Abstract
This article analyzes the intersection of psychology with global development policy and practice, reviewing how gender as a concept is negotiated and understood amongst men and women in rural Malawi. We argue that gender, considered from a psychological perspective, has been narrowed down to meet the standards of global policy actors. By empowering individuals to “self-actualize,” policy implementers expect social and economic spin-off effects such as lower birth rates, higher education levels, and poverty reduction. The focus on individuals acts to obscure the broader structural power inequities, is especially prevalent in rural Malawi. To explain this, we use Haslam’s idea of “concept creep,” on how psychological concepts tend to affect other institutional traditions. The everyday understandings of gendered life described here show how gender is a fluid concept that shifts according to cultural, social, and ideological norms.
Psychological expertise is increasingly integrated in the global development context (Howell, 2011). This psychosocial paradigm shift is generally said to have originated in the 1990s (De Vos, 2012), motivated by what Pupavac (2004) calls the “crisis of legitimacy” in humanitarian aid and what Fassin (2008) characterizes as “the politics of suffering” in recognition of mental health issues such as PTSD in conflict areas.
The global aid sector was criticized for disrupting local economies and firing up conflicts in the regions where it operated, resulting in the demoralization of humanitarian organizations. Aid agencies were encouraged “to adopt psychosocial work” and to “bring back the human in the face of the bureaucratization of aid, foregrounding how people and communities personally experience disaster or conflict” (Pupavac, 2004, pp. 496–497). Since the 1990s, development donors and aid agencies have promoted the turn to “psychosocial programs” (Pupavac, 2004, p. 496), as reflected in a greater psychosocial focus on individual behavior (Howell, 2011). The incorporation of psychological concepts such as “agency,” “empowerment,” “behavioral change,” “resilience,” “self-efficacy,” and “self-actualization” is evident in development policy and practice (De Vos, 2011; Klein & Ballon, 2018; Pupavac, 2004). The year 2015 marked a historic milestone in the recognition of mental health: the annual World Development Report of the World Bank had a specific focus on “Mind, Society and Behavior,” and both the UN Sendai Framework and the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) included mental health and well-being in their strategic plans (Izutsu et al., 2015). Psychological concepts and practices have come to play a key role in the construction and implementation of global development policies. However, the current embrace of psychological discourses and expertise within the field of development disciplines “remains largely undefined, untheorized and unproblematized” (Klein & Mills, 2017, p. 1991). This article focuses on how gender, here understood mainly as a psychological concept, pervades the global development discourse and is transferred, reconstructed, and manifested on local levels in rural Malawi, in sub-Saharan Africa. Gender is increasingly recognized as entailing multiple power relations; this approach has—unsurprisingly, “given the highly individualistic focus of psychology as a field” (Stewart, 2004, p. 522)—been little explored.
Here we note Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG5): to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls as a main tool for eradicating global inequity. In Malawi, with its high rates of gender-based violence, child marriages, unintended teenage pregnancies, and girls dropping out of school, this policy is especially campaigned in its developmental context (Ministry of Gender, Children, Disability and Social Welfare, 2013).
Background
In September 2000, world leaders came together at the United Nations Millennium Summit Conference in New York with the wide-ranging vision of, among other goals, providing worldwide education and ending global poverty by 2015. The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were derived from this campaign, all targeting different international development agendas. In announcing MDG3, gender equality and the empowerment of women became a top-priority development objective. This approach was nothing new as such: the “gender turn” had been employed by global development actors since the 1970s (Jackson & Pearson, 2005). However, the “Smart Economics” of the late 1990s intensified the joint effects of pairing gender equality with economic development (Chant & Sweetman, 2012). In the wake of the MDG3 agenda, international, state, and non-state organizations followed up by passing various motions supporting the approach (Chaaban & Cunningham, 2011; Temin & Levine, 2009). A new discursive field promoting agency, self-efficacy, and individual freedom emerged (Hickel, 2014). In 2009, the US-based Center for Global Development (Temin & Levine, 2009) issued the report “Start with a Girl: A New Agenda for Global Health,” urging donors and civil society organizations to scale up their work on addressing girls’ well-being—which, it was assumed, would serve to accelerate economic and social development. Declarations like “Women and girls are one of the world’s greatest untapped resources and a terrific return on investment” (Quinn, 2010, para. 13) and “Help empower women around the world to reach their full potential” (“Women’s empowerment,” 2017, para. 1) came to dominate the development discourse (Hickel, 2014; Switzer, Bent, & Endsley, 2016). In 2015, following up the MDGs, the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; United Nations, 2019), ensuring the previous strategy and adding a more ambitious, integrated, and extended list of goals and sub-targets. With SDG5, “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls,” the agenda further established the next 15 years of global focus on women and gender in development discourse and implementation. Many international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) adopted programs specifically focused on women and girls (“Because I am a girl,” 2017; Our story, 2018; Save the Children, 2019).
Several international organizations maintain that empowering women in the Global South is necessary to eradicate global poverty (Chaaban & Cunningham, 2011; UNICEF, 2015). However, critics, opposing the discontinuity between vision and ideology, fear that this approach ignores the structural drivers of poverty, such as poor public services, lack of infrastructure, “debt, tax evasion, labor exploitation, financial crisis and corruption in the global governance system” (Hickel, 2014, p. 1356), and ignores the social, political, and economic rights of women and girls (Chant & Sweetman, 2012). Klein (2016) maintains that hollow slogans like “gender equality” and “empowerment” obscure the power processes of neoliberalism and colonialism. Further, Boyd (2016, p. 150) argues: “‘gender equality’ is being discursively instrumentalized as an expedient for development and together, re-instrumentalized as an alibi for economic growth”. By turning the women of the Global South into “entrepreneurial subjects” (Koffman & Gill, 2013, p. 89), development agencies and NGOs hope they will serve as catalysts for economic growth (Calkin, 2016; Hickel, 2014), seeing them as the “means to development rather than as ends in and of themselves” (Moeller, 2014, p. 577). However, there have been few studies on how psychological expertise and concepts are applied in the field of global development (Klein & Mills, 2017). Further, although scholars and civil society organizations have questioned the discourse of “gender equality” and “empowerment” in the context of the global policy framework, they have “usually stopped short of reflection on how these concepts have acquired their meanings” (Cornwall & Rivas, 2015, p. 399). In this study, we aim to improve this situation by focusing on psychological conceptions of gender, seeing empowerment as a tool to achieve gender equality.
The Malawian context
Malawi is one of the world’s poorest countries. With more than 60% of its total health expenditure financed by donor aid (Chansa & Pattnaik, 2018) and a high presence of international NGOs, it has been called a “donor darling” (Koch, 2007, p. 1) and has experienced “NGO-mania” (Kloster, 2015). These organizations contextualize and display global development policies such as the SDG5 through campaigns, conferences, interventions, and the mass media. Impoverished rural Malawi provides an environment where many of these policies are carried out. This context also offers a setting that helps explain how psychological concepts such as gender permeate broader development objectives, and how the concept is understood and contextualized locally.
Most of the participants in this study of two rural Malawian communities are of the ethnic Yao group, mainly Muslim, and living in the south of Malawi; some are a mix of Chewa, Ngoni, and Lomwe, generally adhering to Christianity. Yao communities follow a matrilineal marriage system, traditional in the southern regions, where rights to property are secured by daughters inheriting their mothers’ land (Kishindo, 2004). Upon marriage, men move to the natal villages of their wives; in case of divorce, they are the ones who move, leaving the land and property to their wives (Verheijen, 2013). Nevertheless, as women are traditionally excluded from the labor market, they do the unpaid domestic work and thus have to rely on men for economic support (Verheijen, 2013).
On the national level, “gender equality” is established within the state constitution and “women’s empowerment” is institutionalized. The Ministry of Gender, Children, Disability and Social Welfare (2013), as well as key funders, international NGOs, and the mass media all stress “empowerment” as imperative for enabling women and girls to get an education, engage in family planning, acquire agency, and achieve independence (Ministry of Gender, Children, Disability and Social Welfare, 2013). In the Chichewa language, gender is translated as “not differentiating between men and women at work.” And as Riley and Dodson (2016, p. 1050) point out, the term gender has developed “as a ChiChewa word in its own right, even appearing in a dictionary as ‘jenda’ with an annotation that it is originally an English word”, translated as “gender equality.” Thus, in Malawi gender is constructed as a practice people do to reduce gender inequity. 1
Theoretical tool: Concept creep
Haslam (2016, p. 2) offers a useful framework—concept creep—for explaining the semantic changes that several psychological concepts have undergone, involving both vertical and horizontal expansions, where the altered meanings have “looping effects on how people make sense of themselves personally and collectively”. In this process, concepts continue to refer to the original phenomena while they, quantitatively and qualitatively, are expanded to include a new range of additional phenomena. Based on Haslam’s theoretical framework, we discuss gender as an instance of concept creep. The elastic meanings of gender as presented in this article may be understood as expanding, both vertically and horizontally, and include looping effects on individuals’ self-understanding in the societal contexts where the concept is introduced.
Methods
Data collection for this study was conducted by the first author together with a research assistant, here referred to as “Mercy.” Mercy has extensive research experience, and speaks both Chiyao and Chichewa, the major languages in the area. The fieldwork, conducted in the rural south of Malawi between April and August 2017, was based on informal interviews, focus group discussions (FGDs), and in-depth interviews with villagers. The normal ethical standards were followed: we acquired research permits, informed consent from participants, and maintained participants’ anonymity.
Setting
The research site is a rural agricultural area with two neighboring villages. The district was selected and approved in collaboration with the local authorities, chosen on the basis of certain criteria: a mixed ethnic population, economic hardship, poor infrastructure, low school enrollment, high level of school drop-outs, early marriage, and unplanned teenage pregnancies (Population Reference Bureau, 2014)—all targeted by NGOs conducting gender-equality programs and interventions. Members of the community were informed of the research project by the village chiefs.
Participants
Most participants were from the Yao ethnic group; the remainder were a mix of Chewa, Ngoni, and Lomwe. Ages ranged from 18 to above 50: this allowed for political and societal changes such as law reforms, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, governmental and NGO interventions, to be seen through different life contexts. Participants live primarily off income from farming, small businesses, and piecework; households are large, with four to eight children; nine out of ten households cook over fires, and only 5% have access to electricity (Hivos People Unlimited, 2009). Most of our informants had never enrolled in primary school, or had dropped out. Further, most of them reported that they suffered from high levels of poverty and struggled to cover their basic needs—food, medicine, clothing, and school fees.
Data collection
Informal interviews, FGDs, and in-depth interviews were chosen, as these methods are generative for studying people’s experiences and understandings of social phenomena within a given cultural context (Mason, 2002). In total, 34 informal interviews, 5 FGDs, and 6 in-depth interviews were conducted. For 14 weeks prior to the arrival of the first author, Mercy paid daily visits to the villages: this gave the community a chance to get informed and develop an understanding of us and the project. Mercy’s interaction in everyday talks and tasks helped to create mutual trust between us and the communities, enabling us to work within the local context. We also hoped that this would lessen the possibility of our objectives being confused with the work of NGOs in the area. As each household was involved, the 34 informal interviews created a data foundation that informed us about a population who were led by the same chief and were targeted by the same NGOs. Because the NGOs’ “gender equality” programs primarily target women and girls, the first author and Mercy agreed to focus on contacting female community members. Of the 34 informal interviews, 24 were conducted with women. These interviews were organic, intuitive, and dependent on aspects such as the availability and willingness of community members. Often Mercy helped out with daily duties while chatting about their everyday lives: there was no specific time structure. The intention was to engage with and acknowledge all households, and to build a sample based on informants who might later be interested in elaborating and sharing experiences and thoughts in dialogue with us. Participants were asked to participate in FGDs based on information from the informal interviews and previous discussions with Mercy on topics that included experiences with development, gender, empowerment, NGOs, marriage, divorce, schooling, and dropping out of school. None of these topics or terms were explained or defined by us in advance.
The FGDs, as well as the informal and in-depth interviews, were guided by questions such as “what is development,” “how do you understand gender,” “is gender something you do or something you have,” “can you explain the word empowerment,” and “do you follow cultural practices.” Here, “empowerment” and “cultural practices” served to trigger discussions on gender, as these topics are widely used in NGO interventions; however, they are not the object for analysis as such in this article. The FGDs were composed of male and female adults and young adults gathered separately. This dynamic was selected in order to encompass the nuances in individual experiences and understandings of gender and generations. The dividing of gender and age presumably reduced potential hierarchy effects between young adults and middle-aged men and women. Before starting the FGDs, we introduced the research project and ourselves. Participants joined voluntarily, and all were informed about the nature of the study, after which, they signed a consent form. We conducted two mixed-gender FGDs with young adults—three men and three women. The two women-only FGDs involved four and six participants; and one FGD was conducted with five men. Next, participants from each focus group were invited to take part in in-depth interviews, based on their experience and interest in the topics discussed. The six in-depth interviews involved three men and three women. All FGDs and in-depth interviews were scheduled in advance and were held in the local community building; all lasted between 30 and 60 minutes, and were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim in English. In the interviews and FGDs, the first author asked questions in English. These were translated into Chichewa and/or Chiyao by Mercy, who then wrote down the participants’ replies. These were immediately translated into English for the first author, who then asked follow-up questions in English.
Analysis
We conducted a “theoretical” thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). This method is both theoretically flexible and suited for research on under-studied topics such as local people’s conceptions of the gendered development discourse and its impact on the social and relational context in their communities. Because of language and cultural differences, we found that this approach allowed us to code the material for explicit research questions such as “how do gender interventions change local perceptions and/or behaviour?” using a semantic level that centered on the broader meanings of the themes. The FGDs were situated in a context in which the participants had shared experiences of everyday life, so there was little variation in the level of reciprocal understanding about the themes. For example, most participants explained gender in noticeably similar ways and spoke of similar experiences regarding the impact of gender.
After thorough and repeated readings of the transcripts, all material was coded into NVivo 11 and organized under thematic titles. Relevant excerpts were gathered under titles and sub-titles, and central themes (such as “the role of men/women,” “doing/not doing gender”) were identified and conceptualized. This thematic ranking was further moderated and reduced, to sharpen the focus. In the analysis below, we illustrate the themes with representative statements made by participants, to indicate the broader reoccurring patterns in the material. Pseudonyms are used for the names of quoted participants.
Patterns and themes
Generally, participants agreed that gender is part of development introduced by various international and national NGOs implementing programs in the villages. Most participants saw the shift to gender as related to work and daily practices previously tied to separate gendered roles, such as construction work, farming, cooking, washing, and cleaning. Of the initial 34 informal interviews, 30 generally defined gender as being a man and woman working together in activities like construction, farming, digging, cooking, and childcare. This understanding of gender was further confirmed in the FGDs and in-depth interviews. This quote from Ernest illustrates the gender message NGOs communicate to the village members: “Most of them say there should be no difference between men’s work and women’s work.” Thus, gender could be understood as “not differentiating between men and women at work” and the Chichewan “jenda” translated as “gender equality.”
Five recurrent themes and negotiations were identified: men and “nowadays there is gender”; women and gender nowadays; doing/not doing gender; “there is no gender in this village”; and gender and witchcraft.” These themes capture the complex, contextual, and sometimes conflicting ideas about what gender can represent in everyday life in rural Malawi. However, these constructions of gender also illuminate and challenge the wider gender discourse outside rural Malawi which sees gender as universal, general, and individual. We hold that gender has undergone what Haslam (2016) calls “concept creep.” Using accounts from village participants, we will show how gender has expanded horizontally and vertically, with qualitatively and quantitatively changed meanings of gender.
Men and “nowadays there is gender”
Although the vast majority of participants felt good about the concept of gender, indicating that it made life better, opinions varied as to whether and to what extent gender works. The following quotes show how male participants perceived gender as communicated by NGOs: Blessings: When NGOs come with some work in the village they speak of gender, saying that nowadays there is gender so let us all participate in this, or let’s work together, men and women—so we started to understand. Happy: Maybe men were selfish, thinking “a woman cannot do this while I can,” but the NGOs they have helped us to start to understand what gender is. We can say that it starts from the high level, and then comes to the low level, because it has come from you people [the first author/Mercy].
These men mention the encouragement from NGOs when bringing gender to the villages as being something new. Further, “the high level” and “you people” refers to the first author and Mercy, a white woman and an English-speaking Malawian woman. This notion stresses the characteristics of gender as coming from people who are different from them. In addition, gender is made to mean something that can be understood with help from others from outside the villages. Not doing gender is seen as egoistic—and it can be argued that selfishness is opposed to the African cosmological and philosophical principle of Ubuntu (Ashforth, 2005a; Gade, 2011; Holdstock, 2013; Venter, 2004). Ubuntu implies “a person is a person through other people” (Ashforth, 2005b, p. 85); the Malawian uMunthu is defined by Bandawe (2010) as, “I am because you are, and because you are, therefore I am” (p. 19). Further, “If a person acts selfish, rough and cruel he is said to possess bad spirits” (Layman, 2002, p. 30). Selfishness is culturally rejected as something disturbing and disruptive (Lwanda, 2004). To think of oneself first, and not think of others, finds scant approval in a culture where people, often due to poverty, must depend on the compassion and generosity of others (Swidler, 2013). These men see gender more as a perspective, a principle, a practice, and a way of living, desirable also for its moral aspects. Consequently, gender can be conceived as a method that can be thought and learned.
Women and gender nowadays
Women see gender as something extraneous and new, which they highlight with concrete examples of how gender has been opening up new ways of dealing with the mundane tasks of everyday life.
If you see a man going to fetch water or if the women are talking about themselves they say, “there is gender nowadays.”
Look at those women cutting down a tree—that is gender. Felling trees used to be work for men, but now even women can do it.
In the past, there was some work that was especially for women, and some work for men—but when gender came, that’s when we started working together.
Changes in the division of labor have shown these women that daily practices that used to be only for women/only for men have, with the onset of gender, become shared work that both men and women can do. Gender came, opening up new ways of living that these women appreciate.
Similarly, in one focus group:
What is the best thing about gender?
It helps you to know what you are doing and also where you are. Best of all, when you don’t have money you can know that “ok I can do this on my own without paying [a man] to do it.”
it [gender] is everywhere all over the world. Now people are realizing “oh! This is not only for men, we can do it, too,” and so it is everywhere.
Other people think that some jobs are for men only, but that’s not true, they are for both men and women. Building a bathroom, for example—if we get divorced we can do things like that on our own.
Women speak of gender as something we can be made aware of and can understand. They point out how “doing gender” makes them less vulnerable and more independent. This newfound agency is appreciated as being empowering and liberating.
Thus, according to these women, gender seems to have the intended effect of gender equality that policymakers and NGOs promote. On the whole, the general impression was that gender makes life easier.
Doing and not doing gender
According to West and Zimmerman (1987) gender is not something we are or have, but something we decide to do, repeatedly, again and again on an everyday basis. This in turn gives rise to the question, “can we ever not do gender?” (West & Zimmerman, 1987, p. 137).
In these villages, the concept of gender is in line with West and Zimmerman’s (1987) view of being something we do.
We have gender in the village, we do work together with women.
Even at school, they always put [pupils] together a boy and a girl, saying that “it is gender, you need to be doing gender.”
You can even see men pounding maize meal like women do, so that’s part of gender.
These statements illustrate the broad consensus among participants that gender is something one “does” that involves sharing responsibilities and work. Gender is for everyone, and can be “done” together. In other words, in these villages, gender is not seen as something we “do” alone, but is negotiated as a collective activity to benefit collective goods, such as time- and money-saving practices, help, care, and support with child raising. However, gender is also mentioned as something that is not done. Happy, a young male focus group participant, explains how gender is not done: Like here at the village, normally [NGOs] focus on girls only, not the boys. [The boys] don’t get jealous, they just accept that is what the NGOs have decided. That is not part of gender, had it really been gender it could have been helping both men and women.
NGOs play a major role in the communication of global and national development policies. Women’s equality, education for girls, and gender mainstreaming has long been a primary goal of the government and many international and national NGOs in Malawi. In the pursuit of gender equality, their interventions have often focused solely on women and girls, as highlighted in the quote above. Our participants see gender as a value that is supposed to benefit everyone, but, as Happy notes, the one-sided focus on girls “is not part of gender.” He sees gender as a common interest, so excluding the one sex is “not gender.” What he notes is the discrepancy between what NGOs say, promoting gender, and what NGOs actually do, focusing only on girls. Policy implementers and NGOs contradict themselves and create ambiguous meanings of what gender involves, by constructing gender categories that constrain and reinforce the unequal dichotomy they were designed to open up.
Failing to “do gender”
Men and women alike see gender and “doing gender” as benefitting both sexes. However, the greater focus on girls and school attendance may end up having negative effects on girls’ self-esteem and their perceptions of themselves.
Fredah: Mostly [NGOs] want [girls] to continue their studies so that they shouldn’t get pregnant quickly, that’s why they focus a lot on the girls.
Fredah went on to explain that women alone are seen as being responsible for their pregnancies, and many female participants report being deserted by their husbands and left with full responsibility for their children. When schoolgirls become pregnant, it often results in their dropping out of school in order to care for their child.
Gladys, a 19-year-old schoolgirl, further elaborates on why this is problematic: [Girls] feel they tried and failed . . . they get pregnant, and maybe sometimes they might just lack some food, sometimes they lack soap or body lotion and then they decide to drop out. They just stay in the village. It’s the woman who has a problem, she’s the one carrying the baby, while the man is just free, he does not have to do anything. Maybe that’s why boys go to school but girls don’t.
Participants speak of dropping out of school as signifying failure; “just staying” is a common expression amongst youth referring to their inability to get on with their lives (Classen, 2013). Mary, a 25-year-old single mother, describes this existential dilemma: I’d always been a good girl, very quiet, and had turned 25 without having a boyfriend. This was my first one. He just got me pregnant, ignored the responsibility. Because of the pregnancy, I was very weak and tired and failed to help my mother with selling her donuts at the market, so I did not have any success last year.
In the above excerpts, the obligations connected to gender cause a quandary. Because of governmental and NGO incentives, with their strong focus on keeping girls in school, becoming pregnant and dropping out are associated with failure. Informants report that there is now a law: if a girl gets pregnant and drops out, she or the parents will have to pay a fine to the village chief or local police. In a society where assets and money are scarce, a fine not only signals misconduct, it also has direct economic implications. With the pressure from society and various NGOs, the individual agency and behavior of girls become everybody’s business. Additionally, with this focus, NGOs implicitly communicate that girls are responsible and accountable for their reproductive behavior. Thus, contradictory to the greater equality that gender interventions are intended to foster, girls who drop out of school may not only face a fine, but also be left with the stigma of failure. Moreover, this one-sided way of assigning gendered responsibilities like pregnancies onto women and girls legitimizes the irresponsible behavior of the men who abandon them with the sole responsibility of child-rearing. Accordingly, though “doing gender” is conceptualized as sharing duties, also linked to domestic chores, the unequal load of responsibility in terms of pregnancies and parenthood seem to benefit men’s individual freedom. Consequently, while men who fail to “do gender” face less responsibility, the absence of gender penalizes women.
“There is no gender in this village”
The previous section noted the dos and don’ts of gender. What, then, of the absence of gender? All focus groups stated that there was gender in the villages; however, in individual interviews, several women said there was “no gender” in their communities. This absence was explained in terms of the gendered division of labor, and lack of mutual respect and responsibility between the sexes in domestic work. As Elisa, a middle-aged woman, put it, “There is no gender in the village because there are specific jobs for women and for men.”
When gender is perceived as something that one must “do” repeatedly in order to maintain and regulate the balance between the sexes, it is not difficult to understand the widely shared perception among participants that gender would disappear if they “stopped doing it”—if they stopped sharing work and responsibilities, gender would also stop. Naile explains: There is no gender in this community. If you get sick, it’s usually your neighbor who takes care of you. The men just sleep—you can work together in the field, but when you come home they just look at you while you do the cooking. When a woman is sick, the men often run away, but if the husband is sick his wife is the one who takes care of him.
Here, Naile relates an experience familiar to many women: even when they fall ill, their husbands count on them to manage the household. She also notes the solidarity among women, where neighboring women help out. Naile concludes that the existence of gender cannot be explained by the presence of a few specific practices, such as allowing women access to arenas previously unavailable to them. If gender really existed, men would help their wives with the cooking after working in the field together and would show compassion when they are unwell.
Lindiwe, a newly divorced mother of three, says she did not “have gender” in her marriage, and she sheds light on the patriarchal structure that constitutes life for many Malawian women: Most of the men they just wake up and then sit down, without caring that maybe they have some kids, they just wake up and then maybe go to play Bawo-game, and then come back without thinking of their responsibilities.
Here, Lindiwe refers to how men do not feel responsibility for their children—a point made by many female participants—and to the gendered inequity many women experience with regard to household work. “Bawo” is a board game popular among both men and women in East Africa; thus, the imbalance she describes is the equation of free time versus responsibility and domestic work. Contradictory to the idea of gender as a method that focuses solely on the inclusion of women, we found wide agreement among participants that gender is connected to the inclusion or exclusion of women and men in work, household, responsibilities, etc. However, there is some dissonance in how men and women perceive the private and the official gender. Men talk of gender as a good that they themselves and the community as a whole benefit from, and they say they realize that they can “help” in the household if the woman is away or if she is ill. Women also talk of gender as something good: but they acknowledge the lack of gender in the private sphere. They agree that women are now allowed, even welcomed, to do “men’s work,” and that women’s inclusion in labor reduces work hours and streamlines productivity—but women are still responsible for the majority of domestic work. More porous gender roles enable shared work outside the household, but do not seem to apply to domestic work. On the whole, then, gender appears to benefit men more than women. This is a highly relevant point, as global gender-equality policies and NGO gender-promoting programs are designed to foster women’s participation by reducing gendered practices.
Gender and witchcraft
In Malawi, as in many other African countries and cultures, many people believe in Ufiti, often translated as “witchcraft” (Holdstock, 2013; Leistner, 2014) or “sorcery” (Mbiti, 1990; Murrey, 2017). Witchcraft and “the sense of insecurity the term indicates permeates virtually every aspect of life” (Ashforth, 2018, p. 365). From birth to death, life is defined and confined by the permanent threat of spiritual insecurity, and the fear of witchcraft attacks compels people to take a whole range of precautions (Ashforth, 2005b). The Association for Secular Humanism, a Malawian NGO, defines witchcraft-related violence as “behavior that is intended to hurt or kill another person. Violence need not be physical. It may be economic, social, psychological or sexual” (Chilimampunga & Thindwa, 2012, p. 8). Witchcraft has actual and critical consequences for people, and considerable time and effort go into circumventing witchcraft and protecting oneself from it (Mgbako & Glenn, 2011).
Several participants told us how traditional love potions and witchcraft explain why men do not help out with domestic chores. Many women regard the use of love potions as a justifiable way of getting their men to remain faithful and fulfill their role as fathers and husbands; men, however, often see this as a harmful act of witchcraft that violates their free will (Ashforth, 2018).
Here, there is not gender like 100%. If people see a man doing the washing, [neighbors] would think that maybe the woman used some magical charms to get him to do it. But if the woman is away, then he can do the washing, because [neighbors] would understand that his wife was not there.
Other people [neighbors] can think that maybe you’ve used some love potion, to get your own husband to help you in the house.
These excerpts refer to the use of traditional love potions, generally said to be used to manipulate people to get them to perform various acts. The reasoning is that men can do women’s work only under the influence of love medicines or if the woman is not around. The woman’s role is to take care of the household; when a man takes part in daily housework, he is “helping out” or helping himself, rather than actually sharing the responsibility.
There are many ways to protect oneself from acts of witchcraft, but there are also many ways in which this protection can be broken. Sylvia explains how daily practices can be apportioned between the sexes in order to avoid witchcraft: Only farming, they [men and women] could farm together—but washing and cooking, no, they [men] say that is why they married you, so that you can manage the home. And otherwise, people believe that a man should not touch a cooking stick, because that would stop any protection he might have against [witchcraft attack] . . . the cooking stick washes it away. Also, if [neighbors] see your husband doing that, they think that you have used traditional medicine to get him to do household chores.
Sylvia points to the “organization” of marriage, how men expect their wives to do the household work. Further, she describes breaking gender norms as colliding and conflicting with witchcraft. Many everyday practices are related to protection from witchcraft attacks: where this belief is practiced, men are not supposed to do the cooking because of the impending threat of witchcraft spells. That means that if a woman gets her husband to help with cooking, she can be blamed for using love medicine on him, or for trying to get him to ruin his protection against witchcraft.
Discussion
In their article on gender and development discourses in relation to food security in urban Malawi, Riley and Dodson (2016) hold that discourses of gender illustrate how interventions aimed at fostering gender equality are inescapably intertwined with contextual knowledge. They maintain that the conception of “gender, including its spatial connotations as something exogenous to Malawi and specifically associated with urban life” (Riley & Dodson, 2016, p. 1057), derives from a mixture of colonial/postcolonial gender constructions, and today’s global discourses of gender equality and human rights. Similar to our study, Riley and Dodson’s participants report gender as being a new phenomenon that has come from the outside. For the majority, it brings positive social change, in which the rigid divisions between male and female duties and daily activities are relaxed somewhat. However, while men speak positively about greater gender egalitarianism in the public sphere, women note the reversion to traditional gender roles in the private sphere. Interestingly, Riley and Dodson’s urban participants mention that lack of education and backwardness in rural villages might result in suspicions of men who perform female duties because of “love medicines.”
Although the findings of our study share similarities with Riley and Dodson’s (2016) urban research, the main differences remain important. Among their participants there was broad consensus on gender as a progressive civilized urban phenomenon linked to educational level, and thus assumed to be less prevalent in rural societies. However, the participants in our rural study report “doing gender” as part of everyday village life. Thus, it would appear, the meaning-making of gendered life is—if not directly, at least indirectly and abstractly—constitutive of people’s lives, also in rural Malawi.
For reporting on the occurrence and extent of gender equality, “gender accounting” (Classen, 2013, p. 226) is an effective measure that reduces the complexity of “gender equality” to an individual level that is countable and reportable (see also Shore & Wright, 2015). This method quantifies by simplifying “gender parameters” in a way that disregards the circumstantially defined strategies that men and women use to navigate a fundamentally unequal society. Such context-specific and often creative approaches to “gender inequality” are therefore missed because of ignorance or lack of contextual understanding (Classen, 2013). Data from our fieldwork support this insight: our analysis shows how gender is variously constructed to fit the context of these rural villages.
The rural Malawian practice of gender is positioned in the midst of a complex and dynamic process highly imbricated in historical, geographical, cultural, economic, and ideological contexts in which global, societal, and individual development is central. The complex characteristics of gender make interpretation and understanding of the concept circumstantial, creative, and sometimes contradictory, as seen in the various interviews and focus groups. In many ways the local use of gender exceeds the narrow account practiced by the state and NGOs operating in the villages.
Drawing on Haslam’s (2016) theoretical account and our own analysis, we argue that the academic concept of gender has undergone a concept creep. Within the interrelationship of psychology, development theory and practice, and societal change, gender has expanded, vertically and horizontally, into new contexts, with looping effects on how individuals in rural Malawian villages “make sense of themselves personally and collectively” (Haslam, 2016, p. 2). Further, with regard to Haslam’s (2016) framework, we contend that, even though gender per se is not seen as a particularly negative concept, this “concept creep” may indicate how and why the alteration of gender may entail negative effects.
Referring to the human rights movements that target inequality with regard to women and minorities, Haslam (2016) maintains that “concept creep” may be connected to broader cultural and societal shifts. Our study participants in rural Malawi note that gender came to their villages not long ago. This leads back to global development changes in general, and societal changes in Malawi more specifically. During Kamuzu Banda’s more than 30 years of one-party rule, foreign organizations were basically not allowed to operate within the country. It was only with the end of his dictatorship in 1994 that Malawi opened its borders to international organizations (Thornton, Pierotti, Young-DeMarco, & Watkins, 2014), mainly for assistance with the rampant HIV epidemic; the number of operating NGOs has grown since then (Morfit, 2011). In Malawi’s new democratic constitution, social, cultural, and economic rights were included under the “right to development”; and the “right to gender equality” was declared an explicit principle, recognized in several international treaties (Riley & Dodson, 2016). This was probably also a result of the mainstreaming of the “gender and development” movement in the 1990s in which global development policy and practice promoted “gender equality” as the new paradigm (Hickel, 2014). Gender came to Malawi and these villages due to societal changes; and, as the concept trickled down from the global to the national and local levels, its meaning changed—now referring both to the legal right to “gender equality,” and to social ideas of how men and women could benefit by practicing it.
The most prominent conceptual change of gender has been horizontal. While gender has kept its original academic definition, the concept has spread horizontally from the psychological definition concerning gendered individuals, to the focus in development theory and policy on women’s inclusion, and to the Chichewan concept of not differentiating between men and women at work, referring to a specific “doing” in a specific place.
Gender as promoted by foreign and national NGOs in Malawi has been applied in a new context, as confirmed by our participants. They experience gender as a new way of living that has come mainly through the arrival of NGOs, and from people who are different from them. Gender is seen as something that enables men and women to share work and responsibility, and which pays off in collective goods like time-efficiency and saving money. With this qualitative stretch, gender has come to be associated with normative concepts such as “moral,” “responsibility,” and “agency,” in turn connoting managerial concepts of “time,” “money,” “efficiency,” and the like. We found that gender is regarded as a perspective, principle, practice, a way of living—not as an inherent, dichotomous human category. Unlike the original psychological concept, gender is here intuitively understood as a collective incentive.
The individualistic–collectivistic contrast is also evident in the vertical extension. Most of our study participants felt positively about gender and its “effects.” Men generally appreciated the time-efficiency aspect, as did women, who also valued their newfound agency. However, the instrumental ways in which NGOs teach gender sometimes create ambiguous understandings, leading to contradictory consequences. In the villages, it is commonly said that gender now allows women into areas of work previously restricted to men—but women still bear the burden of most household work. With the inclusion of women, gender streamlines work previously done exclusively by men, meaning that women spend more time working, and men less. This is not specific to rural Malawi: around the world, most unpaid domestic labor is still done by women, reflecting both what is defined as “work” and their inferior social position. That is indeed the opposite of what NGOs argue they intend to achieve by promoting “gender equality.” Further, unlike development theory and practice, where gender is seen as being closely related to the mainstreaming of “gender equality” and the inclusion of women, our rural Malawian participants understand gender as involving both sexes. When gender is regarded as a means to reach a common goal, the exclusion of either sex may be perceived as a lack of gender. The one-sided NGO focus on women may, instead of promoting “gender equality,” lead to not practicing gender, as seen by the local population. “Not doing gender” is connected to irresponsible and selfish behavior, as generally stated by female participants with reference to men. This way of understanding gender extends the NGOs’ narrow implementation of it, with new approaches to what men and women can do and expect from each other and from society. In FGDs in our study, both men and women expressed notions of gender egalitarianism, but privately, women stressed continued adherence to traditional gender roles. This might be explained by the wish to provide socially acceptable answers in line with development discourses. Also, as indicated in the analysis, not “doing gender” is regarded as egoistic, in turn making it difficult to accuse others openly of this. We see this as an example of vertical expansion, where NGO interventions result in indefinite and less stringent perceptions of what gender may or may not represent.
With the global policy pressure from world organizations and donors, NGOs commit to achieve “gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls.” This pressure is placed on individual women and especially on girls, to not become pregnant, to graduate from school, and to escape structural poverty. The individual behavior and agency of girls becomes a common interest. The heavy focus on school attendance is further extended on the local level, where participants report that girls who drop out of school must pay a fine to the local police, signaling their sole responsibility for such “misconduct.” However, in a society where poverty is prevalent, with inefficient infrastructure and little access to electricity and other amenities, dropping out of school is often not a personal choice but a consequence of cultural, social, and economic problems. Girls who drop out “fail” to meet certain standards. Contradictory to “gender equality,” these girls now face increased inequity, associated with their own individual behavior. Additionally, while the one-sided focus on girls’ reproductive behavior implicitly furthers the idea of pregnancy as being the girl’s responsibility, the bias in a way simultaneously rewards men who do not “do gender” by deserting their responsibility as fathers. Consequently, the individual focus on gender may indirectly justify male independence while assigning even more expectations and responsibility to women and girls already struggling to cope in a society permeated with inequity. The “doing” of gender also conflicts with cultural beliefs in witchcraft and traditional love medicine. As these components permeate almost every aspect of Malawian life, and as gender is connected to everyday life practices, gender will inevitably come into conflict with witchcraft and protection against witchcraft. Thus, “doing gender” is not only manifested in the mundane activities of ordinary life: it may also shed light on gendered differences connected to the supernatural aspects of life. Although the prevalence of witchcraft in Malawi and its harmful consequences have been thoroughly documented by many social anthropologists (see Ashforth, 2018; Englund, 2007), the village chief reported that none of the NGOs active in the communities we studied acknowledged witchcraft or tried to deal with it. Thus, in ignoring the well-documented fact that witchcraft is especially harmful for women and children (Mgbako & Glenn, 2011; Reis, 2013), these NGOs show their ignorance of local and contextual inequalities that further subordinate women and children.
According to Haslam (2016), the popularity of a concept may help to explain why it gains impact, creeps, and conquers new semantic fields. Concepts that appeal particularly to researchers and practitioners have a greater chance of spreading into new forms and contexts. Thus, the influence of psychology on adjacent disciplines and institutional practices may account for why gender, paired with concepts like empowerment, agency, and equality, has expanded rather than contracted. Further, definitions of concepts that describe humans and human activity are bound to be in constant change (Haslam, 2016). Gender, which is applicable to all humans in one way or another, may well be one of the most adopted, least stable, and most shifting concepts in operation. The wide range of scientific disciplines, international organizations, and development agencies that are involved in human activity, apply a range of interpretations of gender and gendered attributes into an infinite variety of places and spaces.
As researchers from Norway, one of the world’s most gender-equal societies, we find it imperative to reflect upon our own positionality when engaging in settings where structural inequality permeates all aspects of life. These fundamentally diverse backgrounds and experiences pose limitations on what and how we can attempt to understand about life in rural Malawi in general and gendered life in particular. Despite the risk of adopting a Western interpretative prerogative, we hope to be able to shed light on some of the issues that emerge when we talk of “others” and how the “others” may reflect our own taken-for-granted assumptions. This study has neither intended nor claimed to show how manhood and womanhood are understood in rural Malawi today: rather, we have sought to explain some of the contextual and non-universal characteristics of the “universal” concept of gender. Further ethnographical studies would enable a deeper description, fostering an understanding of the various ways in which gender is negotiated, and how individuals actually act in relation to gender.
Conclusion
Our analysis has shown how the idea of gender as collectively regulated in shared work and participation is far broader than the individual concept used in Western psychology. These portrayed constructions of gender and the account of “concept creep” regarding gender have relevance for the wider gender discourse beyond rural Malawi. Our participants’ ideas of gender show how something generally defined as inherent, individual, and universal may experience concept creep, shifting its meaning to refer to a method involving cooperation that in turn results in collective goods. In the Chichewa language, gender is in itself a collective idea, referring to shared work and responsibility. However, in Malawi, as throughout the world, women’s access to traditionally male-dominated spheres does not seem to lift the load of unpaid labor from their shoulders. Indeed, with gender-equality interventions centered on individual girls and women, the focus may entail backlash, with these girls and women being held responsible and accountable for their own education and reproductive behavior. Although the introduction of gender has brought some positive changes to these communities, its implementation has also had potentially negative implications for women—and that merits further investigation. Psychology as a discipline, and development policy and practice should critically review their inter-connectedness, acknowledging the non-universal and contextual characteristics of our social lives.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The first author would like to thank Sigrun Marie Moss, Sidsel Roalkvam, Maren Olene Kloster, and Hanneke Pot for reviewing and providing constructive comments and advice on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank colleagues at the Centre for Development and the Environment, SUM’s Research School and the Culture and Community Psychology Research Group for very useful comments.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was funded by the Norwegian Research Council (Grant No. 254947).
