Development Archives

Equality and Effectiveness: Lessons Learned

About the Authors: Stephenie Foster is a Co-Founder and Partner at Smash Strategies, Yeva Avakyan is Associate Vice President, Gender Equality at Save the Children, and Kristin Kim Bart is Senior Director, Gender Equality, International Rescue Committee. All three are recognized experts in this field.

We recently participated on a panel marking the launch of Save the Children’s Gender Equality Hub. The Hub is a cross-functional team that has been established to oversee the development and implementation of Save the Children’s Gender Equality Strategy through collaborative, cross divisional efforts.

Each of us brought unique expertise on how to promote gender equality and empower women and girls. Collectively, our work spans the government, business, and non-profit sectors. Each sector is different, but we identified overarching lessons learned to increase the effectiveness of this work across sectors.

Why a focus on gender equality? In business and development, we ignore gender equality at our peril. While the term “gender” is often used interchangeably with “women and girls,” the terms are distinct. In short, gender equality is not just about women or girls, but about the different ways women and men experience their lives, have access to resources and take advantage of opportunities. A focus on gender broadens our perspective, so that policies and programs reflect these differential experiences and concentrates work on structural constraints to gender equality. Importantly, this helps us create systems and structures to promote equal opportunity and outcomes for everyone: women and men, boys and girls. It increases organizational effectiveness and helps ensure we use all of the talent available to solve problems and address challenges in a sustainable and durable way.

Here are some key lessons:

We must design, and operate, for change. Words aren’t enough. An organization needs to be purposeful in how it designs a gender strategy and implements it, and use this process to be clear about what success looks like. A gender equality strategy is relevant to both an organization’s internal operating environment and implementation of its outward facing work. It guides an organization’s substantive work to ensure that the differential impact of policies and programs is taken into account. Internal gender teams or working groups can help guide the work so that knowledge is shared within the organization, and the work isn’t siloed. These linkages between organizational and programmatic work ensure better coordination and implementation. Organizationally, gender mainstreaming across functions is important, but can dilute the focus on gender and decrease accountability for real change. It’s critical to ensure that there is a functional group (or person) that only focuses on gender, and helps hold the organization accountable. This helps ensure a sharp focus on gender equality doesn’t get lost along the way.
Organizational leadership is key. Commitment from the top sends a strong signal to others at every level of the organization that paying attention to gender is fundamental to success. But, that’s not enough. Leaders are needed at every level who are committed, and have the resources, financial and otherwise to integrate gender issues into the way the organization functions and to do their jobs. The organization’s leader should refer to gender issues or gender equality in public comments, on social media and during internal meetings throughout the year – not just around International Women’s Day in March. Attention to gender should be integrated into annual (or other) job evaluations so that everyone in the organization is held accountable for implementing a gender policy.
A vision about how a gender focus enhances organizational effectiveness is critical. In addition to a rights-based case for a focus on women and girls — and gender — it’s also important to make a case that focusing on gender translates into more effective policies and programs. In the economic sphere, the data is clear: When women’s participation in the labor force increases, GDP rises. When women start businesses, communities flourish. When women are promoted to senior management and appointed to corporate boards, companies do better. This compelling data is important to highlight and can provide an entry point to skeptics.
Meet people where they are. As a corollary, you will encounter organizational and individual roadblocks and skeptics. It’s important to understand that not everyone prioritizes the issue the way gender experts do. We need to listen to what people say and the concerns they raise, and respond in a way that respects their views. We won’t convince everyone (and there are some who will never be convinced), but it’s critical to make sure we use every opportunity to have this critical conversation and frame it in a way that moves people. Using data and research, and continuing to build the case for why a gendered approach matters using stories, as well as sex-disaggregated data and metrics, helps with these arguments. Sex-disaggregated data is fundamental. It examines differing needs, constraints, and opportunities for women/girls and men/boys. It provides the information to see if interventions are reducing gender disparities in access to, and control over resources, wealth, opportunities, and services, or increasing capability of women and girls to realize their rights and influence decision-making in the public sphere. You won’t know the differential impact of your programs if you don’t segregate the data.
Develop and customize training programs that are practical and help people do their jobs more effectively. Off-the-shelf tools and toolkits aren’t the only answer, but they help practitioners across disparate offices and locations get the start they need. More specialized, hands-on workshops where gender experts help the rest of the staff see how gender can be taken into account in their day-to-day tasks helps make the issue of gender manageable, and something that staff can relate to as they do their work.

Finally, we know it’s important to go beyond gender in recognizing that men or women are not homogenous groups. They have intersecting social identities of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, social class, physical ability among others. In doing a gender analysis, taking into account these intersecting inequalities is critical for understanding lived experiences, constraints and needs of different population groups. This is a long game, but worth every step. Making the case everyday — and in every meeting, forum and conversation — matters.

Gender vs. Women’s Empowerment in Development

In many discussions, the term “gender” is often used interchangeably with “women and girls.” These concepts both get at gender norms and roles, but are different. Here’s a overview of these terms and how they differ. In short, we’ve learned that gender equality is are not just about women or girls, but about the different ways women and men experience their lives, have access to resources and can take advantage of opportunities. It broadens our perspective, so that policies and programs take into account those differential experiences of women and men, and address structural constraints to gender equality. Importantly, taking gender into account also encourages programs to include men and boys – political, business and religious leaders as well as husbands, brothers and fathers – because their gender or social roles will also change.

While “sex” refers to the biological characteristics that define us as female or male, “gender” refers to the economic, political, and cultural attributes and opportunities associated with being male or female. How gender is defined varies among cultures and changes over time.

Gender equality is the concept that all human beings, both men and women, are free to develop their personal talents and abilities and make life choices without the limitations set by stereotypes, rigid gender roles, or prejudices. It does not mean that women and men are the same, but that their rights, responsibilities, and opportunities should not depend on whether they are born male or female.

The role of women and the idea of “gender equality” in development has changed over time. For a very long time, development programs did not take sex or gender into account. Commodities or services, such as food, healthcare or education, were provided by richer countries to developing ones without attention paid to the characteristics of the beneficiaries.

A few decades ago, discussions and program implementers began to take into account that women might have different needs than men and/or might prioritize assistance in a different way. An example — for a long time rice was distributed around the world in 50 lb bags. While most men could haul the bags onto their backs and carry them home, the weight made collection of this food almost impossible for women. A simple change, made at women’s request, made the bags of rice lighter so that women could transport them.

Next, development organizations began to consider how men and women benefited from their programs. For instance, asking if both boys and girls were able to attend school, and what the barriers might be if there weren’t equal attendance rates. Or, if an agriculture program was teaching how to improve crop yields, were both male and female farmers benefiting from that knowledge. If all of the intended beneficiaries were not being reached or the outcomes were not being reached as planned, implementers started asking questions.

In the last ten years, technical experts have moved from a focus on women to gender. What was acknowledged was that in order to “empower” women, their social or gender roles had to change. For example, if the aim of a program is to create more women business owners in order to increase her family’s income and move them out of poverty, then the program cannot focus solely on the female entrepreneurs-to-be. Training women about how to start and run a business is key, no doubt, but the program must also take into account the local laws that prevent women from having access to credit, and, very importantly, how her income will create a new balance of power within her home. We now know that when a woman, a wife, earns her own income it can change the gender roles of both the woman and her husband. If a women begins contributing to family income (when she didn’t before), this can make her husband feel shame that he cannot solely support his family and lead to an increase in violence against her. And the same is true when women learn more about how their bodies function, play a greater role in politics or even stay in school a few more years.

The United States government, particularly the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has kept abreast of this growing field of gender and development just as it has with other technical fields, gaining new knowledge and improving its programs to spend U.S. taxpayer dollars more efficiently as it ends extreme poverty. USAID collaborates with other governments, private companies and implementing partners to know more and do better for women around the world.

While the gap between the number of boys and girls in primary school has been eliminated, the number of women in elected office has increased and the number of women in the formal workforce is higher than it has ever been, now is a good time to remind ourselves about the importance of these issues, how we arrived at this moment and the need to continue this critical work.

SDG Five, Target Three

Within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Global Goals, Goal 5 is to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. For Goal 5, there are nine targets. In this, we will focus on SDG5 Target 3: Eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation.

Unfortunately, data on these critical issues is not regularly collected in the United States. While we believe that less than 5 percent of girls in the United States are married before the age of 16 and that female genital mutilation is rare or limited to ethnic minority enclaves, we do not know for sure.

Early, Forced and Child Marriage: At the federal level, there is no law against child, early and forced marriage because laws on the age of marriage in the United States are set at the state level. Twenty-seven states have no minimum age for marriage; four states allow girls as young as 13 or 14 years old to marry; and in many states, 16 and 17 year olds can marry with parental consent alone. According to data compiled by Unchained At Last, at least 207,468 minors married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2015. This likely does not reflect the breadth of the issue because ten states provided no or incomplete statistics. A few other nuances:

Eight-seven percent of the minors who married across the country between 2000 and 2015 were girls, with the majority aged either 16 or 17.
More than 1,000 children aged 14 or under were granted marriage licences. (Source)

There have been some advocacy campaigns to set or increase the age of marriage at the state level to match the age of consent for sex. However, in 2017, the Governor of New Jersey rejected legislation that would have banned marriage before age 18, without exceptions. “An exclusion without exceptions would violate the cultures and traditions of some communities in New Jersey based on religious traditions,” the Republican governor wrote. (Source)

Globally, one third of girls in the developing world are married before the age of 18 and one in nine are married before the age of 15. In 2012, 70 million women aged 20-24 had been married before the age of 18. If present trends continue, in the next ten years, 150 million girls will be married before their 18th birthday. While countries with the highest prevalence of child marriage are concentrated in Western and Sub-Saharan Africa, due to population size, the largest number of child brides reside in South Asia. (Source)

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM): A federal law making it illegal to perform FGM was passed in 1996, and was amended in 2013 to make it illegal to knowingly transport a girl out of the U.S. to inflict FGM abroad. Since 1990, the estimated number of girls and women in the U.S. who have undergone or are at risk of the practice has more than tripled. This increase is due to rapid growth in the number of immigrants from countries where FGM is a common practice. These girls and women are concentrated in California, New York and Minnesota. Though at-risk girls and women are thought to live in every state but Hawaii, only 25 states have enacted laws against FGM. Prosecution under these laws depends on the age of the victim; who performed the procedure; whether the victim was taken out of the country for FGM; and, whether the accused uses cultural reasons as a defense. Punishments include as much as 30 years in prison and fines that reach $250,000. The first prosecution in the U.S. did not occur until 2017 when two Michigan doctors and the wife of one of the doctors were charged with performing the banned procedure on two 7-year-old girls. (Source) There has been some discussion about more formal data collection about the incidence of FGM in the U.S. with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Globally, an estimated 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM in the countries where the practice is concentrated. Furthermore, there are an estimated 3 million girls at risk of undergoing female genital mutilation every year. The practice has been documented in 30 countries, mainly in Africa, as well as in the Middle East and Asia. Some forms of FGM have also been reported in other countries, including among certain ethnic groups in South America. (Source)

SDG Five, Target One

Within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Global Goals, Goal 5 is a stand alone goal focused on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. There are nine targets for Goal 5.

Here, we will focus on SDG5, Target 1: End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere.

It is important to examine the U.S. legal framework that the U.S. to achieve gender parity, as well as the gaps that exist in that framework. While the U.S. does have both federal and state laws and policies to address discrimination based on sex or gender, there is not a comprehensive or constitutional framework for gender equality.

The first gap is that the U.S. is not a party to CEDAW, The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women which is often described as an international bill of rights for women, and was adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly. CEDAW has been ratified by 189 states. There are only six other UN member states that have not ratified CEDAW: Iran, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, Togo and the Vatican.

President Jimmy Carter signed CEDAW in 1980, but despite numerous advocacy campaigns, the U.S. Senate has not yet ratified CEDAW. When ratifying the Convention, countries commit to undertake a series of measures to end discrimination against women in all forms. CEDAW is the only human rights treaty which affirms the reproductive rights of women, and targets culture and tradition as influential forces shaping gender roles and family relations. Countries that have ratified or acceded to the Convention are committed to submit national reports, at least every four years, on measures they have taken to comply with their treaty obligations.

Further, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution has not been ratified. The ERA would ensure that rights guaranteed by the Constitution apply equally to everyone, regardless of their sex. After the 19th Amendment affirming women’s right to vote was ratified in 1920, suffragist leader Alice Paul introduced the ERA in 1923. In 1972, the ERA was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. The original seven-year time limit was extended by Congress to June 30, 1982, but at that deadline, the ERA had been ratified by only 35 states, three states short of the 38 required to amend the Constitution. The ERA has been re-introduced in every Congress since the deadline.

Another framework for the U.S. to consider is an overarching national plan to advance gender equality. Such a plan would provide guidance to help the government, in conjunction with non-governmental organizations, strategically work towards greater equality. The U.S. government already has several gender oriented action plans, such as the National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, which outlines how U.S. foreign assistance programs will help other countries increase women’s leadership, and the Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence. What’s needed is a concerted effort to knit these strategies together with other strategies and plans to advance the empowerment of women and girls, so that work is driven toward one set of goals.

This would complement the many, individual pieces of legislation focused on ending discrimination against women in the U.S.

The Equal Pay Act (1963) made it illegal for employers to pay men more than women performing the same job.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964) prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, sex, or ethnic origin.
The Fair Housing Act (FHA) (1968) prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on sex among other characteristics.
Title IX of the Education Amendments Act (1972) prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded education programs.
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) (1974) guarantees an equal opportunity to obtain credit and prohibits creditors from discriminating against credit applicants on the basis of sex among other characteristics.
The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978) prohibits employment discrimination against female workers who are (or intend to become) pregnant, including discrimination in hiring, failure to promote, and wrongful termination.
The Affordable Care Act (2010) stopped the discriminated by insurance companies against women in coverage and cost, however, that provision, among others, may be repealed.

Looking at the big picture, these laws in the U.S. are a patchwork and gaps, such as with political representation, remain.

Overall, the United States ranks 49th out of 144 countries with regard to the gender-based gaps that exist in access to economic resources and opportunities, according to the 2017 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap report. There are ongoing advocacy efforts to have the U.S. ratify CEDAW and pass the ERA and send it back to the states for ratification.

Using Soft Power is Not a Hard Choice

Effective U.S. foreign engagement is based on both soft and hard power. Soft power – winning hearts and minds — helps shape global public opinion about the United States, showcases our values, core beliefs, and aspirations, and highlights who we are as a people. Soft power is about diplomacy, both public and private, providing development assistance and aid, and facilitating direct exchanges and interactions between people. Military leaders, charged with the responsibility for hard power, acknowledge that soft power goes hand in hand with the tools they wield. In 2013, now Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis now famously said “[i]f you don’t fully fund the State Department, then I need to buy more ammunition.”

What is soft power? Besides governments talking to each other in formal and informal settings, soft power is comprised of programs and policies that have an impact on people’s lives. Examples include PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), President George Bush’s signature initiative to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS; the prestigious Fulbright program, which for 71 years has brought scholars to the U.S. and sent American scholars abroad to teach and study; and our role in providing humanitarian assistance to countries in crisis. We do this work, and so much more, spending only one percent of our federal budget. The impact is real, though sometimes difficult to measure and quantify, and a critical long-term investment in our global stature and role as a nation with values that others want to emulate.

I have seen first-hand how this makes a difference. I spent the last five years at the U.S. Department of State, working to bring a focus on women and girls into US foreign policy. I served at the US Embassy in Kabul, where we helped women learn entrepreneurship skills, girls go to school, and ensure woman had better access to maternal health services. When I returned to the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues in Washington, DC, we did this same work – empowering women politically, economically and socially – because it builds strong societies, increases stability and prosperity, and because it reflects our core values of inclusion, utilizing talent, and our interest in stability and fighting extremism.

I watched John Kerry meet with women business leaders from every corner of the globe; advocate for ways to end sexual violence in conflict; and encourage women and girls to fully participate in every aspect of their lives. This type of engagement – from the Secretary of State on down — promotes our values and beliefs, as well as approaches to problem solving that we have seen work at home. This happens everywhere, and using every possible platform. Whether it is working with China on how to address domestic violence, Malawi on ensuring that girls can access education, Liberia on developing a strong rule of law and legal system, or Vietnam on how to build job skills, these engagements matter. We not only help others, we help ourselves, building good will, understanding and working with leaders who will be influential in their countries for years to come.

We need soft power – and we need to wield in constantly, everywhere and with a strong voice about who we are. Living in a secure and stable world is important to every U.S. citizen. The more people know about us, and about what we stand for, the better able we are to participate in the global public square, and convince others to join us.

The Importance of Women’s Networks and Beyond

Earlier this week, I spoke on a panel at the Wilson Center on women in politics. We all agreed on the importance of women’s networks as an empowerment tool. Networks can provide women with several kinds of support. First, a network of similar women allows members to share strategies as they face similar situations. An example of this could be an association of women engineers. Second, a network of diverse women can give women the opportunity to meet women that are unlike them in some ways but could be helpful to them financially or politically precisely because of their differences. An example of this kind of network could be a parliamentary women’s caucus. A third kind of network for women could provide the members access to resources they might need but find hard to acquire. This network might include mentoring or a “pitchfest” event where younger entrepreneurs share their business ideas with potential funders. Another is the annual conference put on by EMILY’s List that brings together candidates with journalists and potential donors. Supporting a variety of networks is often a part of a gender equality development program.

Ixil Mayan girls pose for a photo in Guatemala. / USAID

5 Ways to End Poverty by Focusing on Women and Girls

We know that women and girls are a powerful force for change. And when we put women and girls at the center of development, we can break the cycle of poverty. We can help them delay their marriages, choose the timing and spacing of their pregnancies, access needed services and information, complete their education, and gain the knowledge and skills they need to participate in the economy and in their country’s development.

Yet, all too often gender inequality gets pushed aside because of competing priorities or a lack of resources. People say that gender equality isn’t their area or that gender equality is a “women’s issue.”