Tag Archives gender equality

Pros and cons of a women-friendly rideshare app

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As ride-sharing booms in Asia, women’s mobility is crucial. But it faces challenges like harassment due to the introduction of gendered strategies.

Photo by Hua Ling (Unsplash)

Ride-sharing platforms in Asia are thriving but their impact on women’s safety and mobility remains largely unexplored. This is concerning, given the prevalence of gender-based violence in conventional transport, particularly in South Asia where women face greater restrictions on independent mobility.

Enter Tootle. Research conducted in Kathmandu, Nepal, shows that the issue of gender has featured centrally in the business strategy of the Nepali-owned ride share company.

Co-founder and CEO Sixit Bhatta describes Tootle, which launched in 2017, consistently as “not just a ride-sharing company, the whole idea revolves around encouraging freedom of movement“. Tootle seeks to expand the freedom of movement, especially as Kathmandu’s public transport has been unfriendly towards differently-abled people and women.

Without questioning Tootle’s social justice concerns, the focus on women was recognised as a business strategy as women comprise at least half of the potential passenger population and constitute a dormant pool of potential riders.

Women are also underrepresented in paid work. In Ethiopia, for example, these observations have contributed to the launch of a ride-sharing platform (Seregela) which worked with women drivers exclusively.

Recruiting more women as drivers is probably the most effective strategy to increase the share of women passengers. Women drivers convey a sense of safety and security to women passengers. Tootle has built this factor into its ride-sharing app by allowing passengers to ‘choose‘ between men and women drivers.

However, attracting more women drivers is a challenge. The ride-sharing platforms seek to address this by championing women as drivers in their advertisements and by depicting ride-sharing as a women’s practice, involving women drivers and women passengers.

The platforms also publish success stories about women drivers that carefully weave together the benefits of being a driver with aspects of women’s conventional gender roles. Tootle also sought to attract women drivers by not charging them a commission (initially it charged men drivers a 4 percent commission).

Tootle not only creates its supply of drivers in gendered ways, following the theoretical premise that platform companies are ‘in the business of making markets’ it does the same for demand. For the public this is less visible; yet, probably more impactful. In its driver’s interface, Tootle represents demand for ride-shares in hetero-normative ways: customers are presented as either female or male.

Research in 2019 suggests that drivers (who are mostly men), indeed, use this to give preference to women passengers. For example, women passengers rarely complained about long waits. One woman customer who mostly used Tootle said: “I never had to wait more than 10 minutes for a ride-request sent.” In contrast, men frequently complained. One said: “It will be a pleasant surprise if I ever get a ride without waiting for more than 30 minutes.”

Allowing drivers to give preference to women passengers can be argued to make ride-sharing more women-friendly because it reduces waiting times for women.

Unfortunately, it also facilitates sexism.

A male customer interviewed referred to a response he got when he complained to a (male) Tootle driver who picked him up after a long wait: “You should feel lucky, because you are my first male customer [today]. I never give rides to males but only to females. Why would I become a driver otherwise — it’s fun having a female on the back of my bike.”

While in this specific case no woman was negatively affected, the driver’s attitude mirrors those collected online from women passengers reporting harassment by male drivers both during and after the ride-share.

These incidents happen despite compulsory onboarding of new drivers in which ride-sharing platforms instruct newly recruited drivers about avoiding unwanted behaviour.

New drivers are told to not tease women customers, to refrain from comments that could be interpreted as sexual innuendos and to refrain from asking women customers to sit closer to the driver, or to brake in such a manner that the body of the woman passenger touches the driver.

Across Asia ride-sharing platforms have significantly transformed urban transportation, including in gendered ways. The expanded choice and availability of transport options is good news, especially for those women looking for and able to afford alternatives to existing gender-insecure forms of transport.

Recruitment efforts targeting women as drivers has not only created new opportunities for paid (part-time) work for women, it also contributed to further shifts in gender norms in urban transport.

However, the gender justice argument put forth by Nepal’s ride-sharing platforms must be recognised as a business strategy. When platforms make markets in gendered ways, this creates gendered tensions.

Most notably, allowing driver selection based on the passenger’s gender seems beneficial to women initially but it encourages sexist attitudes and creates the potential for gender-based violence.

Over recent years, Nepal’s ride-sharing platforms have improved complaint and tracking mechanisms to combat sexism. Yet, the failure to increase the share of women as drivers delimits the inclusiveness of ride-sharing platforms. Improving women’s riders working conditions may be the surest way to address this.

This article is part of a Special Report on the Asian Gig Economy, produced in collaboration with the Asian Research Centre – University of Indonesia

This article was originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Roy Huijsmans is an associate professor of childhood and youth studies. His research focuses on young people in processes of social development, which includes the emerging platform economy.

Pritee Hamal is an independent researcher based in Kathmandu, Nepal. She holds an MA in Development Studies and Gender Studies.

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Transformative Methodologies | Using a caring approach to equalise research relationships

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Collaboration between researchers and those they engage with for their research is increasingly promoted as a way to address some of the epistemic injustices arising from the process of producing knowledge. Stepping back and allowing those we work with to shape research agendas and become intimately involved in the research process is an act of care, and the effects and benefits are tangible, writes Marina Cadaval Narezo. Care can be a thread that weaves together multiple and diverse actors, helping create a dense fabric of experiences through which researchers and those they work with can collectively, and in more equitable ways, make sense of the creative process.

Uncomfortable questions

Before starting my PhD at the ISS, I was working in Mexico for an initiative that provided grant scholarships to indigenous people to pursue graduate studies. During the 15 years I was involved in operational and executive activities for this initiative, I got to know many inspiring women whose stories to obtain a university degree filled me with uncomfortable questions. Most of them were the first in their families or in their communities to go to university; most of them had attended boarding schools since they were children or had to migrate as teenagers to continue their education. Most of them had full-time jobs to cover their university expenses; those who did not face these challenges were considered privileged. Their academic trajectories were at times the result of collective efforts and at others that of solitary struggles. Nevertheless, they were generally painful, complex processes.

I felt that a better understanding of their paths was needed, so I decided to explore and highlight their stories through my PhD research. I wanted to know what had happened to some of the women who received a scholarship after they graduated and how their master’s or doctorate degrees affected their professional – and personal – development. I was puzzled about what changed and what remained in their lives as women, as indigenous people, and as professionals. Given my closeness to many of them due the long journeys together at the scholarships program called IFP-Probepi[1] but also as a researcher committed to anti-oppressive (Brown and Strega 2005), feminist (Haraway 1988; Harding 1991), and indigenous methodologies (Wilson 2008; Smith 2012), I thought that the most appropriate thing to do was to ask them directly. To talk it over.

‘Reflective conversations’: bridging times and spaces[2]

At the end of 2019, I contacted 36 indigenous women who had obtained master’s or PhD degrees between 2004 and 2014. Of those I contacted, 17 participated in the research. They were from different indigenous groups, states, ages, and areas of specialisation. Diversity was intentionally considered in order to identify those changes and continuities I was looking for, as well as the intersections of gender, race, and class that inform educational policies in Mexico. Originally, I was exclusively paying attention to their exclusion in terms of racism, sexism, classism, and tokenism.

I went to the towns or cities where they lived, including Yucatán, Chihuahua, Oaxaca, Mexico City, Chiapas, and Veracruz. We had long talks, or what I call ‘reflective conversations’, which I understand as dialogues that start from previous common and mutual understandings – such as the IFP-Probepi scholarship, the graduate courses, our feminisms, our families, and our health – that allowed us to meet and examine ourselves across multiple times and spaces. While sharing a meal, a drink, or a walk, we conversed, reflecting on the experience of studying abroad, on our current jobs, on how much or how little life had changed. We connected those we were when we first met through IFP-Probepi with those we had become.

Shifting centers – from ‘victims’ to social and political change agents

After organising, systematising and analysing the information obtained, in the summer of 2020 I shared the preliminary findings with them. The meetings were online which allowed us to connect our multiple geographies: Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatán, Veracruz, Chihuahua, Mexico City, The Hague (The Netherlands). Sharing and discussing these findings and listening to their responses led me to shift the focus of my research -initially centered in their exclusion of the education system- to their processes and strategies of resistance. “We do not want to be the victims nor being seen only as beneficiaries of educational programs and social schemes,” some stated. “We must be recognised as the social and political actors that we are.”

Our encounters allowed me personally to understand in a much clearer way their paths and to address my research questions considering their gazes, but also to build networks and take action that goes beyond the very objective of writing a doctoral thesis and is more closely linked to the reality we want to transform. Thus, in 2020, we participated in a campaign to help eradicate racism in higher education promoted by Cátedra UNESCO Educación Superior y Pueblos Indígenas y Afrodescendientes en América Latina (UNESCO Chair in Higher Education and Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples in Latin America). Through the ISS Research Innovation Facility (RIF), we then set up an independent and collective blog called ‘Resistencias y Mujeres Profesionistas Indígenas’ (Resistances and Indigenous Professional Women) that we are using to share our stories of racism and the strategies that each of us has developed to face it.

A transformative methodology?

Was the methodology I developed and used transformative? For the way academia produces knowledge, I think so. I am doing research showing how collaboration, reciprocity, and recognition can work together to create caring processes in which different voices can be woven together into one fabric of experiences. For the women I am working with, I think it also does. It has created synergies and coalitions necessary to challenge stereotypes and transform not just how knowledge is produced, but how we want to walk in this world. For me, for sure. It has allowed me to reconnect with those women who have made me confront my own privileges and prompted me to use my position to continue exposing some of the still-existing structural exclusions. The way is long, but it is important to keep sharing, discussing, and resisting.

REFERENCES

Brown L. and S. Strega (2005), Research as Resistance. Critical, indigenous and anti-oppressive approaches, Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.

Cadaval Narezo, M. (2022), “Methodologies for collaborative, respectful and caring research. Conversations with professional indigenous women from Mexico”, in W. Harcourt, C. Dupuis, J. Gaybor & K. van den Berg (eds.), Experiments and Reflections in Feminist Methodologies, Series: Gender, Development and Social Change. Switzerland: Palgrave.

Haraway, D. (1988) “Situated knowledges: The Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575-599.

Harding, S. (1991), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Smith, L. T. (2012), Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples, New Zealand: Zed Books/Otago University Press.

Wilson S. (2008), Research Is Ceremony Indigenous Research Methods, Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing.

[1] The initiative was financed from 2001 to 2012 by the Ford Foundation as the International Fellowships Program (IFP), and from 2013 until present (2022) by the Mexican government through the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) as the Fellowships Program for Indigenous People (Probepi). In both cases, it has been administered by the Center for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology (CIESAS).

[2] For a more in-depth discussion of the methodology I used, see Cadaval Narezo (2022).

 

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Marina Cadaval Narezo is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies.

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There’s so much we still have to do to address gender injustices once and for all

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Today we celebrate International Women’s Day, but as always, there are some positive developments we can commend and others that we should be horrified about. The COVID-19 pandemic has strongly exacerbated gender injustices and created new gender inequalities. At the same time we can fortunately witness the strengthening of discussions on gender relations and things we’re still doing wrong (and those things we’re setting right). We’ve reached the tip of the iceberg and the rest – the assumptions and silences that perpetuate gender injustices – lurk beneath the surface, a silent colossus standing between us and real progress. In this post, we celebrate attempts to chip away at those parts of gender relations that are less visible, but just as crucial to address.

It’s International Women’s Day again! Who could’ve thought that we’d have gone through so much in just one year’s time? Last year on 8 March, they were still considering whether borders and public spaces should be closed and measures imposed. And here we are. All of us suffered the COVID-19 pandemic. No-one remained unaffected. And I think especially women had a hard time as schools closed, remained closed, and they had to balance jobs with childrearing and other tasks traditionally assigned to them. I take my hat off to each and every woman who has faced adverse circumstances over the past year and who has somehow managed to conquer them.

Bliss has received many contributions over the past year about the pandemic from our academics, who have diverse research interests. We’ve seen discussions about things we hadn’t considered. The vast array of articles on different dimensions of the pandemic helped us make sense of what’s happening and take stock of the bigger picture beyond our unhappiness with lockdown measures and the inconvenience they were causing. Inequalities were and still are worsening, and new injustices emerging as the pandemic rages on globally.

One of the articles that grabbed my attention was an article by ISS alumna María Gabriela Palacio, who flagged the rising inequality in academia due to the pandemic as gendered and racialised. In her article she described how women were struggling to fulfill their academic obligations due to the burden of unpaid work they had to shoulder in addition to their work as academics, which is known to be precarious and demanding. She quoted “a sizeable social gradient in the extent to which families feel able to support their children and provide home schooling”.

This growing inequality in academia, which is already highly unequal, needs to remain a topic of discussion. It shouldn’t be normalised or dismissed. Women who manage to do so much and remain standing are superheroes in my eyes, but that doesn’t mean that we should assume that they want to be superheroes.

Another regular author on Bliss, Professor Thea Hilhorst, is also talking about gender relations. But she has a somewhat different focus: the plight of men. At least in the article published today in Dutch newspaper Trouw, where she turned the notion of toxic masculinity ever so slightly on its head by arguing that men have feelings, too, and that we also need them to be involved in reconstructing societies ravaged by conflicts.

Hilhorst, Professor in Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at ISS, argues that men need to be included in post-conflict reconstruction efforts because conflict gives rise to new or perhaps worse forms of toxic masculinity that remain long after conflicts are over. New perceptions of masculinity may emerge as women’s role is strengthened during conflicts or wars when they assume duties typically considered those of men. And during wars, men also resort to sexual violence and the torturing of civilians – something that remains in their conscience and perceptions of masculinity once the war or conflict has passed.

Men need to find themselves in the post-war reconstruction, as they’ve lost their identity twice – when the conflict started, and when it ended. Neglecting them can lead to greater toxic masculinity as they feel worthless and invisibilised. Thus, not losing sight of men is necessary to strengthen the position of women in society – it’s a dual process in which toxic masculinity is addressed and men given the room to explore alternative identities while women are supported. “A bird needs both its wings to fly,” goes a saying from the DRC that Hilhorst quotes.

Linking to this discussion, in 2018 on Bliss, Hilhorst, Holly Porter and Rachel Gordon in an article titled ‘Challenging humanitarianism beyond gender as women and women as victims’ called on aid organisations to tread carefully in programming gender relations. Echoing Hilhorst’ argument above, they argued that forgetting about men could lead to problems “ranging from mental health problems […] to the (violent) re-assertion of men and masculinities”. And, they argued, by seeing women as primary victims and primarily as victims, “other realities in which men and women assume different and more complex roles” are obscured.

Just over a year ago Christo Gorpudolo also argued on Bliss for the need to move beyond the notion of women as victims of war. She focused on a transitional justice mechanism in Liberia following the country’s long period of civil war and how framing women as victims was not helping the process. Importantly, she highlighted the need to equalize men and women in the peacebuilding process. “A way of approaching peacebuilding in Liberia in order to achieve a gender-just peacebuilding process would be to incorporate both men and women in the peacebuilding process based on their lived experiences—as equals and not necessarily according to a victim-perpetrator dichotomy,” she commented.

And besides reconsidering those who remain women throughout their lives are framed in gender programs and other interventions, we also need to consider the particular problems that queer women face. Back in November 2017, Heather Tucker on Bliss discussed the need to focus on the needs of queer women in Ghana in their own right. Tucker’s ethnographic study in Accra revealed that broader approaches to tackling issues affecting LBGTI+ communities fail to adequately recognise the particularity of problems affecting queer women.

Labeling is just one problematic aspect of the experiences of queer women. For example, the term ‘lesbian’ as it has come to be understood does not adequately reflect the dynamics of same-sex relationships in Ghana, where the term supi is used (she writes how it describes a relationship, not an identity, and how this relationship is defined as one between two women that is intimate and might or might not be sexual in nature). “It is therefore critically important,” Tucker argued, “that donors who are involved in funding queer projects pay attention to the specific nuances, needs, and desires of those they are trying to support.”

This small selection of articles on Bliss (there are many others that are just as interesting – see here and here and here, for example), shows just how much we still need to discuss about gender, and how much we still have to do to change it.

But we are starting to make the change ourselves – and this is crucial. The sentence above (‘how much we still have to do to change it’) is an invitation not to sit back and think of ‘what needs to be changed’, but for each and every one of us to get involved in redressing gender injustices.

Lastly, I want to particularly thank the female academics who have written for Bliss on gender-related, but also on other issues. It’s inspiring to know that the conversation on gender is continuing, but also that women are driving conversations in academia. Chapeau! And happy International Womens’ Day to all women!

About the author:

Lize Swartz

Lize Swartz is the editor-in-chief of ISS Blog Bliss and a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she researches political dynamics of socio-hydrological systems. She is part of the newly formed Transformative Methodologies Working Group situated in the Civic Innovation Research Group

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Reclaiming the space for feminism in development practice: the role of ‘femocrats’ by Clara Mi Young Park

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In spite of international pledges to gender equality and development that leaves no one behind, the current wave of populism and autarchy is materializing in the form of resurging patriarchy, oppression and exclusion. This has spurred a counter movement of feminist activism across the globe. At this juncture, this article discusses the role of feminists in development organizations that can and must also do their part to promote change that is premised on gender and social justice.

With the adoption of the Sustainable Development Agenda 2030, the international community committed to transformational change that puts gender equality, human rights and leaving no one behind at the center of sustainable development.

At the same time, with the rise of populist, fundamentalist and extremist politics, not only has the space for democratic civic expression and engagement shrunk, but women human rights defenders are also increasingly the target of violence and oppression. The recent report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders highlights the rise of “misogynistic, sexist and homophobic speech by prominent political leaders in recent years, normalizing violence against women and gender non-conforming people”. Equally worrisome are the spread of “gender ideology” advanced by certain groups as a threat to morals, religious and family values, widespread militarization and use of violence and force, and globalization and neoliberal policies that disempower women and exacerbate power and social inequalities (United Nations General Assembly 2019, 7).

The current political scenario calls for an urgent action and convergence among those committed to social and gender justice. As we approach the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action in 2020 with a gender equal world still a chimera, we need to step up our efforts and “push back against the push back” on women’s rights, as the Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Gutierrez said in opening the 63rd Committee on the Status of Women in March this year.[1] Testament to that is the new wave of feminist activism that is spreading across the globe. Feminists working in development can and must also play their part.

The role of feminists who embrace gender as a profession in development bureaucracies – referred to as ‘femocrats’ (Goetz 2004, 137) – has not always been fully appreciated by feminist activists and academics, although there have also been genuine attempts to recognize the contribution of and the hardship faced by femocrats (Goetz, 2004). In the past, this divide reflected critical feminist reflections on the heels of the gender mainstreaming project. On the one hand, gender equality had become an integral part of the development agenda and sustainability discourse, opening the door for feminists to engage in high level political fora and processes (True 2003). On the other hand, by coming to mainstream, gender lost “its political and analytical bite”, sometimes leading to simplification and essentialization of the feminist project (Cornwall 2007, 69).

This juncture, however, requires alliance building and bridging rather than dividing. For those like myself who navigate multiple positionalities, as feminists, gender and development professionals, women and men from different cultural, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, the question is: How can our work make a difference while being apparently more acquiescent to different interests, including of bureaucracies that are slow and/or reluctant to change?

Despite the challenges, the present moment is ripe with opportunities. While not perfect, Agenda 2030 opens the way to tackling a broad range of structural gender inequalities, including violence against women and girls, unpaid care work, sexual and reproductive health and rights, access to productive resources, and women’s access to decision making (Razavi, 2016). Increasingly in development, the call is for feminist and gender-transformative action. Action that transforms and subverts the traditional structures that perpetuate gender, social, power hierarchies and, injustices – be it in environmental, agricultural and rural development or climate change policy and praxis. Such transformation implies moving beyond technical and technocratic approaches and fixes to addressing gender inequalities. It implies grounding the design of development action on a thorough understanding of the power and social dynamics at play in a specific context. It calls for recognizing the intersectional and compounding nature of inequality and oppression.

Within this context, femocrats can advocate for stronger political commitment and for policies and programmes that take the Agenda 2030 pledges seriously and address the structural barriers to gender equality and the realization of women and girls’ human rights. Femocrats can also push for increased accountability towards international instruments and conventions. Importantly, femocrats can expedite the promotion of a re-politicized understanding of gender and the positioning of intersectional gender justice on the agenda of global policy fora, where social justice-based approaches are easier to take forward. Finally, femocrats can play a unique role in opening doors while facilitating dialogue among parties and actors.

It is thus the special duty of any femocrat to fight from inside the system while creating alliances with likeminded people from different backgrounds. For example, femocrats can promote dialogue and create formal spaces and terms of engagement[2] of women’s groups, LGBTQI groups, social movements, farmers’ and fishers’ organizations and indigenous and minority groups with government actors, engaged researchers and other actors. This is needed to build the kind of sustainable coalitions that can bridge initiatives from below with initiatives from above, thus opening the space for more democratic participation and decision-making while advancing a vision of development grounded in gender and social justice.

[1] Opening remarks made at the opening session of CSW63, held in New York, 12 March 2019, which the author attended.

[2] As Jonathan Fox (2009: 489) notes, “balanced decision-making processes are especially difficult to construct, especially across cultural and organizational divides” but coalitions can become sustainable “when grounded in shared terms of engagement”.

References
Cornwall, Andrea. 2007. “Revisiting the ‘Gender Agenda.’” IDS Bulletin 38 (2): 69–78.
Goetz, Anne Marie. 2004. “Reinvigorating Autonomous Feminist Spaces.” IDS Bulletin 35 (4): 137–40. doi:10.1111/j.1759-5436.2004.tb00169.x.
Razavi, Shahra. 2016. “The 2030 Agenda: Challenges of Implementation to Attain Gender Equality and Women’s Rights.” Gender & Development 24 (1): 25–41. doi:10.1080/13552074.2016.1142229.
True, Jacqui. 2003. “Mainstreaming Gender in Global Public Policy.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 5 (3): 368–96. doi:10.1080/1461674032000122740.
United Nations General Assembly. 2019. “Situation of Women Human Rights Defenders. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders. Human Rights Council. Fortieth Session. 25 February-22 March 2019.” A/HRC/40/60. Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Including the Right to Development. New York: United Nations.

Image Credit: Fibonacci Blue on Flickr

ClaraAbout the author:

Clara Mi Young Park is the Regional Gender, Rural and Social Development Officer of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Office for Asia- Pacific. She has recently earned her Doctoral Degree at the International Institute of Social Studies with a thesis on “Gender, generation and agrarian change: cased from Myanmar and Cambodia”. This piece is partially based on self-reflections about doing feminist research included in the doctoral thesis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond the binary: negotiating cultural practices and women’s rights in South Africa by Cathi Albertyn

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In a recent lecture at the ISS, Professor Cathi Albertyn of the University of the Witwatersrand discussed how South African women navigate civil and customary laws to claim women’s rights within culture. Here she shows that women in South Africa do not seek to oppose culture and custom, but desire equality within their own communities.

Women in South Africa have long opposed discrimination in the family, in both civil and customary law. When the South African Constitution was negotiated in the early 1990s as the apartheid dispensation made way for a democratic political system, few expected the conflict that occurred between women pursuing equality and traditional leaders seeking to affirm culture and custom. Women fiercely opposed the traditional leaders’ 1993 call for customary law to be excluded from the equality guarantee in the Bill of Rights, arguing that all South Africans should be recognised as rights-bearing citizens in the new democracy. In the end, the 1996 Constitution created a plural legal system that recognised customary law, as the written and unwritten indigenous law regulating the lives of many black South Africans (especially in rural areas), and subjected it—together with all law—to the values and rights of the Constitution.

As with earlier forms of civil law, women suffered multiple inequalities under customary law, including unequal status and rights in the family, to inheritance and land, as well as participation in customary courts and positions of leadership. But in calling for equal rights, they did not seek to oppose culture and custom. On the contrary, organisations such as the Rural Women’s Movement were very clear that women wanted equality within their communities. In constitutional terms, they asserted both the right to equality (section 9 of the Constitution) and the right to participate in their culture (sections 30 and 31).

The relationship between equality and culture

How, then, should we think about the relationship between equality and culture? In the early 1990s, international law did not seem to be particularly helpful. Whilst the Convention on the Eliminations of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) set out important rights, it did not engage the cultural domain beyond calling for change. Rather, it seemed to imagine completely separate and hierarchical spheres of women’s rights and discriminatory culture. This tended towards a trumping relationship between women’s rights and a “cultural other”.

South African lawyers and policy-makers imagined a different relationship, drawing on the idea of “harmonising” customary law with the Constitution. Here they were influenced by the work of Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA), who recognised that women’s rights needed to be strengthened within their customary context. Their research pointed to ideas of custom and culture that were not bounded, rigid and unchanging, but more flexible and responsive to a changing world, and to women’s needs. In contrast to the official customary law, codified under colonial rule, the “living law” revealed practices in which women secured rights to inheritance, land, and so on.

This idea of “living law” in which women were agents within an evolving system, able to draw on multiple ideas to negotiate change from within, became a key idea in both legislative and judicial reform of customary law in South Africa.

For example, research in South (and southern) Africa which showed that women actively seek out rights in marriage, reaching to civil marriage when they could not secure rights in customary marriage, influenced the enactment of the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act in 1998. The RCMA granted women equal status and rights in marriage, while preserving customary forms of celebration and—controversially and directly against CEDAW—recognised polygamy.

In addition, Classens and Mnisi’s research into land rights—with land usually held by men—has uncovered practices in which women (particularly single women with children) are able to negotiate access to land in their communities by drawing on customary and constitutional values of equality, democracy, need and dependency.

Criticism of “harmonising” two law forms

These examples point to the possibilities of claiming women’s rights within culture, and that cultural rules and practices can accommodate and affirm women’s rights and gender equality. But this approach is not without problems, nor is it uncontested.

A major criticism by writers, such as Himonga (2005) and Nhlapo (2017), is that legislative and judicial attempts to “harmonise” customary law with the Constitution are too reliant on civil forms and lack the imagination to embed customary values in new legal forms. As a result, they have not always been followed within rural, customary communities.

Others, such as Nyamu-Musembi (2002), point to the problems of power and vested (male) interests within communities, suggesting that the potential for change is limited as long as women lack authority and voice. Even where women succeed, it is by conforming to gendered “stereotypes”, such as the “dutiful daughter”. Further, meaningful cultural change is often only possible with support from “outsiders”, such as local NGOS (Nyamu-Musembi, Hellum and Katsande 2017,).

Working from within is a contradictory and uneven strategy. However, it cannot, and should not be dismissed. Women need rights within their communities and “top-down”, trumping strategies, while important, can have significant limits. In the end, there is no magic bullet for women’s rights.

List of useful references
Catherine Albertyn ‘Cultural Diversity, “Living Law” And Women’s Rights in South Africa’ in Daniel Bonilla Maldonado (ed) Constitutionalism in the Global South (2013) Cambridge University Press 163-.
Aninka Claassens & Sindiso Mnisi-Weekes ‘Rural Women Redefining Land Rights in the Context of Living Customary Law’ (2009) 25 South African Journal on Human Rights 491.
Anne Hellum & Rosalie Katsande ‘Gender, Human Rights and Legal Pluralities in Southern Africa: A Matter of Context and Power’ in Giselle Corradi, Eva Brems & Mark Goodale (eds) (2017) Human Rights Encounter Legal Pluralism: Normative and Empirical Approaches 119–136.
Chuma Himonga ‘The Advancement of Women’s Rights in the First Decade of Democracy in South Africa: The Reform of the Customary law of Marriage and Succession’ 2005 Acta Juridica 82.
Thandabantu Nhlapo ‘Customary Law in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Constitutional Confrontations in Culture, Gender and “Living Law”’ (2017) 33 South African Journal on Human Rights 1.
Celestine Nyamu-Musembi ‘Are Local Norms and Practice Fences or Pathways? The Example of Women’s Property Rights’ in Abdullahi A An-Na’im (ed) (2002) Cultural Transformation And Human Rights In Africa 126.
Bhe v Magistrate Khayalitsha [2004] ZACC 17 http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2004/17.pdf
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UN GA Report of the independent expert in the field of cultural rights, Ms. Farida Shaheed, submitted pursuant to resolution 10/23 of the Human Rights Council, 22 March 2010, A /HRC/14/36
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UN GA Report of the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, 17 July 2017, A/72/155

Picture credit: Max Pixel

image-20160512-16407-1phc8djAbout the author: 

Cathi Albertyn is Professor of Law at the School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where she teaches graduate and post-graduate courses in Constitutional Law and Human Rights. Prior to joining the School, she was the Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (2001-2007) and headed its Gender Research Programme for ten years (1992-2001). She was appointed to the first Commission on Gender Equality and later served on the South African Law Reform Commission. research interests include Equality, Gender Studies, Human Rights, the Judiciary and Constitutional Law.

The university of paleness by Willem Schinkel

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In a recent attempt to address the underrepresentation of female professors in the Netherlands, the Dutch government made extra funds available to universities to appoint women. To the dismay of many people at Erasmus University, the university refused to fill over half of the available positions and sent the money back. This triggered Willem Schinkel’s personal essay in which he explains how he feels alienated from a university whose masculine dominance is closely tied to its corporate character.

 

If an alien from an exoplanet came to Erasmus University, or to any other university in the Netherlands, and if that alien considered the composition of the university in terms of gender and race, it would most likely draw one of two conclusions. One, this space has been invaded by white men. Two, the model that best describes the spread of white men through institutions of higher learning is that of some kind of plague or epidemic. Of course us earthlings would be quick to explain to our alien friend that the unequal distribution of men and women, of white people and people of color, is normal – even though it is not a normal distribution in the statistical sense! You see, we would tell this alien, the principle that governs our distribution over institutions of knowledge and power, is what we call quality. To which the alien might rightfully respond: ‘I see. And what is the principle that governs the distribution of your quality?’

At this point in time, I don’t think administrators at Erasmus University have a good answer to this question. Recently, our university refused government money for the appointment of so-called Westerdijk chairs for female professors. The dean of the Rotterdam School of Management, Steef van de Velde, made a classic patriarchal move and wasn’t shy about it: in an interview with Erasmus Magazine he said he hadn’t appointed any women because he wanted to “protect” them. After all, an appointment on a Westerdijk chair would be perceived as “stigmatising”, since people would think ‘that they needed this type of appointment because they could not get an appointment on their own merits.’ Moreover, he said, this was not at all a question of money – the RSM has plenty and doesn’t need such money to appoint women. To top it, he said there were plenty of upcoming women in tenure tracks – and why give some women some money (in Dutch, he spoke of a “sweetener”, or douceurtje) and others not?

This kind of reasoning and rhetoric is an affront on so many levels, including the level of intellectual discussion befitting a university. I have no intention to counter it with all the good reasons for the appointment of women. I don’t think it’s my place in particular to make that case, and I also think that the case has been made over and over again. We know all the arguments – that is, if we choose to pay due attention to the scientific study of “diversity” – but they run aground in the morass of the white male dean-dominated powerhouses that university faculties are in this country and elsewhere in the world. So this essay is not a case for diversity. If anything, it’s a case for a university that may be gone, and that more likely may have never existed.

The alien in my hypothetical example might assume that an invasion had occurred. And in a way, of course, the invasion has always already taken place. We are in a state of occupation. Getting serious about undoing it is what is called “decolonising the university”. Here’s another way to think about what it means that our appointments are so one-sided. If I often feel alienated from the university  it has something to do with the model of living together we embody.

The university, like any other setting, is always also one answer to the question how to live together, how to be social, how to practice sociality as being in the world together. And I guess it just keeps on being disappointing that this – the current composition of the university – is the modality of sociality that keeps on being reproduced. Ours is a conditioned stupidity. It is conditioned by an imagination limited to market-based modes of finding value in life. But being so conditioned is not a condition; it is a constraint that is enforced, but over which we might have control.

So whatever happens, let it be obvious that our “diversity”, that is, the composition of our togetherness, is a choice. And the university as it is produces what might be best called a form of paleness. By this I mean a uniformity and homogeneity, a desire for and expression of an order of looking and working alike, an order of whiteness and masculinity, in which “I don’t recognize this picture of the university” even counts as an argument. This paleness is of course a form of whiteness. But the paleness I’m alluding to is also an intellectual desolation or drabness, an achromatics of thinking. And it is a submission to neoliberal procedural routines in the ways we work, as well as a general appreciation of mediocrity sold as “excellence” – remember that, after appointing men on half the positions available, we’re tapping into the lower tiers of intellect and creativity if we continue to appoint men.

And what a bleak picture it is to see those with a ticket to inclusion! What has happened when students (they are not to blame for this!) don’t even think to criticise the curriculum set by the order of pale sameness? What has happened when technocratic markers of achievement that are “evidence based” take precedence when in fact most have no clue what a genuine spirit of inquiry would be, what intelligence might be as a mode of sociality beyond individuated IQ indicators, or how study might be a shared venture to recompose the world in ways that subvert the pale order of sameness to which we currently sacrifice ourselves, but mostly others, for the noble cause of producing “knowledge”?

If anything is clear, it’s that the university is invested in state and corporate power, including criminal fossil fuel companies, and divested in diversity. And when we keep on seeing how diversity basically functions as what Sarah Ahmed calls a “non-performative”[1] – something designed not to produce its stated goals – the only way to move forward is to step up our critical reflection on, and our subversion of, the university at large. The point is thus not to consider the university as basically fine as it is, and to just grant access to it to a greater number of people, or by people of a variety of gender and “race”. It’s not about letting others get a piece of the pie, of sharing in the otherwise unchanged corporate paleness that marks the university today. Much more fundamentally, it is a matter of living as such, of living together. After all, this is what we do on campus: during the day, ours is a specific modality of being together, a selective, tilted, and pale form of intimacy. So the question who gets to be there is pertinent, and concerns us all.

[1] See: Ahmed, S. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Durham: Duke University Press.

An earlier and longer version of this piece was published in Erasmus Magazine: https://www.erasmusmagazine.nl/en/2018/05/19/opinion-the-university-of-paleness/?noredirect=en_US


willemschinkeloverracismecensuurenpolitiekecorrect-0-0-820-540About the author:

Willem Schinkel is Professor of Social Theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).