Focus group on women in male-headed households

After about a month of sitting in the office, this week I conducted my first focus groups in Rwanda. Although my research is primarily quantitative, the lack of information on females living in male-headed households is challenging my ability to conduct a gender analysis. I reached out to colleagues to see if there would be any opportunities to conduct field research, and a couple days ago a coworker invited me to the annual agricultural exposition in Kigali, which a group of women farmers who are beneficiaries of WFP's programs would be attending.

On the first day of the exposition, I showed up with some coworkers, and we found a woman I could interview. The interview was useful, but after 20 minutes, the translator had to leave because the opening ceremony was beginning.

I thus returned yesterday to try to follow up. The same woman wasn't there, but I ended up doing a focus group with 6 women. This too only lasted for 20 minutes because then the women said they had to leave.

In any case, while this was not nearly enough time. I did learn some helpful information that will help shape my research. For instance, I discovered that while men and women both work in the fields, they do different tasks, with women responsible for most of the cultivating. The division does not have to do with physical strength in any way, either; women are responsible for much of the heavy manual work. Men will help out in some very exceptional cases, but otherwise, it is considered the woman's job. These agricultural divisions of labor means that different farm-related interventions would impact men and women differently.

I encountered one problem during the focus group that I'm going to need to get some advice on. At least some of the women in the group seemed eager to boast about full gender equality in their communities. More than genuine, it felt they were saying what they thought they should say. I tried to prod a bit, asking not just about decision-making and conflict within their own homes but also within other homes in the community, and they insisted that decisions were made 50/50 between husbands and wives and that there was never any conflict. They argued that there might be some very exceptional cases of gender-based violence in the community, but this would be less than 1% of all homes.

As a researcher, I'm not sure how to handle this because it seems highly unlikely that the information I received was accurate, given that Rwanda has such high levels of domestic violence. At the same time, I don't want to push so hard that I end up finding information that confirms what I am looking for rather than reflecting the reality of focus group members.

For the time being, I'll try again with more people--perhaps one on one instead--to see how the information confirms or contradicts what I learned this week.

women women both work in the fields (as I