Gender Analysis Overview
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| Participants at a South African gender integration workshop learn about gender analysis for their programs. Photo Source: DevTech Systems, Inc. |
Gender Analysis offers a framework for illuminating the opportunities and constraints in development activities that are based on the
relations between women and men. Including gender analysis up front, as a part of the program planning process, can help the development
practitioner identify key gender issues to build into program design and implementation.
Two Key Questions
USAID's approach to gender analysis of programs and projects is built around two key questions:
- How will gender relations affect the achievement of sustainable results?
- How will expected results affect the relative status of men and women?
Gender Analysis Essentials in Every Technical Assessment
Gender analysis is most effective if it is included as a part of each and every technical assessment used in program planning and design.
"Gender" is not a separate sector to be analyzed or reported on in isolation.
Rather, technical assessment teams should integrate an analysis of how gender relations and differences in men's and women's roles may
interact with or affect their broader findings and incorporate these gender considerations into their program designs and monitoring plans.
For example, an environmental assessment examining water usage should examine the patterns of collection, use, and disposal by women and
men in the household and consider who makes decisions about supply and priority uses.
To understand the effect of a job creation program on poverty in a community, the economic assessment should estimate the proportion and types
of jobs that would be held by men and by women.
Guiding Gender Analysis
Gender Roles and Economic Roles
The analysis of information about men's and women's roles in society, their interdependence, access to resources, and relative participation and power provides essential insights
needed in order to build strategies that will achieve results and benefit the entire community.
A plan that does not take into account these factors may have unintended and unforeseen consequences that harm some segments of the community or even the community as a whole.
A commercial farming project that inadvertently reduces women's production of items for the local market may not only reduce women's income but also damage the local market
and decreases the availability of nutritious foods, like fresh fruits and vegetables.
Integrating Gender in the Development Hypothesis
The development hypothesis underlying the program strategy presents the cause and effect logic of how the expected impacts are to be achieved.
This logic always involves assumptions about the context in which the activities will occur.
Key gender considerations are easily overlooked when these simplifying assumptions unintentionally seem to remove the need for gender analysis.
For example, treating a household as a single economic unit assumes that the individual men and women in a family all behave the same economically
and make the same decisions about purchases, investments, and savings. The assumption effectively ignores critical gender differences and preferences
that may affect individual behavior and responses to project activities.
Research consistently shows that men and women in a family have different priorities for spending. Women are more likely to spend money on education,
medical expenses and children whereas men tend to purchase property and productive resources. Thus, the impact of additional income for the household
depends on who controls the income and the budget.
Within the context of any particular development problem, information about men's and women's responsibilities, needs, activities, resources, and opportunities and constraints
is essential to defining linkages between cause and effect and deciding how specific development goals will be achieved.
An Illustrative List of Questions to Guide Gender Analysis
Whether undertaken in direct connection to USAID's development agenda or otherwise, gender analysis is a more effective tool when a few preliminary questions are considered:
- What resources are needed to accomplish the project objectives - in terms of land, labor, capital, and information? What types of organizations are needed to accomplish the results? Who is in these organizations, and who controls their agendas?
- Who controls these resources? What determines access to and use of these resources? Is control or access likely to change during the course of the project?
- What tasks (formal and informal) are essential to accomplishing results? Which tasks do women perform and which do men perform? What intermediate steps need to be taken to reach the objective?
- Are there constraints of time or access that may interfere with women's or men's abilities to perform these tasks?
- In what way do interactions between men and women within the household affect the availability of resources and the distribution of the project's benefits?
- How will the achievement of these results shift the balance of control of or access to resources between men and women? How will men and women be affected by these results? In turn, how are these shifts (or lack thereof) related to sustainability of the results?
Like any other analytic tool, Gender Analysis offers a framework which is most useful when crafted to fit a given context. Project examples are provided
from Business Development, Environment,
Health Care, and Local Governance activities,
which highlight some of the issues that arise in a gender analysis.
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