Unlearning Patriarchy: Expanding Impacts of Gender Training

When the United Nations convened the first international conference on women’s equality in Mexico City in 1975, an official report on the status of women in India entitled “Towards Equality” had just been released. Attention to programmes of women’s studies and bringing focus on women in development began then. Focused training programmes on women’s equality in educational institutions and development agencies began since early 1980s in India.

With focus on women’s economic and social empowerment, planning and implementation of women-and-development projects began to incorporate training for integrating women’s practical and (later) strategic concerns in their design. Gender training in its early days built capacities to understand realities of poor, excluded women for whom such development programmes were being designed and implemented.

International development agencies – bilaterals, multi-laterals and NGOs – had begun to fund training for improving excluded women’s access to development impacts of such programmes. A more critical focus on gender relations in community and society emerged through gender-and-development approaches. Deeper understanding of socialised patriarchy and consequent relations of unequal power between women and men resulted in fresh focus on gender relations in everyday life, not just of poor women for whom such development programmes were being implemented, but for all women.

Gender training gradually began to focus on working with boys and men, as much as with girls and women, to ‘unlearn’ prejudices and beliefs related to capacities, aspirations, roles and responsibilities of women and men in family, society and institutions. Women’s leadership in male-dominated domains of governance and politics was further supported through intensive training late 1990s onwards.

While gender integration in budgeting and planning of development policies and programmes seems to have become commonplace, critical reflections of everyday attitudes, values and behaviours of women and men in gender training programmes have been somewhat limited. Bringing women and men together in a training situation for ‘unlearning and relearning’ processes of experiential and historical understanding in one’s own life is still somewhat constrained.

Moving beyond the framing of gender relations as a binary, new approaches to gender training in the digital era are gaining ground. These approaches and methods have many lessons for making gender training a force for ‘unlearning patriarchy’ in family, institutions and society.

Despite a long and rich history of gender training in India (and the region), societal impacts on promoting gender equality remain weak. India’s rank in the World Economic Forum gender index is 140 (out of 156 countries) and 131 (out of 189 countries) on UNDP’s Human Development Index. Gender-based violence and exclusion of women from livelihoods have increased during the pandemic. What can be done through gender training to strengthen efforts towards gender equality?

PRIA’s past programmes in gender training have contributed to and been influenced by above-mentioned trends and approaches. As a part of PRIA@40 reflections, a Samwad – Conversation on “Unlearning Patriarchy: Approaches to Gender Training” is being organised on September 28, 2021 between 3:30 – 5:30 PM IST.

In partnership with CYSD (Bhubaneshwar), UNWOMEN (Delhi), and Martha Farrell Foundation (MFF) the conversation will focus on the following questions:

• What lessons can be drawn from past approaches to gender training?
• How can larger efforts be coalesced to broaden impacts of gender training towards equality?

For more detailed webinar report: Click here

For webinar recording: Click here