TIP Gender Sensitivity Sessions

From our experience, holding a session on gender sensitivity prior to planning your evaluation helps the team members establish a common ground in understanding gender issues.

Gender sensitivity workshops can be customised to suit the needs of an organisation. A session can last for a day or half a day where participants get an overview on the basic concepts of gender, gender equality, women’s empowerment and the interrelations between gender, social transformation and ICT. Experience also shows that while most are able to grasp the issues of gender and ICT separately, analysing the relationship between these two issues is new terrain.

The workshop is a preparatory step found most useful in a gender evaluation of telecentres because these initiatives are usually based in grassroots communities where traditional values and beliefs on gender roles and relations are more deeply rooted. All of the evaluation teams that

conducted studies on telecentres using GEM found that setting in place gender sensitivity strategies promote reflection and open up opportunities for dialogues, thus, minimising or avoiding antagonistic confrontations.

For example, a GEM evaluator working with two communities in Ecuador was told that the community (i.e., male decision-makers) will refuse to hold workshops on “feminism” because of previous problems with women’s groups that “put women against men.” The indigenous groups in the communities perceived racial discrimination as a paramount problem rather than gender relations. Thus, the priority aim of the evaluation was to overcome racial discrimination and work in favour of cultural and racial diversity. The GEM evaluator repackaged the gender sensitivity workshop by using the concept of “equity” in a broad sense to include racial, gender, age, cultural and social discrimination.