Men, women, and organisational culture: perspectives from donors

Anne Coles

For many gender advocates, progress towards gender equality and gender mainstreaming since the UN Fourth Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 has proved disappointingly slow. This paper proposes one strategy to help further progress: namely to involve more men as gender specialists in bilateral development organisations and to involve them fully in mainstreaming processes. The aim of the paper is to highlight the need for both men and women in donor organisations to be fully involved in advancing the position of women, if development goals are to be reached. It begins by looking at the progress that has been made in promoting gender equality in the work of bilateral development organisations since Beijing. I consider the special case of the way in which gender has been mainstreamed in the British government's Department of International Development (DFID). I then examine the respective advantages and disadvantages of men and women taking lead responsibility for gender issues. And I conclude with suggestions for the future.

I am basically drawing on experiences of DFID and on the recent research that I have been undertaking as an associate at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women at Queen Elizabeth House in the University of Oxford. I want to acknowledge the help of both men and women gender specialists, working at policy, programme, and project levels, who generously shared their views with me.

The context

In 1996 the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD published an important strategy document: 'Shaping the 21st Century: The Contribution of Development Co-operation'. The document selects targets for the bilateral donor community to aim for by 2015: halving the number of those living in extreme poverty; universal primary education; reducing infant mortality by two-thirds; reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters; universal access to family-planning methods; and reversal of trends in the loss of natural resources. The indicator (or proxy measurement) for the empowerment of women is a limited though critically important one: to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education. The transformation in gender relations and the gendered re-distribution of resources needed to achieve these targets seem initially to have passed largely unnoticed. But they present an enormous challenge to the development community as a whole.

Progress since Beijing

I have recendy been helping to review how the countries that are members of the OECD's DAC have implemented their 1995 policy statement on gender equality, which was a contribution to the Beijing process. All members have made progress, but the advance has been uneven, both across organisations and across the nine goals of the Statement. It has varied according to the 'baseline' positions of the development organisations concerned, the flexibility of their institutional structures, their priorities, and the total resources available. In no development organisation, either ministry, government department, or agency, has the strategy of gender mainstreaming been fully established, and none has reached all the goals. Advancing gender equality is proving to be a much slower process than many originally expected. Much remains to be done; and it can only be done, I suggest, by involving men much more fully than hitherto.

The adoption of a mainstreaming strategy involves taking gender considerations into account throughout the work of the organisation concerned. From this it follows that advancing gender equality becomes the responsibility of all staff — men, who are usually in the majority, as well as women. This is very different from the earlier Women in Development (WID) approach, which typically found expression in small female-staffed gender cells devoted to projects on women's issues. Indeed it was because of the limitations of these units as agents for change, and their marginalisation, that gender-mainstreaming strategies have been adopted in a majority of donor organisations. Gender units are still needed to act as advocates and catalysts, to lead on policy, to provide expertise, and to support technical departments. But in order to gain the commitment of a much wider body of professional and administrative staff, both men and women gender specialists are needed.

Preliminary remarks

Any consideration of the effectiveness of men and women in championing gender policies must take institutional aspects into account, including the following.

• The culture of the development agency in which they work is critical: its mandate, which determines how gender policies will 'fit', its norms and values, its formal structures, and (especially important) its informal working behaviours, which may be very powerful. The extent to which the organisation is directed by parliament varies, but the political agenda can be important. For example, there were powerful statements in Scandinavian parliaments following die Beijing conference, and in Britain the Labour government's 1997 White Paper (official policy document) on aid, 'Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the 21st Century', has had a major influence in DFID. Organisations are also variously vulnerable to other external pressures, such as lobbying by civil-society groups.

• Those working overseas need to take account of the structure of local society, the nature of partner organisations, the leading personalities and, at the level of the field, the culture of the population to be reached.

Gender is, of course, only one aspect of a person's identity. Other aspects such as ethnicity and class are also important, and gender cuts across them, often in complex ways.

• Being 'part of the modern world', affluent, or a foreigner may be more important factors than gender in the conceptual gaps that exist between the development professional and the target beneficiaries.

• Age can be critical. Both men and women working on gender equality need to hold senior positions in their organisations in order to be taken seriously. They often are neither. Young unmarried women, both expatriates and nationals, may be at a particular disadvantage in some countries, for they lack the status of an older woman who is assumed, rightly or wrongly, to be married with children. Unfortunately many development agencies lack older women staff.

Social and gender advice in DFID

The Department for International Development, formerly the Overseas Development Administration (ODA), has always had a unique structure for addressing gender issues. The responsibility has lain with the Social Development Department (SDD), which, along with the economists and the environmentalists, has formed the cross-cutting advisory cadres that contribute to the design and implementation of all programmes and projects. The agency never passed through a completely typical WID phase, although a comprehensive policy, an action plan, and arrangements for monitoring were set in place in 1987/88. There was never a separate budget for women's projects — only in the last few years has SDD had funds for applied and operational research on gender matters. The numbers of men and women who are SD advisers have always been roughly equal, potentially enabling the strengths and weaknesses of each in relation to implementing gender policies to be revealed. Most SD advisers have a research background in anthropology or social policy: gender analyses are incorporated into (and sometimes buried in!) broader social analyses. The approach to gender training for staff in general has been to emphasise the understanding and skills required for working purposes. Personal aspects have been deliberately set aside, and the link with internal equal-opportunities policies is not made.

DFID understands that if, following gender analysis, men and boys are shown to be disadvantaged, in some circumstances there should be projects or project components addressing their specific needs. This has occurred in education and health sectors particularly. Support has also been given to initiatives such as men's groups opposed to violence. Even in Bangladesh, where there is an overwhelming need to advance the position of women, a very few activities related to HIV/AIDS, health, and legal literacy specifically target men.

Bilateral development organisations are largely male, middle class, and white — or rather the institutional culture has tended to display these characteristics. Most are bureaucracies. Comparatively few welcome transformational agendas: conformity is the norm. DFID has usually been no exception. But changes are taking place, many in the wake of the 1997 White Paper. Others are the result of the growing numbers of young women who are joining DFID and who are now well established in administration and in many of the professional departments, particularly economics, health, and education.

Nevertheless, the higher echelons of the office have always been dominated by men, despite the fact that the ministers have often been women. There is only one woman in the senior directors' group, and only one woman head of profession. Key meetings (such as the board that endorses new projects) typically avoid mentioning gender aspects in their summing up. And their abrupt, hierarchical style requires considerable adaptability on the part of a woman if she is to contribute effectively in them. (Conversely, the senior development adviser — a man — who represents DFID at the DAC Working Party for Gender Equality initially found its co-operative and more discursive meetings equally strange and confusing.)

The Social Development Department has been one of the fastest-growing departments in DFID, and there has been steady progress in tackling gender inequalities. Recently the proportion of DFID spending aimed at promoting gender equality has more than doubled, from 23 per cent in 1994 to 46 per cent in 1998-99. Nevertheless, there is a legacy of seeing gender and even social development more generally as a 'soft' and second-class policy area. The 'hard' technical departments appear to be more highly valued.

The economists have a particular status and, as in many other agencies, the World Bank has a special aura of power. If, as seems likely, the Bank places greater emphasis on gender equality and supports this with 'hard evidence' from practical research, the issue will receive much more serious attention in many bilateral organisations.

There is an inter-relationship between an organisation's internal culture and its ability to deliver its external services or products. This has been clear in DFID. Thus, the introduction of team-working (from about 1993) interacted with the growing interest in process and participation in projects and programmes. The former benefited women staff, who preferred this more collegiate, verbal style of working to that of the formal written memorandum. The latter assisted the development of local partnerships for gender-specific activities in the post-Beijing era. For example, it has become easier to discuss matters such as simplifying procedures to fund NGO activities. The approach taken in DFID has been to integrate gender policies within the existing organisational structure, but senior social-development advisers have been quick to seize opportunities for transformation.

Let us now consider the respective merits of men and women in promoting gender equality in development aid. The next two sections reflect the views of men and some of their women colleagues who are working professionally as social development and gender specialists. The discussion focuses on the operational practicalities of the 'here and now', but it encompasses both short-term initiatives and the longer-term objective of transforming the development agenda.

Advantages and disadvantages of men taking forward the gender-equality agenda

Policy dialogue

Given the present circumstances, a man is often in a good position to influence other men, whether agency colleagues or partners. Men's influence on men should not be underestimated: men listen to men more readily than they listen to women. As we have noted, women may have real difficulty in making their voices heard in high-level negotiations, for reasons that include problems of audibility, cultural 'invisibility', and inability to intervene in a male discourse with appropriate language and style.

A man may therefore have greater access to officials at the policy and programme levels, both at home and overseas. In most partner countries, decision-makers, whether in government, the private sector, or civil society, are overwhelmingly likely to be men. Even at project level, the 'case for women' can sometimes be better communicated by a man, especially when dealing with traditional leaders and local bureaucrats. Men cannot so easily ignore gender issues or dismiss them as 'feminist rhetoric' when they are proposed by other men.

Mainstreaming

Stereotypes still exist in many aid organisations. A man working on gender issues may be perceived as more professional and more 'objective' than a woman. However wrongly, women gender experts are often seen by male staff to be 'difficult' or 'threatening'. As one woman official put it, she and her colleagues were apt to be regarded as 'both extreme feminists and sort of fluffy'! In present circumstances, therefore, men can add prestige and weight to gender-equality work.

Involvement of men specialists can therefore help to make gender concerns more integral to the development process, more 'normal', and more pragmatic. If gender is seen only as a 'wimmin's' issue championed by feminists, it may be treated as a minority interest, as so often in the past. It may be particularly helpful to use men to champion gender issues in strongly male technical departments such as engineering, particularly where the man concerned comes from the same professional background.

Gender analysis

Men have a potentially important role to play in contributing to balanced gender analyses. Despite advances in the last few years, most gender specialists have limited understanding of male values and masculine perspectives, and of how to incorporate them into their work. There are several strands to this. Firstly it is through thorough gender analysis that it is possible to identify certain circumstances where men may be the most affected. For example, men may become severely demoralised in refugee camps; or young men's educational failure may result in gang violence, which damages the whole community. Secondly it is still common for gender to be considered a women's issue that can only be addressed by looking at women's needs and interests, without addressing the barriers created by gender relations, men's roles, and the gendered nature of institutions. It may be easier for a man than a woman to understand these masculine attitudes and controls and, in so doing, to identify possible entry points for initiating change. When it is necessary to challenge the barriers, it may again be easier for a man, for if a woman does so, she may be perceived to be confrontational and 'rocking the boat'.

Resistance

A man may be better able than a woman to uncover and understand the 'politically incorrect' but deeply held views that many men (and some women) have about gender. He may therefore have a better grasp of how to deal with instances of personal and institutional resistance to concepts of gender equality, whether within his own organisation or within programmes and projects in partner countries. Overseas, women may have real difficulties in learning the true perceptions of local men. Men may be either disrespectful or alternatively cautious in expressing their true opinions.

In contrast, there are some areas where men are likely to be at a disadvantage, compared with women. Overall, there are more men than women who find working on gender issues uncomfortable – who seemingly seek to avoid the potential conflicts. This has limited the effectiveness of some social-development advisers in giving prominence to gender-equality concerns. Advancing the position of women can pose a challenge to men's identities that they are unwilling to address. It is perhaps worth noting that those men who have taken senior gender positions have for the most part already established themselves successfully in their organisations. (Otherwise, maybe, they would not take the risk!) They are volunteers, committed to taking up the challenge, and are thus a valuable asset.