Volume 1, Number 3
October 1995

Contextualizing Gender Analysis

The section in the previous newsletter on the usefulness of female-headed households as a poverty-related disaggregation sparked off a wider debate on the importance of placing gender analysis within context. Ruth Alsop (currently a Visiting Researcher at IFPRI) reminds us that it is difficult to talk about "gender relations" without reference to the social and economic context that they both contribute to and are shaped by. As an example, she points out that the intrahousehold position of women in India is related to the social and economic position of the household. Hilary Feldstein (CG Secretariat, Gender Program) pointed out that in her experience, the introduction of gender analysis to technically trained scientists can represent a window of opportunity for a discussion of wider social science analysis in agricultural research, including the points made by Ruth about the heterogeneity of women's roles. Concerns that gender should not become a Trojan horse for wider social science research were aired by Cecile Jackson (University of East Anglia). She felt that while gender is one very good way of demonstrating social analysis, it should not be dissolved into it. Shubh Kumar (IFPRI) echoed the need for placing gender in a social context, pointing out that gender exploitation in India will vary by, among other things, caste. Mike Collinson from the CG Secretariat reported that gender can be viewed as one dimension of the user perspective. He cautions that due to gender's political clout, gender often gets ahead of the user perspective. He points out that making sure the user horse is in front of the gender cart is one way of ensuring that gender relations are not placed out of context. One more note on this subject from Villia Jefremovas at Carleton University in Canada. Villia provides a concrete example of the importance of context from her work on the impact of cash cropping on gender relations in the Philippines. Middle class women who control the marketing of vegetables and those who control moneylending have a very different set of interests from the poor women who are attempting to gain access to these developing cash-cropping markets. One final point on this subject (for now, anyway): the new collective models of the household that economists are beginning to explore explicitly model intrahousehold relations as a function of "extrahousehold environmental parameters" in addition to household factors such as income, education, and caste. These models allow asymmetries in male-female access to common property, credit programs, or public works programs to affect the ways in which resources and power get allocated within households (see Alderman et al. 1995).