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The CGD Podcast
"Empowering Women Benefits Everyone" – Susan Markham
00:20:08
An entire Global Goal has been dedicated to greater gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. The question now is how to achieve that goal. Susan Markham, USAID Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment,...
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
And welcome to this edition of the CGD podcast. I want to start with SDG number five today. Remember what that one is? It says, achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. By 2030, women make up half the workforce in any economy, sometimes a little more than that. Yet they still hold fewer assets and they earn less than men. Now we are beyond the why. There's growing evidence that income inequality can be tackled only when we address gender inequality. But the question now is how. To discuss this with me, I'm joined by Susan Markham, senior coordinator for gender equality and Women's empowerment at usaid. Susan, great to have you here. Thanks for coming in.
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A
Thank you for having me.
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B
So let's cut to the chase. What works in heading getting us towards children gender equality? What has USAID found to be effective?
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A
Well, we are working on a couple of fronts simultaneously. We have a new gender policy. It's about three years old. Now, obviously we've been working with women and gender issues for a very long time, but we have refocused our efforts on issues of gender and women's equality because we have found that our work is not as sustainable or as effective without addressing some of these issues, such as so with regard to gender and the goals of the policy. One in access to resources, there are often gaps between men and women and how they access resources in their daily lives. So if it's services provided by the government or access to bank accounts or credit, men and women access these resources differently. And so through usaid, we try to address those helping pass laws or implement policies. But also in the work that we do at usaid, if we're providing seeds or schooling, we want to make sure that men and women, boys and girls, can access these resources and really pay attention to if they aren't, why is that? And so we're looking at our programmings that way. We're addressing gender based violence. Gender based violence exists in every country where we work and live for usaid. And so it takes often different forms in different countries, whether it's in the workplace or in school or in the home. And so we once again look at how gender based violence affects the work of usaid. And certainly we try to avoid USAID programming exacerbating issues of gender based violence.
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B
Does it? Can it?
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A
It can. Certainly when we work to empower women, we are changing relationships between men and women, between husbands and wives, fathers and daughters. And that is very potentially a big difference in people's lives. Men feel if we are giving women skills, if we are Teaching them how to grow better crops. We are letting them have citizenship or the right to divorce. We are diminishing their power. And that can be a very volatile situation which leads to conflict or violence. So we are thinking through all of our programs now. How do we work with men? How do we work with the partners in these women's lives, whether it's their father or brothers or sons or their tribal or political leaders, for them to understand how empowering women benefits everyone in the community, how it makes their economy stronger, how it makes their schools more effective so that we don't just work with women in a vacuum anymore. We have to engage men in order to both prevent violence and then also to make sure it's not getting worse.
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B
It's very interesting that you bring that point up, because one of the reasons that CGD's program of work in this area is called gender development rather than women in development is that you're not going to achieve gender equality unless you get men on right.
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A
And it's also these gender roles. It's not the fact that women aren't smarter or don't have access to it. It's the roles that are created in societies about what is appropriate for girls and boys and women and girls to do on a daily basis. Should she be on the local council? Should she be able to say what happens when she earns a paycheck that's not a women's. It's how women and men interact with each other. I mean, a large issue is this. What does it. What does masculinity mean? What does it mean to be a good man? For some men, it's this issue that we have to protect our daughters. That's why you see child marriage. They think they are protecting their daughters from sexual abuse or from living in poverty. If we just marry her off to this other family, she'll be better. Because that's my role as a dad, is to do this. You know, my role is to be the breadwinner, you know, and so when his wife starts bringing income, he. He doesn't see it as great. There's more food on the table. He thinks it as, oh, my neighbors aren't going to think that I can provide gender issues. Gender roles are the key. It's not a women's program, it's a gender program.
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B
But to take that example of the father who thinks he's protecting his daughter by marrying her off and giving her a life because she'll have a husband to look after her, those views are entrenched. In societies for centuries. How does USAID come in and say that's wrong, should it? Many people would say you shouldn't. How do you respond to that?
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A
Well, because what we've seen is that for every year a girl stays in school and does not get married, her obviously she grows in educational skills and her reading and writing, but she's healthier. The difference between a 10 year old giving birth and a 16 year old, I mean, just think of their physical bodies. The most dangerous place to be is a girl pregnant in Africa and under 14 years old, four times more likely to die than a girl in the same place, but several years older. And so no one wants their children to die in childbirth or otherwise. And so we work with families to understand the importance of keeping daughters in school, raising the age of marriage, which then raises the age of first pregnancy. And then what we're also showing is by having her be healthier, the babies are healthier. And that leads us the consequences across not just her life, but years of her life and that husband's life. You know, the work we do is sexual and reproductive health. We bring the husbands in because we think when they understand they want their wife to be healthy, they want their kids to be healthy, and when we show them the benefits of birth spirit, they're very open to it. They don't think, well, we're just going to hold on to this because it's the way it's always been done. You know, seeing the ravages of having eight or 10 or 12 children on a woman's life, you know, this is his partner. And so helping men understand how it just doesn't benefit the girl, but it benefits the whole family and the community. We have found that to be very effective.
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B
So you talked about bringing men in and having them try explaining to them the benefits of having an empowered wife and probably fewer kids.
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A
Right.
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B
The number of men you can physically do that to is going to be a small proportion of the number of men that you probably need to reach. USAID can't do this on your own. How do you make national governments or other players take ownership of this?
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A
At that level, we do have to engage governments and we do have to reach more than just thousands of people. We have to reach millions of people. So we do this in a variety of ways. We work with and partner with government. So it's built into their health care systems.
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B
The issue of policy change, leveraging policy change, to what extent is development assistance contingent upon governments accepting or integrating a gender focus into their policies now?
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Well, Almost every country in the world has signed on to cedaw, right, The Convention to end discrimination against Women. And so oftentimes when we are working with governments and whether it's the ministries or civil society organizations or elected officials there, we bring this up. You've signed on to this. We are just trying to help you accomplish your goals.
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B
So there's not a kind of carrot and stick approach in terms of bilateral aid.
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I mean, that would certainly be something more of a State Department than from the usaid. You know, we're there to end extreme poverty and build resilient societies. So we try to make the case that through good development, which includes gender equality, this program is going to be better. The foreign policy or the more political things would be for the diplomats to decide.
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B
So in terms of the kind of work that you and your team do, you sit down with every program team in USAID and say, okay, how are you going to put a gender lens in this? Every team, yes.
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Well, it's not just me. We have a group of gender changes.
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I was saying that you do it yourself.
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That'd be pretty interesting. That would be why I have two.
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Time consuming jobs, right?
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But we do, you know, we have, for instance, last summer, around the Ebola crisis, you know, I sent a quick email to the head of the Ebola team and said, have we thought about the gender issues with regard to Ebola? And the response was, we are treating all the patients of Ebola. And so I marched down there myself to say, look, we are hearing reports that women are getting Ebola first and there are more female victims from Ebola because they are the primary caregivers. These people are scared of going to doctors, so they are going to their mothers and their sisters and their wives to be treated. These women do not know what it is. And just the way you get Ebola was because they were caring for them and washing them and feeding them. And so when you started to look at the different roles men and women play in society, we found that women were getting Ebola in greater numbers. It turns out, though, that men were getting it in greater numbers on the other side because they do the burials and the traditional ways of washing the body before burial. So men and women were getting it in different ways. It turns out that there wasn't huge gender numbers, but when you looked at how they were getting it and how we could respond to in treating it, it was very different for men and women. So everything from Ebola to when you think about energy, right, Often people say, well, a kilowatt is gender neutral, but it's not, you know, who gets electricity first. If you have to have rolling electricity, is that during the day or the evening? You know, where is it? Is it solar power? Is it more the formal grid? I mean, these are questions that men and women in different parts of the country are affected differently by that. So I have very smart, strong women across USAID who know their technical areas and they, I work with them to help advocate within usaid, to show the data and to show the programs and give the tools so that our colleagues in the missions and across USAID can integrate gender.
- [10:41]
B
Are there areas of the kind of portfolio of USAID where you wish you could have a greater gender focus or you could input more? I mean, I'm thinking macro issues like trade. Is there enough of agenda lent in those areas and how do you get more of it?
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A
No, I think broadly we need to be doing more with economic empowerment because of the initiatives that have come from the White House. In the first five years of this administration. We focused on gender broadly. We focused on issues of gender based violence, we focused on women peace and security and somehow economic empowerment fell a little bit by the wayside. We continue to do a lot with small and medium enterprises and microcredit. What we're thinking of now is the bigger issues of the formal workforce. Right? Just having women work or become entrepreneurs is not a long term sustainable program. So how do we get women jobs in the formal workforce with benefits that they can then learn skills and join the formal economy? And a lot of it is through trade, a lot of it is through the private sector. We don't want or we are not against corporate foundations, but what we more want to do is work with companies so that they're building issues of gender into their work plans into their supply chain. So everything from farmers to who is processing those foods to how they're getting to market to the final sellers, how can women be a part of all of those, not just the individual woman who's selling her vegetables at the market?
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B
So it's a requirement. There are an equal number of women working in the supply chain as men.
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No, we are working with companies to help them figure out how they can do this because they don't want to just make contributions as a foundation or as a donation to a civil society organization. They want to say, if I am doing my job and this company is going to be profitable, we need more consumers in this country. We do that by having women join the formal workforce early, earn money and the economy grows. So what we are helping them do is think through the gender issues. You know, if you're doing whatever it is, whatever kind of company there is, how can women become part of their work plan, not just as consumers, but as part of the creators of what they're doing in that company? From tech work, like, we're teaching coding and these things to young women, and we're also teaching, you know, how women who are growing crops and how their crops can be more sellable to these big corporations. Right? They have to have more continuity. They have to meet certain standards. So we're working in a variety of fields to help these companies invest in the women, not as a donation, but as a solid business investment.
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B
How do you know what works and what doesn't work? To what extent is everything you do with the gender lens rigorously evaluated?
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A
So we have made a lot of progress in this over the past couple years, both analyzing the work we do with our programs and measuring the impact of those. For instance, part of the gender policy, all of the data that we collect at USAID has to be disaggregated by sex. And that helps us understand who's benefiting from the programs and how they may or may not be benefiting differently. For instance, over the past few years, we've created the, the Women's Economic Index in Agriculture, the wia. And through this, we look at agriculture inputs. So we provide seeds, we provide training, we provide other materials for men and women to do better in agriculture, improve their yield, get more money from their crops at the marketplace. But we also looked at, for women, when the money comes back from the market into the household, who controls that money, how often, how does she spend her time during a day versus how her husband spends her time? When they come together in local meetings, do women speak as often as men? And so we're trying to get a better picture of what empowerment means. Not just the straight development outcomes on improving crops and these sorts of things, but on the empowerment. So we have made some strides in it. We need to do better about this idea of how different sectors empower each other. So for instance, if a girl does stay in school, it not only, of course, every year she stays in school, that's something that we like. But has it changed the way she thinks about her life? You know, if she stays in school till the day she graduates, she gets married the next day and is following the footsteps of her mother. If that's what she wanted, that's great. But if she wanted, she played smart, so she wanted to have a job outside the home. Was she feeling empowered enough to make that decision about her life? So that we've had a much harder time measuring. I think we're doing much better measuring the impact of our programs and learning from that and making changes. Even mid program, we will make some adjustments to better have development outcomes, but more it's the global outcomes. How does this change the trajectory of her life, the country's life and that sort of thing?
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B
And we've recently been doing some work on identification and the SDGs. Identification is another target, 16.9 of the SDGs. And that work, led by Alan Gelb, a senior fellow here at cgd, says that there are almost a dozen other targets of which identification is a key component. And I'm pretty sure that you'd say the same about gender as well. Gender is one of those enabler goals. Achieve that, you are on the way to achieving others.
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A
I totally agree with that. That many of the indicators will not stand alone. Right? Increased girls in adolescent, adolescent girls in school does not stand alone. You have to increase health, you have to increase, you know, you have to decrease child marriage. You have to. So there are many that while we have specific indicators that they will work together for the broader goal. Another example is this. At usaid, we are working on an issue of resilience. It's not just helping people escape poverty or extreme poverty. It's keeping them out of extreme poverty. So let's say we are doing a good job and their economy is growing and they have access to it and they're earning an income. What happens when there's a drought or a death in the family? Do they have the resilience to continue to move up or, or are they going to go down? Now, resilience itself, you can't measure. It's more looking at the stunting, looking at the income for the family, looking at other issues. And so the ultimate goal is resilience, but you have to measure it through these other indicators. And so gender equality, while it is one of the global goals, you measure that in other ways and using other indicators.
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B
So final question. Who is the most inspiring female role model out there today?
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A
Oh, my gosh, that is very hard. I have met so many strong women in the countries where I have been able to go and work. Women who just the fact that they are at this training or workshop that I'm giving, I met women in the rural area of Colombia where it was not safe to travel by road to come to this workshop. And this workshop was in a concrete room. We had no paper or pens to give them, not air conditioned. And they sat there for four hours and heard about the importance of women's political participation. They got there by boat. And when I say boat, it's a carved out log with an engine on the back because the roads weren't safe. And yet they were willing to do this because they wanted to hear our ideas about how more women could get elected in Colombia. And you know, I've met women in Afghanistan who wanted to run for local council and the Taliban threatened family members if they didn't drop out. And then they killed the family members when the woman didn't drop out. And instead of going home and saying, you know what, you win, she said, I'm running again, I'm doing this again. You know, I've met mothers who have put, you know, they have said to me, you know, I'm doing great, things are coming around, but what are we going to do for my daughter? You know, they're willing to risk things and put their lives on the line and work from sun up to sundown and well past that time to make sure their kids are getting a better life. So, you know, I used to, you know, name famous people that I'd worked with and I'd met and I'm always inspired by these folks, but it's really just the day to day work, the day to day living that women are doing in some of the harshest environments around the world. And yet they still sing and they still have hope and they give me inspiration. And that's the beauty of this work, is that there's millions of them. We just need to tap into it.
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B
It's quite humbling and it makes you aware of the privilege we enjoy.
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Yes, definitely.
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B
Susan Markham, Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment at usaid. It's been great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for coming in.
- [19:46]
A
Thank you for having me.
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You can find out much more about all the work that CGD is doing on gender and development on our website, cgdev.org, and don't forget to join me, Rajesh Merch Chandani for the next podcast and from the Centre for Global Development.