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Gender-transformative research: Examining power relations is key to understanding health inequalities

 

Did the COVID-19 pandemic impact men and women in the informal labour sector differently? Do women experience trauma in a unique way? Are current social protection policies securing equally the livelihoods of both men and women? How do current labour laws impact the health of women and men differently?

Answering these types of questions is key to generating evidence to inform plans for achieving and sustaining an equitable society. However, research is not often designed to answer these questions with a view to effectively understanding gender discrepancies.

That is why a specific approach known as gender-transformative research (GTR) is essential.

At its core, GTR identifies and addresses gender inequities by actively questioning, challenging and reshaping the systemic and patriarchal norms that perpetuate them. The Women RISE initiative, with support from IDRC, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, has begun to spearhead an approach that aligns with global calls for inclusive and sustainable development, recognizing the transformative potential of gender-responsive research in enabling equitable recovery from health-related crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

GTR emerged from the growing recognition that conventional research methods can perpetuate power imbalances and structural inequities in society. While earlier gender-sensitive or gender-inclusive research focused on identifying disparities and accommodating differences, GTR pushes boundaries further by seeking to challenge these systemic inequities.

Globally, the demand for gender equality and inclusion in research gained traction soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlighted the glaring gender disparities across the health, economic and social sectors. These disparities spurred an urgency for research that not only documents inequities but offers transformative solutions to ensure inclusive recovery and resilience.

Through this nuanced approach, the Women RISE initiative aligned with the United Nations Research Roadmap for COVID-19 Recovery. That document underscores how recent economic changes disproportionately impact women and stresses the need for recovery strategies to be more action-oriented, inclusive and gender-transformative.  

Gender-transformative research in action

All 23 Women RISE projects are framed from a GTR perspective, applying key principles of the approach to every aspect of the research, from start to finish. The key principles of GTR include:

  1. Participatory research: Involving stakeholders as active participants in the research process is crucial, particularly for marginalized women in impacted communities. It ensures that the experiences and testimonials of those most affected by inequities shape the outcomes and recommendations for each project. 
  2. Intersectionality: Recognizing that gender inequities intersect with other forms of oppression — such as race, ethnicity, socio-economic status and disabilities —, GTR approaches are deeply rooted in a nuanced understanding of overlapping identities and inequalities. 
  3. Accountability: GTR emphasizes accountability for all stakeholders involved. Project teams and researchers are encouraged to share findings transparently and work collaboratively to drive change. 
  4. Inclusive data and evidence-based solutions: GTR prioritizes collecting granular, disaggregated data that reflects the lived realities of women and marginalized groups. This data forms the foundation for actionable, evidence-based interventions. 
  5. Sustainable development: Research outcomes are directed toward immediate challenges and designed to facilitate long-term systemic change, ensuring the sustainability of gender-equitable practices across sectors.

In Sri Lanka, for example, a Women RISE project aimed at improving pandemic responses to reduce adverse health effects on women workers in the export sector. It used participatory research to not only identify the differences in health impacts on men and women, but also to share the results with key decision-makers with a view to informing equitable decisions around response and relief plans. The research found that there was a disproportionate effect on women workers in the ready-made garment industry. Women workers faced negative impacts such as income loss, unemployment, limited food and lack of access to health care.

Policymakers and key decision-makers are hesitant to acknowledge the necessity of gender-specific pandemic responses or to adjust generic responses to address the unique needs of women workers, according to Asanka Wijesinghe, lead researcher with the project.  

While female representation in the bureaucracy is high, there has been insufficient active involvement or consideration of the concerns of working women in the ready-made garment industry.

Asanka Wijesinghe, lead researcher

The Sri Lanka research was designed to have all interest-holders embedded in the project’s design and governance through a steering committee made up of a wide range of stakeholders — representatives of workers, employers, trade unions, government and international organizations. This allowed the research team to avoid a biased perspective or approach. In addition, to promote sustainable solutions to the gender power imbalance, the team identified financially feasible solutions. These included unique unemployment benefits and the hosting of worker training at times when women would have less care duties, or by providing childcare during the training.

Media
Committee members sit around a large table in discussion.
Institute of Policy Studies
Steering committee members in Sri Lanka meet to discuss feasible solutions.

In El Salvador, another Women RISE project utilized participatory research alongside intersectionality to explore women’s resilience to trauma as a framework for fostering their post-pandemic recovery. While the focus was on women, the team conducted interviews with people from all genders and hired members from the community to conduct research.

Treating the interviewees as protagonists — rather than research subjects — and working alongside local communities led to a more collaborative and successful approach. This is essential to challenge prevailing gender discriminatory practices in the El Salvadorian context, in which there is little public acknowledgement of the realities faced by women; a lack of safe space for men to discuss personal issues; and discrimination and violence against members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Preliminary project findings suggest that trauma-informed, post-pandemic recovery and resilience for women must include meaningful opportunities for women to experience and affirm their bodies (and in turn their souls and minds) and a safe space (both physically and emotionally) to come together as women, with the intention of fostering joy and friendship in community.

For women entrepreneurs, partners/husbands and adult children appear to provide important support by working and providing labour for small businesses, according to Annie Boyd-Ramirez, co-principal investigator of this research. Other informal systems of care and support exist in the community, and these informal familial and community efforts need to be supported and strengthened.

The best practice we can share [from this experience] is the importance of local-level change models, that is, the practices and strategies for working at the [community] level. In-community [and] participatory strategies are emerging as crucial for supporting sustained shifts in gendered distribution of care work.

Annie Boyd-Ramirez, Asociación Programa Valesco executive director

In Burkina Faso, a project to better integrate women and adolescent girls in developing pandemic response measures focused on accountability and sustainable development in its GTR approach. It evaluated how women were or were not incorporated into national response mechanisms and developed strategies to mitigate power imbalances in the informal sector. Some of these strategies included: sensitization training for men in the informal sector by explaining gender-specific challenges and how to recognize inequities, and giving women the opportunity to speak first at meetings so that they are not influenced by comments of traditional power holders.

Working towards even more sustainable transformation, the team worked with lawmakers to recognize the debilitating circumstances women in the informal sector faced during the pandemic, discussing how to create more intersectional response plans for the future.

Unlike much research, where participants are confined to the role of subjects in studies, this project’s approach positioned women from the informal sector as major players in the project implementation process, according to lead researcher Madeleine Valery Wayack Pambe. This meant deconstructing deeply rooted power relations between educated and uneducated people, she added.  

This [also] meant establishing the climate of trust needed to encourage their active participation, challeng[ing] traditional research models that focus on experts [who are] external to the situations investigated, thus fostering a dynamic of co-construction and inclusion.

Madeleine Valery Wayack Pambe, lead researcher
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Women in a research working group sit and a table.
Madeleine Valery Wayack Pambe
Research working group for women in Burkina Faso

Other examples of how the Women RISE projects are incorporating GTR in their design and methodologies are projects in Peru and South Africa. Through a gender-responsive mixed-method research approach, the project in Peru examined working conditions and access to health care for women domestic workers. The research is being used in advocacy efforts for the Peruvian Government to strengthen social protection policies for female domestic workers. In South Africa, a project focusing on strengthening the impact of South Africa's Social Relief Distress Grant among unpaid caregivers of adolescents living with HIV utilized a human-centered design approach by explicitly working to understand the realities of their users. They then used this data to co-design research solutions. 

Challenges in conducting gender-transformative research 

Despite its transformative potential, implementing GTR faces many challenges. In patriarchal contexts, researchers themselves come from positions of privilege, creating a disconnect between them and the communities they aim to serve. This often leads to a resistance to change, making it difficult to implement or even discuss gender-transformative approaches in certain regions.

Without conscious efforts to use participatory research methods, the power imbalance can reinforce existing gender and social inequities. Other common challenges for researchers and project teams include limited resources and lack of institutional support.

The future of gender-transformative research

Despite the challenges, Women RISE researchers believe there is momentum for gender-transformative research as investment and attention increase. To build on this progress and make GTR the norm rather than the exception, the research field must: 

  1. maintain, elevate and prioritize the key principles of GTR in all future research projects — participatory research, intersectionality, accountability, inclusive data, evidence-based solutions and sustainable development 
  2. include dedicated financial resourcing, human capacity and flexible timelines for research projects to effectively incorporate GTR 
  3. promote cross-sectoral approaches that take into account the intersectionality of discrimination 
  4. encourage interdisciplinary approaches for global understanding of issues 
  5. develop locally adapted solutions and strengthen participatory methods to increase inclusive results 
  6. move beyond theory and contribute to building robust evidence that is based on conditions required to achieve gender equality and transformation. This should be done in tandem with principles focused on respecting and protecting women’s lives. 

The Women RISE initiative is grounded in the belief that transformative research can reshape power dynamics and pave the way for inclusive policies, which will have a long-term impact on improving women’s health and wellbeing. Its projects are already addressing pressing gender disparities that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on sustainable recovery strategies that are gender-responsive and intersectional.

The research examples highlighted above demonstrate how GTR can uncover not only the immediate impacts of crises, but also the long-term structural changes needed for more equitable recovery. By addressing inequities in health, employment (both paid and unpaid) and caregiving responsibilities, Women RISE has shown how the methodologies of multidisciplinary research — intersecting multiple areas such as economics, social justice, and public health — can fuel the redressing of power imbalances that hinder women’s health and wellbeing. 
 
To learn more about GTR and how it is incorporated into Women RISE projects, listen to a webinar on Navigating Local Challenges and Cultivating Change: Insights into Gender Equality and Inclusion in Research