Gender and Livelihoods in the field of social work
This blog outlines the various livelihood approaches with an emphasis on the gender aspects of livelihoods and examines the post of gendered livelihoods as a developing area of interest in the fields of development and social work. At the end of this post the reader should be able to:
- Recognize the transition from conventional livelihood practises to modern livelihood practises and debates; and
- Acquire knowledge about how gender affects livelihoods.
- Recognize the complex relationship between citizenship and access to a means of subsistence.
- Create a gender-sensitive framework for examining livelihood programmes.
Contents
- Introduction
- Approaches to Livelihood: An Overview
- Employment
- Sustainable Livelihoods
- Livelihood and Citizenship
- Gender and Livelihoods
- Summary
Introduction
Development plans have never given enough attention to the unique economic requirements that women may have inside the family that differ from those of males. Women do not have equal access to the assets or productive resources needed to support their way of life. For instance, when it comes to addressing women's economic demands, the requirement for women to have independent land rights is frequently disregarded (Fraser 1994). Being largely an agrarian economy, a sustainable way of life depends on having access to and ownership over landed resources. Contrary to how males control and own property, employment is considered to be the primary indicator of women's economic standing (Agarwal 1996). Women are not only paid less than males for doing the same work, but the sexual division of labour in the industrial and agricultural sectors also keeps them in low-paying employment and stops them from contesting their inferior roles in their households. Even while it is not sufficient to provide gender equality in the home and greater society, having access to a means of subsistence and income is a significant step in that direction.
Approaches to Livelihood: An Overview
Traditional theories limited the definition of economic activity to rural and urban work and agriculture, respectively, viewing these two sources of revenue as the main drivers of economic well-being. While employment may be one source of income, the bulk of the poor's sources of income includes a variety of activities that go beyond it (Masika and Joekes September 1996). As a notion to describe how the poor life, their realistic priorities, and what can be done to aid them, "for many of the poor, livelihood seems to fit better than employment" (Chambers 1995).
However, Chambers (1995) defined livelihood as the "means of making a living, encompassing material assets (resources and stores), intangible assets (claims and access), and livelihood capabilities," which include coping mechanisms, opportunities, and a variety of freedoms. With this definition, poverty reduction initiatives that prioritise basic necessities and income production are replaced by the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, which takes a wide range of other variables into account. Here are a few of the several livelihood strategies that have been examined along with their gender implications.
Employment
Employment is the exchange of labour services for money or another good or service (Grown and Sebstad 1989). In other words, the definition of employment has evolved over time based on a variety of research and data collection methodologies, but it still refers to engaging in paid, productive work. In India, a number of employment creation programmes are seen as a source of assistance for the underprivileged. By extending the definition of employment, numerous women-performed livelihood-generating activities that would otherwise be invisible have been included.
However, there is a glaring disparity when it comes to women in the workforce, whether it be in terms of pay or type of employment they are restricted to. Numerous elements are usually stated to examine this prejudice, including women's lack of training and abilities, lower levels of education, their reproductive roles, and societal restrictions on movement. In addition, classifying employment as "male" or "female" adds to this inequality. Jobs that are considered to be feminine (such as those in the garment industry, care work, etc.) are centred on essentialized feminine traits like nurturing, dexterous hands, etc., and are typically lower paying and unskilled. Women are paid less than men in the workplace as a result of discriminatory attitudes on the part of employers.
Although employment includes paid jobs, a large range of activities that women engage in is excluded from this group. The majority of women, particularly in rural India, engage in work that supports the family budget but is viewed as an extension of their reproductive responsibilities and is as a result underpaid and undervalued. This includes employment that is both agricultural and nonagricultural, such as raising cattle, doing post-harvest agricultural operations, and engaging in a variety of home-based activities (eg. pottery). Men govern those phases of livelihood that include engagement with the public sphere, such as the market, due to social restrictions on women's movement in the majority of communities. A major criticism of this method is that, despite the fact that women are the primary contributors to the rural economy, their job does not fall under the definition of productive activity or employment.
Sustainable Livelihoods
Despite the relatively narrow scope of employment methods, the sustainable livelihoods framework, which is founded on the concepts of competence, equity, and sustainability, takes into account a number of additional aspects of labour. Capability includes the capacity to deal with stressful situations, shock, and the ability to fully utilise available chances for a living. Equity includes equal access to resources, skills, and opportunities in addition to income equity. Sustainability includes social and environmental aspects of maintaining livelihoods as well as the preservation of the asset bases on which livelihoods depend. Environmental aspects include worldwide worries about pollution, deforestation, etc (Chambers and Conway 1992).
This shift in strategy is reflected in a number of resolutions and papers adopted by international finance and development agencies. A non-binding action plan known as Agenda 21 was established by the UN Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) in 1992. It acknowledges that emphasising the preservation and protection of resources at the expense of the populations who depend on them for their subsistence can have a negative impact on both poverty and long-term environmental (and resource) conservation. The Fourth World Conference on Women, which took place in Beijing, China, in 1995 (Platform for Action, United Nations, 1996) urged governments to make sure that development does not negatively impact poor women so that they can maintain their means of subsistence, their assets, and their sources of income in times of challenging economic conditions. Because of these worries, organisations like Oxfam, the British government's Department for International Development (DFID), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) have all adopted their own variations of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach.
Development is a more inclusive concept, whereas the current concern with economic growth frequently comes at the expense of underprivileged groups and their access to livelihoods. But as Sumi Krishna correctly notes, governmental development initiatives frequently serve to entrench local power systems (Krishna 2007). For instance, despite overwhelming evidence that shows women are the world's main food farmers, policies of land redistribution have consistently failed to give women access to land ownership. As a result, in a caste-ridden society where such progressive, anti-feudal legislation sought to achieve fairness in resource ownership, it instead reinforced and supported the old gender roles by ignoring women's need to access and govern landed property. In order to reframe development as "participatory and people-driven," Sumi Krishna incorporates citizenship into the discussion at this point. As a result, livelihood is viewed as a political right to live with dignity.
Livelihood and Citizenship
It is simple to see how the concept of citizenship fits into this conversation. Because it divides people into citizens and non-citizens, with the former enjoying benefits and the latter being excluded from them, the concept of citizenship is basically exclusionary. The next part will demonstrate how this concept has changed over time. It has, however, always been linked to having access to and control over resources, both tangible and intangible, such as land, property, rights, power, and so forth. Having access to and control over such resources, both material and intangible, is required by Chamber's concept of livelihood. To put it simply, one must, therefore, be acknowledged by the State as a citizen in order to be able to enjoy livelihood as a right (or any other governing entity). Since men and women have varying degrees of access to, control over, and ownership over resources, livelihood is essentially gendered in practise. Traditional gender norms have been reinforced as a result of state initiatives that have resulted in the loss of or creation of livelihood opportunities (explored under gender and livelihoods)
Although the idea of citizenship has been present for centuries, it has changed with time and has been very different across cultures. Buddhist writings from the sixth to the fourth century BC show a social structure that was flexible enough to allow even slaves to reign and did not bar women from politics. The stratification systems in ancient Greek society and the Brahminical patriarchy of first-century BC India, however, were more rigorous. By confining women to households and assigning the status of "untouchables" to lower caste men (and women), the patriarchal caste structure tried to keep both groups out of the public eye. Similar to how only men who shared in the advantages of ruling in ancient Greece, according to Aristotle, could be deemed citizens, which automatically included women, resident aliens, slaves, children, elders, and the majority of ordinary workers. The emphasis of "rationality" as a characteristic of citizenship is noteworthy in Aristotle's writings, and this idea persisted for almost 2000 years beyond his time. As a result, up until the twentieth century, many civilizations denied women the right to possess property and barred them from the benefits of authority. In spite of the development of democratic political systems in many societies, governance was based on limited representation, depriving "indigenous people," "other people of colour," "illiterate mixed races," and "peasants" of the right to take part in political functioning and, as a result, excluding them from citizenship.
Gender and Livelihoods
In India, the debate over women's rights took place in the context of a demand for independence from British rule, whereas in Europe and North America, the campaign for suffrage was at the centre of the first wave feminist movement in the late nineteenth century. Demands for the right to participate in politics had to be backed by a "assurance" that they would not conflict with the customary female duties in the home. The emergence of demands for legal and franchise reforms, as well as general gender equality, were frequently absorbed under the more overarching nationalistic objectives. Although there was broad agreement that women needed education to help end sati and child marriage, this education was often seen as a very Brahminical and elite endeavour that would help women better serve their families and the country.
The place of women in their families and in society as a whole, meanwhile, appeared to remain constant in the face of these new demands. They would still be primarily constrained to home or private settings and be under pressure to fulfil their customary responsibilities. The first person to encourage women to take part in the freedom struggle, which many people found to be very empowering, was Mahatma Gandhi. But even Gandhi firmly believed that the division of labour between the home and the workplace was the normal course of events.
This "false" division between work performed in the public and private spheres draws attention to how marginalised, impoverished populations of forest dwellers, farmers, and craftspeople are absent from popular discourse. Women from the aforementioned communities have traditionally worked outside of their homes and have never been restricted to the private sphere, in contrast to upper caste, upper class metropolitan women. Their gender-specific concerns have been brought up in these campaigns as they have participated in movements for safeguarding their livelihoods. Women have participated in equal measure and even taken on leadership roles in many of these movements. But finally, especially within the working class movements, they were relegated to the margins. For instance, several women peasants held leadership positions during the Tebhagamovement (1946–1947) in West Bengal, which was concerned with the rights to produce on land. However, when peasantry received land titles from the State nearly two to three decades later, the majority of these went to men, and relatively few women actually received sole ownership.
The Supreme Court of India recognised the right to livelihood as an enforceable right when it maintained the rights of pavement dwellers who were being forcibly removed from Mumbai streets (Olga Tellis and others vs. Bombay Municipal Corporation) (Krishna 2007). The reasoning behind this was that because they live close to where they work, evicting them would result in them losing their means of support, depriving them of their right to life because these things are intertwined.
But since economic liberalisation in the 1990s, there has been a sharp reduction in economic space, livelihoods, resources, and knowledge, as well as repression of poor people's and disadvantaged communities' ways of existence (Krishna 2007). Their means of subsistence are correlated with the environments in which they dwell and with particular gendered natural landscapes. Despite the fact that women in many areas of the country are in charge of feeding their families, they hardly ever own, control, or have access to a resource base and almost never participate in its management. Traditional gender power dynamics have been reinforced as a result of state action to "improve things."
Maps of territories and classification of people and land have been used by colonial and post-colonial nation states to manage and regulate occupational groups' access to natural resources. The variety of possible livelihood options for mobile groups is substantially reduced by attempts to confine them to fixed or sedentary occupations and places. In both pre- and post-independence India, the State appropriated resources that belonged to common property, making these communities even more marginalised. Having a sustainable resource base is essential for the survival of these communities because women in the majority of them are the ones who provide food for their families.
Summary
52 percent of men and only 25 percent of women reported being employed in 2001, according to the census. However, compared to nearly 80% of women employees, just 58% of male workers were employed in agriculture. As males go to non-farm jobs, leaving women to carry out agricultural work, this confirms the conclusion that there is a process of feminization in agriculture. Women, however, are very vulnerable because they do not have ownership or control over landed resources. Furthermore, because most of the work done by women is considered as an extension of their reproductive roles, official records do not accurately reflect the full scope of women's economic participation. Although employment guarantee programmes and traditional top-down income production strategies have helped integrate women into the labour field, they have not resulted in their upward mobility in terms of income, as they also limit women to low-skilled, undervalued work. Women's poverty and exclusion are directly correlated with gender inequality when it comes to land and other productive resources, according to a 2013 UN Women book titled Realizing Women's Rights to Land and Other Productive Resources. In order for women, especially those from rural and marginalised groups, to have equal rights to livelihood and to challenge power dynamics in their homes and communities, there is a need to grant them equitable access to a sustainable resource base.
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