Adopting a 'bifocal approach' in Swiss academic mentoring programmes - challenges and opportunities

Mentoring programmes have been accused of inadequately addressing organisations' gendered cultures. In reaction to this, mentoring approaches started applying a dual focus, i. e. targetting both individual development and organisational change. This paper explores - through the lens of the 'bifocal approach' - whether and how two Swiss academic mentoring programmes for female advanced doctoral students and early postdoctoral scholars have adopted a a dual focus. The paper shows that the programmes have developed strategies adopting this approach to a certain extent and discusses the challenges and opportunities experienced. 14.02.2014 | Julia Grünenfelder (Luzern

A foreign woman researcher in a Purdah society: opportunities and challenges for knowledge production in the 2000s

This paper aims to further discussions on access to “foreign” worlds, limits in knowledge production, and the role of gender relations in field research. What follows is an engagement with arguments developed by Hanna Papanek and Carroll Pastner in this journal some decades ago. They both drew on fieldwork experiences in Pakistan to argue that foreign women fieldworkers can (sometimes) take advantage of ambiguities in the social structures of Purdah societies, that is, societies characterized by “sexual segregation and the seclusion of women” (Pastner 1982:262), to flexibly position themselves and to be able to interact with both men and women. This paper rethinks their arguments and evaluates the current situation on the basis of fieldwork experience as a foreign woman in Pakistan in the late 2000s. It argues that possibilities for foreign women to get physical access to men’s worlds, although still available, remain limited and in some ways have become more restricted (including access to women’s worlds) due to political developments in recent decades. The paper also argues that, irrespective of the feasibility of physical access to other gender’s worlds, it is necessary to reflect on subjectivities through which access to “foreign” worlds is mediated and knowledge is produced

Taking gender and development seriously: supporting Pakistani women who work for rural development

Development projects in Pakistan are hiring increasing numbers of Pakistani female professionals to work on rural projects that target women in addition to men. However, women development practitioners face many challenges in their work in remote areas. Many of the challenges relate to their gender, such as mobility restrictions placed on women and questions raised about their morality if they take up employment, in particular a job that includes fieldwork. This discourages qualified women from taking on such work. Development organisations must address this issue if they are to adequately serve their female target groups

"A female … will not be available here": gendered labour markets in northwest Pakistan's rural development sector

While Pakistan has legally binding mechanisms to promote gender equality in employment, labour markets are shaped by the highly gender-segregated society they are embedded in. Based on the conceptualisation of labour markets as gendered institutions, I explore how gender generates unequal access to the labour market for social organisers—a term referring to a type of development practitioner—in the Hazara region, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan, making it difficult for women to participate in an occupational field where they are urgently needed to work with village women. Drawing on a comparison of job announcements and employees’ profiles, I argue that social norms generate gendered inequalities of access to jobs as social organisers by regulating access to information, ability to travel, and eligibility for employment. In this article, I contribute to a better understanding of the gendered nature of this specific labour market, the impediments to gender equality in employment, and the need for an improvement in the work contexts of the female labour force in rural Pakistan in order to make it possible for women to do the job

Gender, work and development in northwest Pakistan: working environments of Pakistani female development practitioners

Even though women in Pakistan have attracted some interest among researchers and policymakers, they are often represented as oppressed and victimised members of a highly patriarchal society. What is lacking are nuanced approaches that recognise Pakistani women as active and diverse agents without neglecting the societal structures that limit their agency. This research thus aims to provide more detailed representations of Pakistani women. The study argues that a research perspective based on poststructuralist, feminist and postcolonial concepts of power, knowledge and subjects is helpful for analysing links between Pakistani women’s individual experiences and their implication in diverse social relations of power. Against this background, this study adopts just this kind of research perspective to explore how Pakistani female development practitioners working in Government of Pakistan projects in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province experience and negotiate their work environment, particularly in respect to gendered relations of power. The four research papers present insights into this research problem. Each of the four papers discusses a specific aspect: the relations between women and non domestic work as constituted through state discourses (Paper I); the complex field realities in which Pakistani development practitioners work (Paper II); the labour market for social organisers – a type of development practitioner – in northwest Pakistan and its gendered nature (Paper III); and the challenges female development practitioners face in their work environment and the coping strategies they develop (Paper IV). Each of the papers is based on an individual set of primary and/or secondary data such as job announcements, observations and people’s narratives. Primary data was generated through qualitative methodologies between 2006 and 2008 during several periods of fieldwork in Pakistan. The research identifies the development sector as a complex and often contested work environment. Many local residents perceive ‘development’ as an instrument of the ‘West’ for pursuing its interests, and they are thus generally wary of development practitioners and organisations. A rising number of verbal and physical attacks in the late 2000s have affected the work of many development practitioners. Besides the resistance to development as a ‘Western’ ideology, there is also a widespread need for and interest in material benefits, which complicates development practitioners’ work further. When social organisers go to communities, they are supposed to select and support villages, communities and individuals that need developing. In a village, however, there are usually different voices that claim the right to development. The findings of the present study show that villagers variably draw on social categories such as development status, clan membership or gender to convince (potential) development practitioners of their eligibility for material benefits. Furthermore, an analysis of job announcement for social organisers shows that job qualifications are high (e.g. for language skills and willingness to work in a mixed-gender working environment) and the rewards (e.g. wages and social recognition) are low. For women in particular, it is difficult to present the requisite skills, since social values and norms regarding gender discriminate against women in areas such as access to information, ability to travel, and eligibility for employment in general. The study further elaborates on the fact that the development sector has become a growing work opportunity for (mainly middle class) Pakistani women. This is because of a growing demand for well-educated female employees in this sector, but also because of a growing dependency of many middle-class families on women’s income. While the female participation rate in the Pakistani labour force is generally low (21.7% in 2010/11), there have always been women in formal employment, although this has often been in traditional female occupations such as teaching and nursing. The study’s findings suggest that Pakistani women have been kept out of non-domestic work through social norms and values that were, for example, established in laws, directives and speeches by state representatives such as Zia ul-Haq. Even today, women who take up a job as development practitioners need to position themselves in relation to these norms and values. The study shows that female development practitioners therefore develop strategies to establish themselves as good Muslim women and good development workers. For example they establish fictive kinship relations with their male team colleagues in order to make the latter responsible for their well-being and modesty. Another strategy is to locate women’s room in the back part of the office in order to shield female employees from men’s gazes. A conclusion based on this study’s empirical findings is that, in the work environments of development practitioners, competing discourses on gender relations and development complicate working women’s everyday lives, but also provide them with an opportunity to reconcile specific gender norms with their labour market engagements. Pakistani women’s lives are made harder by the fact that prevalent gender relations generally restrict their participation in formal labour markets (even though formal structural constraints on women’s employment have been substantially reduced). However, women have to negotiate gender relations to participate in formal employment relations, such as in the development sector. Since engaging in the labour market is per se highly unusual behaviour for many Pakistani women, Pakistani women’s involvement in the market economy often increases both men’s and women’s options to negotiate gender relations, either consciously or unconsciously. The study contributes to research in three ways. First, it makes a conceptual contribution to debates on gender, work and development by applying poststructuralist, feminist and postcolonial methodologies to data analysis and representation, and this is fairly rare for empirical research in Pakistan and in this research field. Second, it contributes empirically to academic debates about gender and work by rendering professional Pakistani women visible, especially the complexities, ambivalences and multilayered nature of their working lives in the development sector. Third, the study makes an empirical contribution to debates on development interventions and how they operate on the ground in the context of Pakistan by discussing the impact of (women’s) work environments on development interventions

Discourses of gender identities and gender roles in Pakistan: Women and non-domestic work in political representations

This paper aims to explore some of the manifold and changing links that official Pakistani state discourses forged between women and work from the 1940s to the late 2000s. The focus of the analysis is on discursive spaces that have been created for women engaged in non-domestic work. Starting from an interpretation of the existing academic literature, this paper argues that Pakistani women's non-domestic work has been conceptualised in three major ways: as a contribution to national development, as a danger to the nation, and as non-existent. The paper concludes that although some conceptualisations of work have been more powerful than others and, at specific historical junctures, have become part of concrete state policies, alternative conceptualisations have always existed alongside them. Disclosing the state's implication in the discursive construction of working women's identities might contribute to the destabilisation of hegemonic concepts of gendered divisions of labour in Pakistan