“Nowadays there is gender ”: “Doing” global gender equality in rural Malawi

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.

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.

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.