Thursday 17 December 2009

Where are the Men?

In a recent workshop on gender-sensitive monitoring, I found myself with some 18 women and one man - the latter being there, as he admitted, because the group was the only one to work in a language he understood. Most participants were well informed of and experienced in gender mainstreaming. Many felt there was a continued necessity to maintain gender mainstreaming as a separate item on the agenda, lest it would be dropped altogether. But we would have preferred to be a more "mixed" group - not quarantined in the women's ward, a sad déjà vu for those among us who have been "doing gender" for decades. Maybe we should have formed sub-groups and swarmed out to infect parallel, non-gender focused working groups with the gender bacillus?