Dr. Kim Ozano: Hello, and welcome to Connecting Citizens to Science.

I am your host, Dr Kim Ozano, and this is a podcast where we explore

global health and development.

And today we're bringing you the first of a special two-part finale

to our gender justice miniseries.

When Ishrat and I worked together on the final episode with our guests today, we

realised that there was a lot of content that needed to be shared, so we decided

to make it a two-parter, so the theme that we're going to be exploring in

both of the episodes is understanding gender as a complex social system,

especially during times of crisis.

When I talk about gender, I talk about it as a social

system and ultimately how it impacts our health outcomes and health systems.

Dr. Kim Ozano: Throughout this series, and again in today's discussion,

it's been clear that gender isn't something separate from conflict

pandemics, or economic instability.

It is deeply woven throughout them, and when systems are under pressure, gender is

often the first thing that is simplified, sidelined, or treated as an add-on, even

though it shapes every part of our lives.

In part one, we stay with the foundations.

We explore what gender really means when we treat it as a social system,

why it is layered, contextual, and dynamic, and how it interacts with

power, identity, and lived experience.

And then in part two, we move onto the practical elements, the approaches

for working more responsibly and ethically for gender justice.

So, before we begin, let me introduce our wonderful guests.

We have Dr. Rosemary Morgan, who is an associate professor at the Department of

International Health at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

She is recognised as a specialist in gender analysis in health and

health systems research, and has published extensively in this field.

We're also joined by Selima Sara Kabir.

Selima is a transdisciplinary, mixed method researcher and educator based

at the BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health in Bangladesh.

Her research spans gender health systems and policy, digital

cultures and social justice.

And of course, my wonderful co-host for this series, Ishrat Jahan, who

is a research fellow at the Center of Gender and Sexual and Reproductive

Health at BRAC James P. Grant School of Public Health in Dhaka Bangladesh.

So, here is part one of our finale.

Enjoy the episode.

Ishrat, here we are coming to the end of this gender justice series.

We've learned so much already, and after each of these episodes, I go

away thinking so much more about gender and how I could apply it in my work.

Perhaps you could set us up.

What are we gonna be talking about today?

Thank you, Kim.

It's really nice to be here, and I'm excited for today because today we'll

be talking about how we can think about gender research and actions moving

forward in a world that's becoming increasingly defined by crisis.

So I recently read a UN Women report that came in The Guardian that was saying

that gender rights is facing stagnation and even regression in some contexts,

and we can see the causes around us.

There's increasing conflict, there's unprecedented aid cuts, and of course

there are various kinds of national or global crisis like the pandemic.

So, I think it's important for us to start off with asking our guests, how

can we think about gender more deeply?

And let's start with you, Rosemary.

Thank you.

I'm delighted to be here.

One thing I've come to realise or learn is when you say the word

gender, it means different things to different people, and this is

often very context specific as well.

Sometimes, when you say the word gender, people automatically

think women and girls.

It means women's rights, feminism, other times, particularly in some

high-income countries, they think it means gender identity, particularly

around transgender individuals and rights for transgender individuals.

And that's a very big topic in the United States at the moment.

Others think it's very binary that it's, you can either be only be a

man or a woman and, and nothing else.

None of these explanations on their own are correct.

I mean, they're all part of understanding what, what gender is, but none

of them on their own are correct.

And when I talk about gender, I talk about it as a social system and ultimately

how it impacts our health outcomes and health systems experience and outcomes.

Thinking about how gender operates as a social system, for example, that's

organised power roles, resources in society, how it operates on

different levels, at the same time influencing how we organise our

society in terms of social norms, institutions, structures at all levels.

Families, households, communities, economies, states, it's like embedded

in all of these different levels.

And it also encompasses our interpersonal relationships, how

we interact with one another, and also how it forms our individual

identities and values, how we identify.

It's different from, but related to, biological sex.

Dr. Kim Ozano: what really stands out for me here is how gender is

something that we live inside.

It's not just a label or a category.

It's a system of norms, expectations, and power that is

shaping our everyday decisions.

And if we don't see that system clearly, it becomes very hard to change it.

It is socially constructed, meaning it's

something that is negotiated by individuals and societies.

What it means to be a man or a woman in one context is gonna be different from

what it means to be in another context.

It also changes over time, what it meant to be a man or a woman 50 years

ago, very different from today, right.

And then again, it changes across context.

it also interacts with other social stratifiers or other social

identities like race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability.

So, my experiences as a white woman are gonna be very different from a, a

black woman or Hispanic woman in the United States or Canada, for example.

All of these dynamics affect our exposure to health risks, patterns of

illness, distribution of health resource.

And ultimately, I think it's really important that we think about

gender as this social system and how it's sort of organised in society,

how it impacts our identities, relationships, and the structures

in which we live and work and exist.

I think that's a really simplified yet, holistic way to put it.

I think, what you're saying is that it's important to recognise the

complexity of gender and gender as a system in itself, and then how

it interacts with other systems.

How power becomes shaped within it, and by it, to be able to understand

it more deeply to begin with.

And the one word that you really picked up on, I think is

important, is the complexity of it.

And I know we're gonna go to talk about sort of tools and and resources, how to

explore it, but it's not straightforward.

It's not an easy thing to integrate into our research monitoring

evaluations, interventions.

It really takes a sort of a systematic, holistic approach to be able to do it.

Absolutely.

I agree.

Selima, how do you think of this idea of understanding

gender as a system in itself?

Thank you, Ishrat and thank you for having me as well.

I think Rosemary's already put it really succinctly and really beautifully.

Um, 'cause when I was thinking about the fact that gender is layered every

time, we sort of start doing our work, and start thinking about gender

discreetly, it becomes really difficult to think about gender outside of like

the power structures and systems outside of all of these other identifiers.

Again, thinking of gender as a system becomes really, really important

because, as you know, I've done a lot of work around like health systems, um,

community-based action, community-based research, and in that, oftentimes

the way in which gender is looked at and understood is very siloed.

It's like, 'Oh, well, AND women or, AND an X, Y, Z gender'.

And that, that's just the sort of, it's a sort of like addendum, but every

time we start looking at health systems more holistically, it becomes very

evident that gender is embedded in every single layer of work that we try to do.

And so, it becomes really important to think about that.

And then, I think, intersectionality becomes really, really important because,

when we think about the different identities that we embody and the

different ways, especially in a country like Bangladesh, class becomes like a

very key sort of determinant, making sure that we're looking at poverty and, uh,

you know, like living outside of poverty.

Even within those who are above the immediate poverty line, there's so

many different layers to which their lived experiences impact the way in

which they enact gender in the ways in which they're allowed to, you

know, like in the ways in which they understand how they can live and act.

And, as Rosemary was saying as well, it's very dynamic.

It's, it's, it's so fluid and it's always changing.

It's very much contextual.

It's very based on so many different, like diverse factors that it's,

it's really hard to pin down.

So, I think, it's just remembering that gender is, is complex and is layered and

it's situated in many different things.

Dr. Kim Ozano: Selima, I really love this point about gender being

layered and constantly shifting.

It really echoes what we've heard throughout the series and how

deeply context matters, and also how gender is always lived locally.

It's shaped by place, identity and environments.

I think we began with a sort of a trick question because

there's no right answer to it, right?

Because, um, I think what we often do is we don't appreciate the

intricacy or the complexity of the systems within which we live.

And, increasingly, there's a drive to simplify or to just, you know, flatten,

so that we understand them better.

And, at least in my limited experience as a researcher, as someone who's

interacted with communities, oftentimes, it's easier for the kinds of evaluation

tools we have or the research tools we have, if we can categorise or put things

into boxes and make it very simple for our reports in our donor agenda.

Dr. Kim Ozano: The complexities for me, I sound almost a bit unwieldy.

They're, they're large and complex and there's so many, you know, Rosemary

and Selima, as you were talking, all these frameworks that I've come

across have popped in my head and I think, let's go back to the basics.

And we're hearing that gender is often an add-on rather than

something that's considered.

And as soon as we get into crisis, it ends up being pushed aside.

So, I guess the question to both of you is how can we make sure that gender's

not just an add-on, that it's thought about in all the work we do; from our

projects and donors right down to the communities that we work with directly.

I think it's very true that gender is often treated as an add-on.

You see it as sort of an additional separate question as opposed to something

that is integrated across questions.

And I, I think in order to make sure it is integrated in, in all of our

work and everything that we do, we do need to take both sort of a gender

mainstreaming approach and sort of gender integration of approach.

So, gender mainstreaming is thinking about how do we establish it or integrate it

into our own organisations, institutions, our own practices through, you know,

making sure we have established policies or gender policies in our organisation.

Making sure we have policies like sexual harassment policies, right?

It's, it's, or equitable opportunities, equitable pay.

I think of gender mainstreaming a lot as practising what we preach.

So how do we turn the lens inwards on what we are doing?

And then gender mainstreaming creates an enabling environment for gender

integration, which is integrating gender into our programmes, interventions,

research, and there's different strategies and tools to do that.

Then we often use, sort of, frameworks and tools to do that in a very systematic way.

I've heard a lot that in the past that, you know, in order to take a gender

lens to our work, especially research or monitoring and evaluation, as all you need

to do is desegregate your data by sex.

And that is not true, because a lot of work we do doesn't include men and women.

Sometimes it just includes women, sometimes it just includes men.

So we, we've done a lot of work of thinking about what is gender data,

how do we actually capture this and measure it, particularly in our MAGE

project, which stands for Monitoring and Action for Gender and Equity, which

is a partnership between Johns Hopkins University and the Global Financing

Facility, which is part of the World Bank.

So, we've looked at established frameworks and thought, okay, what is gender data?

How do we break it down into, for example, sex specific data, which captures just

data from one gender group only, like men or women, sex desegregated data, which

compares things between men and women.

Well, and while these data points are important, they're not enough

to constitute gender analysis.

They're an entry point.

Dr. Kim Ozano: This really resonates with so many projects in global health,

the way our tools often push us to simplify things in order to measure them.

But what you're both saying is those simplifications can hide the very

dynamics that we're trying to understand.

Yeah, thinking about how then do we integrate a needs, rights,

and preferences lens into this needs, what are essential needs for particular

gender groups like women or men?

What rights, what do they have an essential right to and preferences?

What do they prefer?

And these are gonna be very context specific, which is why

we need frameworks and tools.

There's another gender dimension, which is thinking about gender equality and systems

indicators, and all of these overlap.

So, gender equality and systems data or indicators thinks about how

gender power relations manifest as inequities, and then how might that

affect the work that we do, right?

So it, they might manifest as inequitable access to resources, which could be a

lot of different things, finances, time, education, information, knowledge, um,

inequitable roles and practices and distribution of labour, inequitable

norms, beliefs, values, and decision making power, autonomy, and, and sort

of rules, both formal and informal.

And this by, by taking sort of systemic lens like this, we can think about how do

we make our work more gender responsive?

How do we move from being gender sensitive, where we're just considering

gender but not doing anything about it, to gender specific or gender accommodative

where we're actually thinking about how do gender inequities, or how might

they affect our work, and how do we modify our work to make sure they

don't so we can achieve our objectives?

And then gender transformative.

How do we challenge and change harmful gender norms, roles and relations?

So, we do really need to use established frameworks and tools to

be able to do this in, in our work.

Dr. Kim Ozano: And that brings us to the end of part one of our two-part finale.

And today we've stayed with the foundation.

We really took the time to understand gender as a complex

social system and explored how those dynamics become visible.

In part two, we're going to build on everything that you've heard so

far and move into the practical.

We're gonna be talking about the approaches that can really help us to

work more responsibly, more ethically, and more effectively with our communities.

It's a continuation of the conversation that you've heard today, but with a focus

on action, and it's a really powerful companion to what we've explored today.

But for now, thank you for listening and thank you to our guests

for sharing such rich insights.

And do join us in part two.