Women and water

Take a succinct look at the gender picture in the water sector. What does it look like? Women labouring and toiling to provide water for domestic use and doing unpaid work in agriculture while men make the decisions about water resources and their management. This state of affairs is more or less similar across the developing world in rural to urban and local to national levels.
Lacking the explicit consideration towards gender dimensions, water policies and programmes are frequently becoming the source of reinforcing the existing inequalities between women and men and even providing grounds for increased gender disparities. Considering water initiatives being ‘gender neutral’ is a grave mistake. Water related policies and programmes should aim at facilitating both women and men to derive equal benefits. In order to make the policies and programmes work equally for both men and women, an idea called gender mainstreaming is often used by policymakers, programme managers and implementers. This is the systematic assessment of the implications of any intended ‘action’ for both women and men. The action may include legislation, policies or programmes, resource allocations, outreach and participation in all areas and at all levels. In fact, mainstreaming gender is an ultimate strategy to eliminate inequality and ensure sustainable development.
Unfortunately, women’s priorities and contributions into the water sector are never acknowledged or considered as being central while taking vital policy and programme decisions. Concerns related with women remained imperceptible in governance structures in the institutions that control and manage water across the world. For example, women produce 60 percent to 80 percent of the food but women’s role as producers is recurrently disregarded by policymakers and water sector managers.
In Pakistan, only a small portion of women is employed in water related institutions on junior to mid-level rankings where they face several challenges in this largely male dominated sector. One of the women working in key water and power related organisations expressed her concerns as “I really want to go in the field and work like my other male colleagues do but my senior management has never encouraged this move. Most of the women who work in our organisation are mainly engaged in doing clerical work such as opening and sticking of the envelopes we receive or send through postal services. Even the women who visit our office for their issues do not get a gender appropriate response for many in our organisation do not know how to deal with women. We do not have a women friendly environment in our office and undergo troubles due to lack of female specific facilities such as separate toilets, childcare and feeding rooms or modest private spaces, which we need sometimes as women. Men never understand these issues; neither have they ever asked us what our issues are. We have no voice in management in order to influence policy decisions.” She further stated that the men, especially in lower ranking positions like the support staff, do not even dress properly and the women feel uncomfortable while interacting with them.
More or less the same concerns were highlighted by one of the women I talked to who is working in an agricultural bank. She expressed her concerns about how she really wanted to work to her fullest, visit field areas and meet with stakeholders, especially women lenders, to understand female perspectives for how they can be better facilitated. But she is simply never encouraged to do what she is hired for and keeps on getting engaged in maintaining the office files and other records.
When I spoke to the male managers of some water related organisations to understand their perspective, they assumed engaging women in field level activities was challenging, it had security risks and required special arrangements in terms of transport etc., which in turn is a lot of work and they lack the resources to make such arrangements. One of them said: “Incorporating women’s voices in policy and programme level decisions is not worth it since the women have a never ending list of issues and wishes.” Another said, “We are already taking care of their safety and needs as per our best understanding and there is no such need to be engaged with women staff directly; it will raise their expectations and provide them with the grounds to make excuses for not working.” One of the senior officials expressed that they prefer to hire men for key positions.
Changing this mindset and bringing gender equality to the water sector is a colossal challenge. It requires a whole paradigm shift in terms of how women’s roles are perceived in our society. However, one should not find any difficulty understanding that missing out the perceptions, experiences, contributions and knowledge of half of the stakeholders will result only in inappropriate policies and programmes.

The writer is a development professional and can be contacted at shabnambalouch@yahoo.com