Understanding the Gender Concepts: A Framework for Analysis

Dr. Meena Acharya, Nepal

There is nothing in women’s reproductive responsibilities that should make them subordinate to men. It is the culture, which establishes the ideology of male supremacy and female subordination. Without reproduction the human race cannot survive and the position of motherhood is exalted in all cultures. But female subordination at this stage of human history is universal, although its form and degree vary from society to society. How and when this started is still controversial.

But there is now general consensus that the human society must advance towards an equitable society in general and gender equality in particular. The unequal gender relations must recede along with all other inequalities. Still, in the name of culture, tradition, and religion the goal of gender equality is interpreted differently in different societies. Often it becomes necessary to reiterate that the end of inequities does not mean that women want to be like men and get rid of their mothering responsibilities. It only means the social, political, and economic inequities based on their different role in reproduction of human beings must end. They must have a choice in all the walks of life on an equal footing with men. Why is it that cooking in the restaurant becomes a male job and is considered work while the same work done by women at home is defined as no work? Why is it that men farming their own land are considered economically active while women laboring day and night in the family fields are considered non-economic in the conventional economics? Such inconsistencies and socially defined inequities exist in all walks of life and must be redressed.

Patriarchy is an overarching ideology, which pervades all aspects of social existence. Women’s subordination is all round - economic, social, religious, cultural, political, and ideological, each of which reinforces the other one. For example, in our culture dominated by Hindu ideology, subordination of women to men is fortified at the primary level by transferring her inheritance rights to her a final household on the one hand and making it conditional on her sexual behavior on the other. Thus her culturally created economic vulnerability is reinforced by the control of afinal household over her sexuality. Her transfer to a final household is made into a cultural tradition reinforced by the religious code of conduct for married women to submerge her identity into the identity of her husband. Her Gotra itself changes with marriage. She becomes an integral part of the final clan and is completely excluded from the natal clan. She has no individual identity, socially, religiously, or legally and has only derived access to property and social status. Therefore the efforts to liberate women from the oppressive gender relations must be all round.

Men also are victims of patriarchal ideology, but to a lesser degree. For example, the image of masculinity deprives them from simple human qualities such as empathy, kindness, and sensitiveness and the natural expression of their pain, weeping. While family should be a joint venture where each member contributes as per her/his ability and derives benefits according to her/his needs, women are forced to limit themselves within the household while men are forced to earn the living. Ideologically, to use a wife’s or a daughter’s income for family survival is a dishonor for the husband/ father, but in practice, men do not hesitate to kill their wives for dowry. Such inconsistencies are gene-rated by the unnatural social rules and behavioral expectations imposed on men and women. Girls are raised to depend on husbands for access to resources not to earn independent income and for the boys it is made an act of honor not to let their wives work. Still they want money for marrying a girl, defying all principles.

Since patriarchy is an overwhelming ideology, which pervades all aspects of social existence, women’s problems cannot be solved just by addressing her basic needs issues, such as access to minimum of food, shelter, drinking water, primary education, primary health care, and freedom from violence. Issue of power relations must also be addressed.

Women’s overall socio-political and economic status can be improved only by changing the gender relations of domination and subordination between men and women that is by empowerment of women. Empowerment is an all-comprehensive process, which is difficult to define in concrete terms. One way to define it could be "the process of gaining control over the self, over ideology and the resources which determine power". "This must be a multi-dimensional process encompassing all aspects of social existence, legal rights, guarantee of equity, and equality in access to resources, education, and knowledge as also generation of a consciousness about and a willingness to fight against the oppressive relations. It must "address all structures of power." The end product of empowerment is development of an individual, who is self-confident, understands the processes of social interaction, economic resource allocation, and has power to decide and also sufficient options to be able to choose where one wants to work and how one wants to live. Empowerment also means having voice and influence over economic and political decisions affecting their lives in the larger arena. While economic and social empowerments are necessary conditions for attaining the position of political power, political power enhances the opportunities for economic and social empowerment. This process must contribute to women’s real empowerment in all its dimensions. It is not sufficient just to increase women’s income by a marginal amount and help them gain a greater role in the household decision making process, while the role of the household itself in the economic and political processes effecting the lives of the people may be declining. In this context, the empowerment process may be viewed in terms of the following three dimensions:

Increasing women’s political power through women’s organizations, solidarity, and collective action. Both qualitative and quantitative indicators may be used to evaluate this process. Political ability to bring about changes in women’s legal status, to direct resources to women, and to get access to positions of power is of crucial importance.

Increasing women’s access to economic opportunities and resources relative to men, such as employment, credit, and wealth including land and technology and apparently non-economic resources such as education, knowledge, and health which are basic to human development.

Raising social consciousness of women and men about the symptoms and causes of the oppressive religious, economic, cultural, familial, and legal practices; changing the perceived social images of women as individuals; strengthening their capacity to take action for changing the gender roles.

Thus gender assessment of the institutions and programs must evaluate all structures, policies, programs/projects etc whether they are gender-sensitive and conducive to empowerment of women. Gender sensitiveness may be viewed in terms of strength and effectiveness of the specific machinery involved in advocating women’s concerns in the development process, gender awareness of the general implementing machinery, and finally, proportion of women in decision making roles in the government.

This means it is not adequate to just involve women in development programs/projects; measures to empower them and changing the gender relations must be incorporated and implemented in all programs/ projects.

Women cannot be viewed as objects of development; they must be viewed as subjects of development. For example, it is often argued that women must be involved in programs to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the programs. Although UNDP long since has taken a people-focused approach to development, putting people at the center, the largest development agency, the World Bank, still views the need for involving stakeholders in general and women in particular in development programs primarily for increasing the efficiency of its development interventions. But equality and equity is a woman’s human right and they must benefit from human progress on an equal footing with men.

Gender approach to development (GAD) also means that all other kinds of oppression, besides gender relations, for example, caste, class, ethnicity, language-related inequalities must also be addressed simultaneously. When there is any kind of inequity in the society, women are oppressed doubly as women and as members of the disadvantaged group. For example dalit or poor women are more intensely exploited by the men of upper caste and also by their own men. Many more dalit women are raped with social immunity than women from upper castes or richer economic strata. The gender dispa-rity in access to education and health facilities among the dalits exists at a more intensive level than among the non-dalits.

Women’s needs and problems are too colossal to be addressed by individual programs. They have to be addressed in all spheres, hence the concept of mainstreaming. Since women’s problems were viewed as some-thing different from the overall society under WID and WAD, specific programs for women were advocated. Under the mainstreaming approach, the emphasis is on all policies, programs/projects, sector-specific or otherwise. They must be gender/ class/caste/ethnicity-sensitive and must try to redress the disadvantages faced by women of each group in each of the sphere. It does not mean that the basic needs-related programs are to be neglected. But it means that they are not adequate. Basic needs-related programs can be very effective if implemented in addition to programs which meet women’s strategic needs, as defined below. In addition, capacity building and compensating programs are also a must so that women can benefit from gender-neutral programs on an equal footing with men. Further, women’s specific needs related to their reproductive and mothering functions and combating various forms of violence against them must also be addressed. To capture these complexities in program analysis some analytical concepts may be useful as discussed below:

Basic and strategic needs: Although such needs overlap and many programs can fulfill both kinds of needs, it is useful to separate them for analytical purposes. Basic needs include access to minimum environment for survival such as access to income, drinking water, health facilities, education, and freedom from violence etc. Strategic needs include her need for changes in division of labor, power structures, freedom of mobility and choice of livelihood options, control over resources etc. Programs directed to meet-ing women’s strategic needs must incorporate efforts to change the oppressive socio-economic and political structures, acts, rules, regulation and oppressive ideology of all kinds.

Relief-oriented, gender reinforcing or equality promoting programs: Relief-oriented programs address only disadvantages arising out of temporary disasters, such as floods, earthquake, drought, violence etc. Such programs deal only with the results of structural problems and do not question the traditional gender roles. For example, the widow pension, does not address the basic issue of ensuring property rights of women, but treats only the results. Similarly, the micro-credit programs, widely in vogue, have been designed to fit the traditional roles of women. They do not empower women or provide a better ground for equality directly, but indirectly they do strengthen women’s self-confidence and capacity for collective action.

Many programs could also be gender reinforcing whereby the gender roles are not questioned and there is no attempt made to change them. Gender reinforcing schemes assist women in their traditionally accepted standard gender functions, e.g., maternity and child care programs, family planning, access to drinking water, nurse training, home-based employment schemes etc. In home-based employment schemes, the logic is that women will have to adjust with their household responsibilities. But, nobody questions why they have to adjust and why men do not need to adjust.

Equality promoting programs, on the other hand, are targeted for canceling the handicaps that women have because they are women or because they have children, e.g., uniforms for school girls, provision of neighborhood schools or girls’ toilets in schools or working women’s hostels. The above categories are not watertight, but are useful for a meaningful gender analysis of the programs and budgetary allocations.

(Excerpts: Book on "Efforts at Promotion of Women in Nepal" by the author)

Maoist Insurgency: Politico-Historical, Socio-Cultural, and Economic Implications – I

D.B.Gurung

Since the founding of modern Nepal by King Prithivi Narayan Shah in 1769, the state fought only one major war (1814-16) with the British East India Company, which finally wound up with the Treaty of Sugauli (1816), with Nepal losing a large tract of land stretching all the way from Tista to Sutlej river and having to guarantee the access of Gurkha manpower to the British. Another brief war was fought with Tibet in 1856. Any real action Nepal saw the last time was a minor battle the Nepali army fought with the CIA- and India-backed Tibetan Khampa guerillas around the northwestern frontier of the country in the early 70s. Since then the nation appears to be somewhat at peace, like the smooth surface of a sea with the real turmoil underneath. Sociologist Krishna Bhattachan, referring to Johan Galtung's concept of peace - positive and negative - is of the opinion that the Nepali people have been experiencing negative rather than positive peace ever since Prithivi Narayan used violence in the project of territorial unification of Nepal by indulging in Gorkha imperialism and internal colonialism (Bhattachan 2001: 73). Perhaps, more aptly, a "mirage peace" is what the Nepali commoners have known at best, as they have been living in constant fear of the state with its pretext of socio-political stability, law, and order. The country has been ruled by a minority under oppressive Hindu norms and policies that blatantly discriminate against the majority of the ethnic janajati (indigenous nationalities), madhesi, dalit, non-Hindus, and women.

The Nepali people have been either forced or fooled to accept the political legitimacy of their rulers, the military and the political elites. Most prominently, the two dynasties, namely the Shah and the Rana, ruled Nepal longer and more coercively than any democratic parties did. The political elites made to power twice spanning collectively nearly two decades in the Nepali history of 234 years. First in the 1950s and second time in the 1990s. Something terrible was awaiting Nepal - a threat of imminent holocaust, which consequently turned out to be the bloody insurgency launched by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in 1996, coupled with the horrific regicide of June 1, 2001.

The Rana oligarchy, instituted by Janga Bahadur Rana through a bloody contest known as Kot Massacre in 1846, something that can be compared with the Shogunate of the pre-industrial early nineteenth century Japan, maimed and mutilated the nation for 104 years. The Ranas governed Nepal as their private fiefdom. The tyrannous Rana rule confined Nepal to an era of self-imposed isolation and economic stagnation and deprived the people of literacy and foreign influences. In 1951, with the collaboration between King Tribhuvan (then self-exiled in India) and the people's democratic movement, the Rana regime was overthrown, thus sowing the seeds of democracy in Nepal. However, the democratic regime was short-lived owing to political instability and bitter intra- and inter-party feuds among the party leaders, giving way to the Panchayat system inaugurated by King Mahendra through a "royal coup" on December 15, 1960. King Mahendra trashed the parliamentary system as no panacea for the socio-political and economic maladies of the country and ruled as an absolute monarch. His son King Birendra took over the reins of power until he was relegated as a constitutional monarch by the Popular Movement of 1990. The authoritarian palace-centered Panchayat polity throttled the nation for three decades, abusing the civil, political, and human rights of the citizens.

The Gorkha conquest provided Nepal with a single name, a distinct identity, and a strong central government - and also the advent of hordes of Indo-Aryan immigrants along with the Hindu juggernaut that destroyed the cultures, languages, and lifestyle of the indigenous nationalities. The Rana regime entered emphatically upon the campaign of Hinduization of the social, judicial, and the administrative setup of the country by imposing Khas-Nepali, belonging to the Indo-Aryan family, as the official language and transforming Nepal into a Hindu state. Casteism, Sanskritization, and the induction of chha thar ghar system (house of six sub-castes or sub-clans) buoyed up the welfare of the ruling elite and people of Indo-Aryan roots. The indigenous lot was reduced to 7th class citizen with no voice.

The Panchayat autarchy coercively advocated the policy of "one language, one religion, and one nation", which led to the "full spectrum suppression" of the native languages and cultures. After the promulgation of democratic constitution (1990), there were demands for constitutional recognition for the inclusion of other languages, religions, as well as the representation of all population groups in the parliament, and for autonomous regional governments as per historical claim to land and territories and present demographic situation of particular groups of the country. The Constitution Recommendation Commission and the interim government, on the contrary, virtually passed over to accommodate these grievances, simply perceiving them as a threat to national unity. This measure was an attempt to subsume all the indigenous nationalities under the canopy of Nepali Hindu nationalism, thus perpetuating the counterproductive elements of wider social disparity that dumped Nepal's popular platitude of "unity in diversity". In fact, Nepal is not a "nation state" but "nations-within-a-state". (To be continued)

(Courtesy: Name of the book: Conflicts, Human Rights & Peace: Challenges Before Nepal Editor: Bipin Adhikari Publisher NHRC, Kathmandu

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