Gender Evidence Synthesis Research Award (ESRA)

Abstract

Series  There was limited engagement with the concept of rights across the studies and reproductive health rights were generally reduced to reproductive health services with a focus on maternal health outcomes rather than the women themselves.  Intimate partner violence was another under studied issue and given the importance of violence against women and girls for poverty, well-being, health, education and equality outcomes this needs to be addressed.  Harmful 'cultural' practices such as forced and early marriage, FGM, trafficking and bonded labour were little considered.  Transactional sex emerged as important for many women's livelihoods, and the openness to discussing this suggests it is an important area for future research.  Unpaid and paid care work was little discussed explicitly for adult women, but was recognised as reducing girls' life choices and chances.  Gendered mobility and access issues emerged as important, but technology and transport generally remain neglected areas in gendered research.  While women's employment was well covered, women's entrepreneurship and barriers to this, especially in times of financial crisis, was less discussed.  The rise of 'new poor' was documented in a number of countries and contexts but there was little gendered analysis of this.  Only a small number of studies looked at poverty and gender within the changing environmental context, and there was only one study on 'disasters' and one on climate change adaptation.  None of the studies analysed the effectiveness of international policy to improve gender equality and women's well-being. Recommendations  The awards have demonstrated there is an openness to collecting disaggregated data, and this needs to be built on to promote greater gender analysis of the differences noted. Subsequent calls might make clearer what is expected in 'good' gendered research and ensure the ability of the proposers to provide this. The inclusion of a 'gender analysis of findings' section in the EoAR would raise the profile of gender within the Joint Fund.  Some of the issues that are yet to be addressed by the Joint Fund highlight the need for a feminist analytical framework and also the need to ensure gender means the inclusion of both women and men in the studies.  If a future call seeks to explicitly address the gaps in knowledge identified, it would need to promote gender from being one of the cross cutting issues to being a central overarching research question.

Gender equality in climate policy and practice hindered by assumptions

“…When climate change policies and practical interventions use sex-disaggregated data in lieu of detailed gender research, they risk diagnosing gender inequalities as the consequence of innate sex differences 102 . Conflating sex-disaggregated research with gender research likewise reinforces unhelpful stereotypes across many fields including behavioural economics 75 , social and economic research on poverty alleviation, 103 and energy 85 .…”

It’s gender Jim, but not as we know it … A critical review of constructions of gendered knowledge of the Global South

“…To ascertain the extent to which the Joint Fund had contributed to research knowledge in the four key areas of gender, methods, children and young people, and health, in 2014 a series of Evidence Synthesis Research Awards (ESRAs) were commissioned by ESRC-DFID. This article reports findings from the gender evidence synthesis (Bradshaw et al, 2015).…”

Gender and the heat pump transition

“…org/.5 Sex is used to describe biological differences, e.g. the classification of individuals as male and female based on biological criteria such as hormones, reproductive organs and chromosomes.Sex is often used to disaggregate data and inform energy initiatives(Bradshaw 2018); however, distinctions based on sex provide little insight into the gendered roles of men and women and how they are expected to act(Bradshaw et al 2015). The physiological studies on thermal comfort cited are presumably with cisgender women-this has not been made clear in the existing literature.…”