What if we thought about gender in the way we think about finance? No one thinks twice about the need to audit, collect receipts, track budgets, fill out forms, etc. on a yearly (or even quarterly) basis. But when we refer to gender, people will often say, “why do I have to do this again?”
But the times are changing. This week in Montpellier, gender specialists from across the CGIAR Consortium, DFID, the World Bank, and universities gathered to discuss “Methods and Standards for Research on Gender and Agriculture.”
“It’s now well understood that new seeds, and practices in agriculture must increase food security and income for women just as much as for men if we are to successfully reduce rural poverty” says Jacqueline Ashby, CGIAR’s Senior Advisor on gender and research. “So understanding how gender relations can help or hinder that from happening has to be a routine part of how we develop those innovations.”
This workshop aims to make it easier for researchers to carry out gender analyses to a high quality by setting minimum standards for gender research. “We need to make sure gender research is held to high standards,” says Cheryl Doss, Senior Lecturer at Yale University and one of the organizers of the meeting. Cheryl also leads the strategic gender research component of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions and Markets who funded the event.
By the end of this meeting, participants will identify a minimum set of survey questions that researchers must include in their household or individual questionnaires if they claim to be addressing gender. They will agree on basic standards that must be met for qualitative and participatory methods as well. A set of common standards will not only ensure the quality of gender research, but it will also allow researchers to scale and draw broader lessons from their work across studies. This will be especially helpful for CRPs as they implement gender strategies within programs across a range of geographical areas.
High quality gender research is in high demand in the agriculture field. As Markus Goldstein of the World Bank stated in his presentation on the first day, many high level people quote the statistic that “women produce over 50% of food but own less than 1% of the land.” But who even knows how this was concluded, asks Goldstein. It’s difficult to document information like this on a global scale.
One of the big opportunities to improve gender equality in agriculture is to understand how new technologies can improve women’s control over their own time. Yet it’s often considered too expensive to interview a woman as well as the male head of household in a survey even though we know this causes serious underestimation of the staggering amount of unpaid work women do in agriculture. We need to hold ourselves accountable for not cutting corners like this.
“Crops are not there for crops sake, they are there because people need to eat them,” said Jennie Dey de Pryck from GFAR, whilst highlighting the need to integrate gender and social sciences into research plans. This she says will be integral to maximizing research outcomes so that the CRPs can contribute to the strategic objectives of poverty reduction, improving food security, improving health and nutrition, and contributing to the sustainable management of resources.
“We’ve done good diagnostic research,” says Patti Kristjanson from CCAFS, “now it’s time to do research in a way in which we will have more impact…Our questions need to be driven by communities’ needs.”
Over the coming weeks we will publish some of the news and views from participants and presentations from this event. The #gender aspect to #LELP2013 #Ag4Dev (Listening Engaging Learning Progressing – LELP2013)
Thanks to Rieky Stuart, Senior Associate of Gender at Work for her contributions to this post.
More information
The CGIAR Consortium Gender Strategy (2011) (PDF document)
Gender & Agriculture posts on CGIAR.org
Photo credit: CGIAR Research Program on Dryland Cereals (ICRISAT) “Women bring home the sorghum”