The professionalization of gender

Having previously completed a master's degree in Women's and Gender Studies, I'm used to people looking at me skeptically when I tell them what my background is in. "But, why would you study that?" "What good is a degree in that?"

Coming in to WFP as a gender analyst, I was expecting similar skepticism about the value I could add to the organization's work. What I found instead was a certain mystique attached to the word, "gender."

WFP Rwanda has only started focusing on gender in the last year or two. The Head of Programmes encouraged the office to become more gender aware, and the country office became a pilot country for a WFP gender transformation plan. So when I arrived, many people in the office felt gender was important and in some ways respected me for being able to do a gender analysis. Many didn't, however, have any idea what was meant by the word.

During my time in the office, I've been somewhat perplexed by the way the word "gender" is used.

In different contexts, I've gotten used to the word "gender" being used as a stand-in for "woman." Gender-based violence, for instance, almost always refers to violence against women. Gender specialists almost always focus on women. And gender equality is almost always the same as equality for women.

To some extent, this is also true in the Rwanda country office. Gender is still considered an issue of women. However, some of the comments about gender have been so abstract that it's hard for me to know what people are referring to. People who've gone through gender trainings might comment, "Now I understand that gender causes problems in families". Others might say, "gender has become so important" or "we need to apply gender to our work."

Beyond comments that teeter between using gender to mean something about gender equality or gender relations to being essentially meaningless, I've noticed more broadly that gender in WFP has become somewhat professionalized. People get certificates in gender. They tell me my future is bright because I understand gender. They stress the importance of applying gender to their work.

Now. I find tremendous value in WFP's commitment to integrating a gender perspective into their work. I've witnessed trainings and office-place conversations about gender dynamics that I doubt were occurring a few years ago. People recognize that women and men may be affected differently by WFP's programming and that WFP's work should contribute to "gender transformative" goals.

At the same time, I'm somewhat uncomfortable with this professionalization of "gender." I agree with the idea of having "gender experts" or other professionals dedicated to ensuring that the needs of different groups (mainly women and girls) get considered in all programming. However, the professionalization of gender is accompanied by the coinage of terminology and the development of experts. This makes the concept even more daunting than it might have already been and seems to dissociate some of the meaning from the terms.

In either case, some of the concepts around gender (that gender is socially constructed rather than all being natural, biological differences, for instance) would be new for a lot of people. However, I worry that professionalizing gender only makes these concepts more elitist and harder to grasp.