A survey on feminist and gender-responsive evaluation in India

[Virginie Dutoya]

I am a French sociologist and political scientist, working on the women’s movement in South Asia. I first heard about feminist/gender-responsive evaluation as I was starting to investigate the recent transformations of feminism in the region. I was immediately interested by the idea of “feminist evaluation”, as so far, as I had often heard of Monitoring and Evaluation as a burden for feminist/women’s oriented NGOs and project. I am both interested in the conceptual genealogy of this type of evaluation, as well as in the operational side of it; how evaluation participates in the (re)definition of a new professional field, addressing women’s and gender related issues.

Thus I started interviewing (semi-structured interviews) women (and one man) who work, in one capacity or another, in the field of feminist/gender-responsive evaluation. In particular, I look into two inter-related issues: how do people define gender-responsive and/or feminist evaluation? Do they prefer one terminology over another, and why? Second, how is this professional world structured, that is, what is the background of the professionals, how do their carriers unfold, etc.? I made a first preliminary survey in March/April 2015, while I was in Delhi, and I plan to do another round of interviews, in March 2016. During my fieldwork, I have met about 30 professionals working in the field of women’s rights and gender issues in India, and about half of them were concerned by gender-responsive/feminist evaluation. All of them, for one, were women, and of all ages. Obviously, this sample needs to be extended, but I wish to share some preliminary results now!

A first striking point was the absence of any consensus regarding terminology. Some talk about gender-responsive evaluation, other about feminist evaluation, or more generally about equity-focused evaluation. The interviewees use two types of argumentation to justify their position. For some, there is a fundamental theoretical difference between feminist evaluation on the other hand, and the approaches focusing on gender-equity on the other. While all the approaches aim at taking gender inequalities into account, and reducing them, feminist evaluation has a broader scope, as it aims at engaging with the vast literature of feminist studies (particularly feminist economics) and producing new frameworks of analysis. For others, the choice of terminology is mostly strategic, one may wish to avoid the stereotypes attached to feminism, or on the contrary, to make a political point.

This uncertainty regarding terminology is connected to the fact that evaluation, and more so feminist/gender-responsive evaluation does not constitute a formal profession yet. As one of my interviewees put it, there is no such thing as a professional feminist evaluator, that would have evaluation as a main source of income and occupation. From what I could gather, there are roughly three “types” of feminist/gender-responsive evaluators:

-  The “in-house” evaluators, working in international organizations and NGOs dealing with gender issues, and who are in charge of the M&E of their organization’s programmes.

-  The experts/researchers in evaluation. They play a great role in producing and diffusing knowledge on gender-responsive/feminist evaluation, but they might not do many actual evaluations.

-  The consultants, who do evaluations among other consultancy work. Most of them do not do more than 2 or 3 evaluations per-year (about half of my sample). Some are employed by consultancy cabinets, but most are free-lance. They try as much as they can to bring a gender-responsive lens to their evaluations, but are not always free to do so.

A fourth category of evaluators might be the one working as bureaucrats, but I was not able to gather sufficient data on them.

While this categorization is useful, it does not mean that each category is homogeneous. Indeed, feminist/gender-equity evaluators have very diverse educational, professional and personal backgrounds. In terms of education, the only common point I could find among the women I met was that they were highly educated. All had a master, and several a PhD. But the disciplines were quite diverse; literature, history, sociology, political science, rural development, public health, economics, etc. Some had done most of their carrier in the field of women’s rights, and defined themselves as activists; other had just recently started to be interested in those subjects. Consequently, while all the women (and the man) I met were concerned with gender equality, only a few of them defined themselves as feminists. While some fear that this will ultimately dilute the disruptive potential of feminist evaluation, others underlined that this process of mainstreaming of women’s rights was overall positive.

As it can be expected from the heterogeneity of my sample, there was no consensus on what type of training was most desirable. Rather, most of my interviewees insisted on the importance of experience (in evaluation but also in project implementation), compared to formal training. Yet, when asked about that, most agreed that a perfect blend would be someone with a training in social sciences, but who was able “to make sense of figures”. This goes well with the insistence that while there is not one approach to gender-equity/feminist evaluation, mixed and methods (quantitative & qualitative) are generally preferable. In spite of the emphasis put on experience on the field, I met several evaluators who felt they would greatly benefit from more training, especially in terms of handling quantitative methods and software. Indeed, they felt that their lack of knowledge in these matters reduced their work opportunities.

Again this is a preliminary research, and I could not disclose all the results here (as I don’t want to influence my future interviewees). I will be happy to get comments and feedback. I will also be happy to meet you in Delhi (or do a skype interview). 

[Svetlana Negroustoueva]

Thank you Virginie for sharing with us. I would be curious to see the questionnaire guide you used for your study. 

[Rukmini Panda]

I found it very interesting and would look forward to know more. Thanks for posting.

[Asiimwe Joy Turyamwijuka]

Some females actually shy away from gender issues saying its a sign of cowardice or scapegoating. I have heard my female colleagues shut out a gender focu because they want to expose natural abilites. If females shy away, then males also follow. They may be blinded more once females themselves are shying away. I have learnt later in life after that workshop i attended 15 years ago, that males in my society express discontent because gender discussion is about favouring women over men. We have to learn to address gender awareness early in life. If awareness is done at parenting stages, its easy to sustain. Hence we can find programs where female and males are given equal attention and equitable attention as well.

[Asiimwe Joy Turyamwijuka]

 Confronting gender through primary socialisation is one of the least addressed aspects of gender awareness. I was privilleged to attend a women leaders workshop over 15years ago,where a male trainer appealed to women to train their children on gender awareness. Parenting is the only source of primary socialisation and awareness often sticks. The home is where individuals acquire basic lifeskills and gender awareness is one of those to be added on the lists. Otherwise gender awareness in evaluation becomes contentious to discuss at the point of evaluation. Females on the evaluation team tend to downplay gender issues arguing that gender is part of the whole. But some gender considerations actually expose effects of a program that may affect results positively or negatively