Gender transformative evaluation #2
What do people mean by gender transformative evaluation? Review #2
In this second blog post, I will refer to the article “Feminist Evaluation and Gender Approaches: There’s a Difference?” by Donna Podems.
This article uses a comparative framework to describe and contrast the ideas underlying feminist evaluation and gender approaches to evaluation. First, the author provides a historical overview of both approaches and the terminology involved. The author then introduces feminist evaluation as an approach that outlines a “way of thinking about evaluation” rather than a clearly outlined methodology. In their words, feminist evaluation is dynamic, yet built around six tenets[1]: a) a focus on gender inequities, b) an understanding that discrimination is systemic and structural, c) awareness that evaluation is a political activity, d) understanding that “knowledge is power”, e) awareness that knowledge is socially constructed and has impact on the people involved, and f) the recognition that there are multiple ways of learning. As such, the goal of feminist evaluation is to generate knowledge that advances social justice by generating insights on why there are differences between people of different genders and how these differences can be mitigated. Like Espinosa[2] (2013), the article establishes a connection between gender and other facets such as class and race.
In contrast, gender approaches to evaluation refer to evaluation frameworks that examine the structural differences between men and women. According to the author, women began to be considered more important in the evaluation realm back in the 70s, but for reasons not always related to social justice. They state that the concept of gender approaches to evaluation is equivalent to the Gender and Development (GAD) approach, where there is an interest in understanding women’s conditions, patriarchal structures and the causes related to women’s subordination. The author explains that gender approaches are like feminist approaches in the sense that they focus on gender relations, they frame gender roles as socially constructed and aim to go deeper into the roots of gender inequality. However, the nature of gender approaches would be descriptive and not necessarily transformative. They also state that gender approaches are typically based on gender evaluation frameworks[3], which outline indicators and questions that need to be explored in the context of an evaluation. The author explains that these frameworks tend to treat gender as binary, “appear to assume” that women want what men have and are articulated around this “fixed” notion of equality (meaning, that we all want the same). In these respects, gender approaches would depart from feminist evaluation, which is transformative in nature, which rejects fixed evaluation frameworks, which does not assume that women want what men have, and which uses more fluid approaches to conceptualize gender. The author concludes the piece by describing a case study where both approaches informed an evaluation.
Regarding this article, I appreciate the clarity with which both approaches are presented. I also like that early in the piece, the author states their positionality in explicit terms. This positionality is referred to multiple times during the article, and even problematized in the case study. The case study describes a situation where the author wanted to implement a feminist evaluation but had to change their plan along the way to deal with some contextual challenges. In particular, the label “feminist” was deemed problematic by local stakeholders, forcing the author to depart from a pure feminist evaluative approach. Ultimately, the author adopted elements from feminist evaluation and also, from gender approaches to evaluation, yielding what they coined as “feminist-inspired” evaluation, or a mixed approach. I enjoyed reading about the real challenges of carrying out a feminist evaluation and the types of contradictions that appear in the field. I do value the flexibility with which the author seemed to resolve these challenges.
Selfishly, I would have liked a second example on how to apply these concepts onto a real evaluation, ideally of a program that did not focus on gender. On the other hand, I would have appreciated a longer discussion around the tensions between Western driven theories and the nature of development work. How is feminism understood in other contexts, and what is the appropriate course of action if local stakeholders consider feminism a Western imposition? Is it even possible to design a transformative evaluation in the South, if this evaluation follows tenets that conceptualize empowerment in Western ways? These are questions that every critical researcher in the development field grapples with.
Now, what is also interesting to me, is that the ideas presented in this article contrast those presented in Espinosa (2013)[4]. First, the authors seem to use different starting points for concepts such as women in development (WID) or even GAD. Second, in my interpretation, the authors seem to differ in their opinion on where gender transformative evaluation truly lies: to Espinosa, the trick would be to adopt a feminist lens and to use it alongside a GAD (or gender sensitive) approach, whereas to Podems, this would be insufficient because GAD is based on assumptions that are not aligned with a feminist view, such as the “fixed” notion of gender equality that I referred to before. Can a feminist evaluation that adopts elements of GAD yield the same results as a GAD evaluation that adopts a feminist lens? It does not feel true to me, but I would appreciate more views on this matter.
As the main takeaway from this article, I want to stay with the idea that feminist evaluations have a clear political intent. As the author says, these evaluations “try to understand why interventions have different impact on different genders and change social inequity in an overly political manner.”. To me, feminist evaluation it is not so much about the methodology, about focusing on relations, about the nature of the questions, or the notion of multiple realities, but about acknowledging that knowledge is power: in feminist evaluations, knowledge is created with intent. And this is a radical position in a world that tries to frame evaluation as a neutral activity.
[1] Borrowed from Sielbeck-Bowen, K., Brisolara, S., Seigart, D., Tischler, C., & Whitmore, E. (2002). Exploring feminist evaluation: The ground from which we rise. New Directions for Evaluation, 96, 3–8.
[2] Check the “References” section for a full list of reviewed articles.
[3] Gender evaluation frameworks such as Moser’s or Harvard’s.
[4] Reviewed here: https://femmetrics.squarespace.com/blog/gendertransformative1
