Closing the gender gap

A new report has been released by ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences researchers into gender and development, focusing on gender integration in NGOs in Australia.

Closing the gender gap: Gender and Australian NGOs was authored by Dr Patrick Kilby and Joanne Crawford, with the support of the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID).

Gender in development has been an issue for development agencies   NGO, bilateral and multilateral   since the mid 1970s when the México Women's Conference agreed to women and development approaches in aid and development programs.  Since then, and particularly following the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in 1995, bilateral, multilateral, and NGOs, have all agreed to develop gender policies and practices which address inequalities in power relations and access to development resources between men and women.

While some progress has been made in the fields of education and health, overall, the history of gender integration in development has been weak. Despite virtually universal commitment at the level of goal and strategy, implementation of gender equality policies has proved challenging. A 2005 review of nine OECD bilateral donors found very significant ‘policy evaporation’ in the progression from commitment to implementation and resourcing.

The picture with Australian NGOs is similar. AusAID (the Australian aid agency) has conducted a number of reviews of Australian NGOs’ effectiveness (and similar studies on gender), including a study for the 1975 Mexico Women's Conference, the 1995 NGO Effectiveness Review, and the 2010 draft review of the Australian NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP), all of which have pointed out that while NGOs are generally effective, they are weak on gender, and NGOs themselves perceive this as a problem.

The authors surveyed 15 ACFID members which are accredited to receive Government funds (a requirement of which was a gender policy). This was around one third of those eligible. The survey used stratified sampling to ensure that large, small, religious, and secular NGOs were represented.  An online survey followed up with focus group interviews was undertaken.

The findings of the research show that the level of awareness of gender issues was strong among all agencies, and around a quarter of those agencies surveyed have gender as a central focus of their work, and the other agencies had a strong gender focus in particular countries or contexts. Overall the research found that agencies found it difficult to have a strong gender focus across their whole programs. This was due to pressures from their partner organisations in developing countries, as well as what they saw as competition among policy issues set by donors, and internal capacity issues.

The key outcome of the research is that a greater investment in capacity building of both Australian NGOs and their partners is required in how to apply gender norms in a range of social and political contexts where religion and tradition are sometimes used to argue for the maintenance of particular social structures. The research also pointed to innovative approaches to dealing with these issues in a sensitive and respectful manner, and so they cannot be an excuse for inaction.

This working paper was funded through the ACFID-Universities Linkage Network, co-chaired by ACFID and the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University.

View the full report.