Giving Compass' Take:

• Nalini Khurana and Ravi Verma explain that existing cultural gender dynamics demand that men be engaged in women's economic empowerment.

• How can funders help to build culturally-appropriate solutions for women's economic empowerment? 

• Learn how donors can make an impact on gender equality. 

Global commitment to women’s economic empowerment (WEE) has never been stronger. In the past decade or so, WEE has become a popular development buzzword, and has mobilised discourse, funding, and programming on gender equality and women’s rights.

Everyone is on board—international agencies, governments, multinational corporations, foundations, nonprofits, and so on.

Following the publication of the 2012 World Development Report, the goal of WEE has been famously branded as ‘smart economics’—better not just for women themselves, but for economic growth and development at large.

Discourses around men’s role in generally supporting women’s advancement are not new. Chant and Gutmann were the first to use the term ‘men-streaming’, and argued that incorporating men into gender and development interventions is a critical and necessary part of gender mainstreaming.

Widespread recognition of the relationality of gender, along with criticisms of the ‘women-focused’ approach of gender and development has led ‘engaging men and boys’ to become a buzzword of its own. As power-holders in predominantly patriarchal societies, men are increasingly being pushed to use their positions of privilege to challenge deeply-held inequitable norms and structures.

The widespread, glaring absence of men within WEE discourse and programming is best reflected in popular interventions such as microcredit and conditional cash transfers (CCT). These interventions tend to focus solely on women, without meaningful engagement with male relatives to challenge their norms, behavior, and attitudes. This raises several important questions.

  • How do these initiatives interact with existing intra-household dynamics?
  • Do women retain control over the resources mobilized through these initiatives?
  • Who in the household decides how the additional resources are utilized?

Read the full article about engaging men in women’s economic empowerment by Nalini Khurana and Ravi Verma at India Development Review.