From the Inside Out: Gender Mainstreaming and Organizational Culture Within the Aid Sector

Abstract

Many international non-government organizations (INGOs) implement interventions designed to promote gender equality, investing significant resources into embedding gender considerations into programmes through the strategy of gender mainstreaming. However, despite their altruistic mission, INGOs place less focus on addressing culture and power hierarchies within their organizations. This article suggests that many INGOs fail to walk the talk on gender equality. Through an analysis of recent challenges facing the development and humanitarian aid sector, including gaps in safeguarding and #AidToo, this paper emphasizes the importance of addressing gender equality from the inside out. It draws on feminist perspectives, the notion of the “deep structure” of organizations and the author’s own experiences to argue for the need to address gendered, racial and colonial power hierarchies within the organizational culture of INGOs. The article argues that it is no longer sufficient to reduce gender mainstreaming and inclusion to programming interventions, and that INGOs need to reflexively and intentionally tackle power and inequalities within their own culture and structures.

Gender mainstreaming at 25 years: Toward an inclusive, collaborative, and structured research agenda

“…The bureaucratic handling of gender mainstreaming and prevalence of 'management by results' can undermine its transformative potential [60][61][62][63]. Scholars call for more research into resistance and institutional learning, coupled with efforts to dismantle the 'deep structure' of gender bias in organisations [53,64,65].…”

Beyond gender mainstreaming: transforming humanitarian action, organizations and culture

“…Many of the limitations of gender mainstreaming and how it has been implemented in development organizations, as highlighted above, also characterize the humanitarian sector (Pillay 2018 ; Thoretz 2019 ; Lokot 2021 ). Indeed, the recent IAHE GEEWG report also notes that the experience of gender mainstreaming in humanitarian organizations has faced similar challenges as the development field (IASC 2020a ).…”

“…Despite the best of intentions, several recent reviews reveal that the ambition expressed in that statement has not been achieved. This is primarily because gender mainstreaming, which is the approach the humanitarian sector has taken to address gender inequalities, has not been effective (Pillay 2018 ; Lokot 2021 ; Daigle 2022 ). Our study draws on reviews of gender mainstreaming, textual analysis of policy and program cycle documents, and interviews with humanitarian actors and experts to explore why this is so and offers reflections on a way forward.…”

“…Our study also analyzes the cultural and institutional context in which mainstreaming takes place. Importantly, the culture of humanitarian organizations has been characterized as hierarchical and driven by a short-term crisis response with a distinctly macho style of functioning, which is misaligned to a gender mainstreaming approach (Thoretz 2019 ; Lokot 2021 ). Such a culture reinforces cognitive biases and behaviors that are not easily amenable to change.…”