Panelists (left to right): Anna Mecagni from Women for Women International; Kaitlin Love from IPSOS; Sarah Gammage from ICRW; Caroleena Fontes from Oxfam America; Angeline Munzara from World Vision; Calais Caswell from MEDA

We are proud to have presented the exemplary work of several members from SEEP’s Women’s Economic Empowerment Working Group as part of their session at the Women Deliver 2019 Conference in Vancouver, Canada. The conference, which took place in June, is the world’s largest gathering focused on gender equality and the health, rights, and wellbeing of girls and women. Thousands of motivated individuals came together to present new knowledge, promote solutions, serve as a fuelling station for influencers, and advocate to achieve a more gender-equal world.

Gender discriminatory social norms are a widely recognized barrier to women’s economic empowerment, affecting both their agency and access to economic resources and opportunities.

The SEEP Network’s partner side event at the conference, Shifting Social Norms for Women's Economic Empowerment, explored how members of the working group and SEEP have tackled gender norms in the context of their work in developing countries. We heard from Oxfam, IPSOS, Women for Women International, ICRW, World Vision International and MEDA, who drew on practical examples and strategies for understanding, measuring and changing social norms.

We are delighted to share with you 7 lessons learned in shifting social norms for women’s economic empowerment from our members:

1. Collaborating with the private sector is effective

In partnership with Unilever, Oxfam developed a report, showing that men who wished to become more active caregivers faced difficulties in departing from outdated social norms defining caregiving as a woman’s job. The private sector can play an important role in shifting such social norms through gender-positive marketing and advertising. As an example, P&G launched a #ShareTheLoad campaign in South Asia to promote a more equitable distribution of household chores through television ads and social media.

2. Media is your partner

Similarly, NGOs should not shy away from engaging mass and social media to reinforce powerful messaging promoted through WEE programs. Oxfam’s #iLabaYu campaign in the Philippines urged men to share housework with women and went viral with 29 million views earlier this year by using a clever play on words (laba mans to wash clothes in Filipino).

3. To understand shifts, we need to understand how to measure social norms

Social norms are difficult to measure; rather than reflecting individual attitudes, they are governed by ‘shoulds’ - expectations of how a man or a woman should behave. For example, Oxfam’s WE-Care research found that 79% to 97% of men approve that men should do care work BUT only 36% to 60% thought that men in their community would approve of men caring. IPSOS’ framework for measuring women’s economic empowerment aims to capture and measure the role of cultural norms in different spheres of empowerment - individual, household and community. Gender Progress Markers is another methodology used by both MEDA and World Vision to measure and assess transformational change in social and gender norms through project interventions.

4. We need better evidence on the impact of male engagement

Recent research carried out by ICRW found that the majority of male engagement programming stops short of being gender-transformative. A new program jointly implemented by Women for Women International and ICRW will aim to test whether effectively engaging men in women’s empowerment program enhances positive outcomes and wellbeing for both men and women and contributes to sustained gender norm change. Proactively engaging men and community gatekeepers in WEE initiatives ensures that they are not obstructed – but can also ensure that social norm change is addressed directly and more likely to be achieved sustainably over time. Stay tuned for emerging findings from the program.

5. Understanding gender norms is important to identify unintended consequences

ICRW’s work on the unintended consequences of women’s economic programming highlights the importance of using knowledge about social norms to inform program design. Norms that assign men the role of a breadwinner can lead to a higher incidence of intimate partner violence as a result of women’s increased financial and economic independence. Women working outside of the home might also experience increased incidents of non-intimate partner violence due to societal backlash relating to norms around women’s visibility in public spaces. Programs aiming to increase women’s economic participation may also end up increasing their time burdens and time poverty. And programs that train and enhance women’s skills and capabilities may unintentionally contribute to labor market segregation. World Vision’s ENSURE program undertook a Gender Analysis to understand social norms and gender stereotypes prior to designing and implementing the project in order to deliver more sustainable results and minimize any unintended risks for women.

6. Savings Groups can be important

Both World Vision and Oxfam America have found that Savings Groups and financial inclusion can be an important tool for gender norms transformation. By increasing women’s financial independence, they can help increase respect and consideration from husbands and/or household heads, giving women a new sense of agency and influence over household and community decisions. By enhancing women’s leadership skills, these groups have also changed community attitudes towards women’s political participation.

7. Activities focused on shifting social norms can complement traditional WEE programs

MEDA’s Gender Equality Framework recognizes that structural change is required to bring about truly inclusive economies and greater gender equality. This includes addressing biases/inequitable social norms and engaging men, boys and other key gatekeepers including private sector actors, traditional authorities, and institutional stakeholders in the process. In Nigeria, MEDA’s Women and Youth Project supports women and youth entrepreneurs to strengthen their business performance in rice, soya and groundnut value chains. In order to address harmful social norms relating to early and forced girl-child marriage, the project convened community social dialogues that include traditional leaders in project target areas. The project also seeks to address gender norms at the individual level to boost girls’ self-esteem and relationships with family through a parent-child dialogue component. These community-based interventions complement the project’s core WEE and value chain activities, leading to improved and sustainable impact.

Attendees participate in a group activity to learn about innovative solutions to shifting social norms for women.

These 7 lessons highlight the significance of gender-intentional WEE programming aiming to address social norms that shape the context in which development programming takes place.

Interested in reading more? Please download SEEP’s publication, Shifting Social Norms in the Economy for Women's Economic Empowerment.

We would like to thank Thalia Kidder from Oxfam; Kaitlin Love from IPSOS; Anna Mecagni from Women for Women International; Sarah Gammage from ICRW; Caroleena Fontes from Oxfam America; Angeline Munzara from World Vision; and Calais Caswell from MEDA for their contribution to our session and this blog.

Julia Hakspiel is the Learning Coordinator for AWEF and Managing Consultant with MarketShare Associates, a member of the AWEF consortium. She is also the co-facilitator of Women’s Economic Empowerment Working Group at SEEP and is the author of the new publication, Working with the Private Sector to Empower Women: What to Measure and How to Build the Business Case for Change.