Equality on His Terms: Doing and Undoing Gender through Men’s Discussion Groups

Efforts to promote gender equality often encourage changes to interpersonal interactions as a way of undermining gender hierarchy. Such programs are premised on the idea that the gender system can be “undone” when individuals behave in ways that challenge prevailing gender norms. However, scholars know little about whether and under what conditions real changes to the gender system can result from changed behaviors. We use the context of a gender sensitization program in the Democratic Republic of Congo to examine prospects for transformative change at the interactional level of the gender system. Over nine months, we observed significant changes in men’s quotidian practices. Further, we identified a new commitment among many men to a more equal division of household labor. However, participants consistently undermined the transformative potential of these behavioral changes through their dedication to maintaining control over the objective, process, and meaning of change, resisting conceptions of equality that challenged the gender system. Because quotidian changes left gender hierarchy intact, they appear unlikely to destabilize the logics that legitimate women’s subordination

Gender Ideologies: Insights into Health and Demographic Behaviors.

The global agenda set at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo called upon researchers and program implementers to address the effects of gender inequality, especially the way inequality shapes sexual and reproductive health and demographic processes. Since then, researchers have documented links between women’s relative disadvantage and negative sexual and reproductive health outcomes. Less attention has been given to the systems of belief, or gender ideologies, that legitimate ongoing gender inequality. Yet, gender inequality would be unsustainable without supporting beliefs and values that define men and women as different and unequal. Those ideational aspects of gender systems—beliefs, values, attitudes, and norms—are the subject of this dissertation. The three empirical chapters investigate trends in attitudes concerning gender relations or connections between those attitudes and health and demographic behaviors. The first paper examines worldwide trends in attitudes about violence against women. Women in low-income countries have recently become less likely to justify intimate partner violence. The paper documents evidence that global cultural influences may be largely responsible for the observed trend in individual gender attitudes. The second paper uses survey data to test associations between men’s gender attitudes and their risk of HIV in Malawi. The analyses show that men with more egalitarian gender attitudes engage less frequently in sexual behaviors that involve risk of HIV transmission and report lower self-assessed risk of HIV. Finally, the third paper employs qualitative data from Malawi to explore the relevance of ideas about gender to men’s fertility. The paper demonstrates that gender norms are imbued with ideals relevant to men’s fertility preferences and behaviors. Each paper begins from the premise that ideational factors, such as social norms and individual attitudes, play an important role in shaping behavior, and are central to the perpetuation of gender inequality. All three papers use different measures of ideas about gender and all three posit that attention to these ideational elements is crucial to understanding individual motivations for health and demographic behaviors.PhDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102459/1/rpierot_1.pd

The influence of wives’ and husbands’ fertility preferences on progression to a third birth in Nepal, 1997–2009

As couples across the globe increasingly exercise conscious control over their reproduction, and as both spouses’ preferences have the opportunity to influence fertility, there is a growing need to examine the influence of both husbands’ and wives’ preferences on fertility outcomes. Using couple-level measures of rural Nepalese spouses’ family size preferences—followed by more than a decade of monthly panel data on fertility outcomes—we investigate how both spouses’ preferences influence the rate of progression beyond the widely-reported ideal family size of two children to third births. Contrary to expectations based on women’s relative disadvantage, we find that wives’ preferences drive couples’ progression to third births. We further investigate possible mechanisms and find that contraceptive use does not explain the influence of wives’ preferences, but that couple communication about family planning moderates this influence: Wives’ preferences drive third parity births among couples who had discussed how many children to have

Prevention, Cessation, or harm reduction: Heterogeneous effects of an intimate partner violence prevention program in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

IntroductionThe Engaging Men through Accountable Practice (EMAP) program is a series of facilitated group discussions for men in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that sought to reduce intimate-partner violence and transform gender relations. While a previous analysis found null impacts on women's experience of past-year intimate-partner violence (IPV), these average results obscure important heterogeneity. The study objective is to analyze the effects of EMAP on subgroups of couples based on their initial levels of IPV.MethodsWe use two rounds of data (baseline and endline) collected from adult men (n = 1387) and their female partners (n = 1220) as part of a two-armed, matched-pair, cluster randomized controlled trial conducted between 2016 and 2018 in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Loss to follow up was low as 97% of male and 96% of female baseline respondents were retained at endline. We define subgroups of couples based on their baseline reports of physical and sexual IPV using two different methods: i) subgroups determined by binary indicators of violence at baseline, and ii) Latent Class Analysis (LCA).ResultsWe find that the EMAP program led to a statistically significant decrease both in the probability and severity of physical IPV among women who experienced high physical and moderate sexual violence at baseline. We also find a decrease in the severity of physical IPV (significant at the 10% level) among women who experienced both high physical and high sexual IPV at baseline. Findings indicate that the EMAP program was more effective at reducing IPV perpetration among men who were the most physically violent at baseline.ConclusionThese results suggest that men who perpetrate violence against their female partners with greater severity than average may be inspired to reduce their use of violence through participatory discussion with less violent men. In contexts of endemic violence, programs like EMAP can lead to a meaningful short-term reduction in harm to women, perhaps even without transforming prevailing norms about male superiority or the acceptability of IPV.Trial registrationTrial registration number: NCT02765139

The influence of wives’ and husbands’ fertility preferences on progression to a third birth in Nepal, 1997–2009

As couples across the globe increasingly exercise conscious control over their reproduction, and as both spouses’ preferences have the opportunity to influence fertility, there is a growing need to examine the influence of both husbands’ and wives’ preferences on fertility outcomes. Using couple-level measures of rural Nepalese spouses’ family size preferences—followed by more than a decade of monthly panel data on fertility outcomes—we investigate how both spouses’ preferences influence the rate of progression beyond the widely-reported ideal family size of two children to third births. Contrary to expectations based on women’s relative disadvantage, we find that wives’ preferences drive couples’ progression to third births. We further investigate possible mechanisms and find that contraceptive use does not explain the influence of wives’ preferences, but that couple communication about family planning moderates this influence: Wives’ preferences drive third parity births among couples who had discussed how many children to have