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World Development Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 497509, 2002 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in Great Britain 0305-750X/02/$ - see front matter

PII: S0305-750X(01)00113-9

Disciplining Gender?
CECILE JACKSON * University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Summary. Taken as a whole, research on gender issues in development, whether directly oriented to policy questions or to broader understandings of social change in developing countries, has been marked by a broad and deep disciplinary, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary character which has been central to its success. Development agencies research strategies, however, particularly multilaterals, remain dominated by economics, which therefore constrains the extent to which other disciplines are able to contribute to development knowledge and policy evolution. The purpose of this paper is to argue that interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity must be sustained in researching gender and development, and that sociology, anthropology and politics are of increasing signicance because of changing priorities in development. I argue that these disciplines have particular conceptual and methodological strengths, very briey indicated, for researching gender and development, and that there is a need to resource these elds equally through capacity building in developing countries and renewed eorts to increase numbers of women researchers. 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Key words gender, development, research, interdisciplinarity, research strategies, sociology, anthropology, politics, social change

1. INTRODUCTION After a recent conference on qualitative and quantitative poverty appraisal, Ravi Kanbur proposed a number of dimensions for distinguishing variations in approaches to information collection and analysis. These were type of information on population (nonnumerical to numerical), type of population coverage (specic to general), type of population involvement (active to passive), type of inference methodology (inductive to deductive), and type of disciplinary framework (broad social science to neoclassical economics) (Kanbur, 2001, p. 7). A further dimension to these continua might be added, level of inuence and resourcing in multilateral development agencies: (low to high), and this paper argues for the need to redress this imbalance. I also aim to respond to his challenge that we focus on the strengths of sociology, anthropology and political analysis, rather than continue to make well-known criticisms of methods in economics. I argue that the hegemony of economics in development research by multilaterals matters because it cramps the space, the resources and the recognition accorded to disciplines with equally important contributions to make to development puzzles and policy. Excellence in policy-relevant gender research cannot be conned to a
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single discipline but depends on diversity in disciplinary work, on conversations between disciplines, and on interdisciplinary endeavors.

2. INTERDISCIPLINARITY FOR HYBRID VIGOR The problems for interdisciplinary research stem largely from the social costs for researchers of movement beyond disciplinary boundaries, and apparently incompatible theories and methods. The political economy of academic research, with the power of disciplinebased journals, research associations, peer evaluation and teaching programs, works forcefully against those with interests in combining disciplines. The distinction made between multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity is well-known, but it is perhaps worthwhile to identify forms of interdisciplinarity. When Harriss (2002) objects to the wholesale importation of rational choice theory into political analysis and social organizational studies, he is objecting to an economic imperialism which colonizes another discipline, rather than conversing with it. What I argue for here is the

Final revision accepted: 8 October 2001.

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value of distinctive and dierent disciplines brought togetherhybrid vigor derives from crossing two equal purebred lines, which is dicult when hegemonic economics is one such line. But although economics has developed an overly strong presence in political science, in general,
[t]here are . . . limits to economic imperialism. . .After conquering the border regions and collecting the low hanging fruit the leader of an invasion often nds it dicult to keep the troops on the frontier rather than retreating to native territory (Ruttan, 2001, p. 24).

This may be both a blessing and a curse, since the same pressures for the retreat of the storm troops of economics are those which also inhibit interdisciplinary research. Contradictions in the concepts and methods of dierent disciplines, it seems to me, are the source of valuable critical tension which should be celebrated rather than avoided, and they do not necessarily impede interdisciplinary research, as some surprising examples demonstrate. For example, some might consider the term feminist economics to be rather contradictory and oxymoronic. After all, since feminism challenges foundational ideas of mainstream economics, a term I use as shorthand for the dominant positivist neoclassical form of economics, by an explicit social justice standpoint, how can they combine meaningfully? That they do is itself of interest, and supports the notion that research with explicit values produces stronger analyses (Harding, 1987, 1992). This works in a number of ways. Rendering explicit the implicit androcentrism of science, despite its supposed value neutrality, allows new and fuller research questions and designs because of a more inclusive range. Feminist epistemologies also value the subaltern experience of women which generates distinctive knowledges of social reality, and the inclusion of these strengthens analyses. Finally, the feminist stance which does not claim to be dispassionate and disinterested, sets up dierent relations between researcher and researched, and caring about the subjects of research can be seen not simply as bias but as a route to a fuller, more engaged understanding. The example of feminist economics serves to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinarity in development research, but also establishes the important broader point that since development is by denition concerned with social

justice (poverty reduction, gender equity, rights), it needs a critical openness to those epistemologies in which the values of researchers and desired outcomes of social change are acknowledged. Feminist economics 1 has delivered some of the most thrilling insights in development research over the past few decades. Since Boserup (1970), the founding mother of gender analysis of development, paradigm-shifting work of wide relevance has come from the interdisciplinary combination of gender analysis and development economics at dierent scales and in diverse elds. For example, in her extended work on property regimes and gender relations in south Asia, Agarwal (1994) shows just how gender identities mediate the relations of persons and property, a key concern in development economics, while Elson (1991, 1995) has analyzed why and how womens reproductive work matters for macroeconomic analysis, and how apparently gender-neutral adjustment and stabilization processes are inected with gender bias. Feminist economists have also reworked understandings of households and intrahousehold relations. They opened the box of the household by thinking outside it, inspired by research beyond the discipline of economics, and demonstrated the signicance of separate income streams rather than conjugal pooling, how problematic assumptions of altruism and self-interest can be, the inadequacy of comparative advantage explanations of gender divisions of labor, and the value as well as limitations of game theoretic approaches to intrahousehold resource allocations and outcomes (Agarwal, 1997; Folbre, 1986; Hart, 1995, 1997; Kabeer, 1994). An important role in these advances was played by the in-depth empirical studies of intrahousehold inequality which had ourished in other disciplines since the 1970s. While the cooperative household models of the 1990s may have reached the limits imposed by the individualism of this approach and the constraints of large-scale survey data (Hart, 1995), the noncooperative models of Lundberg and Pollack (1997), and Carter and Katz (1997) again appear to be moving forward at least partially on the basis of noneconomists work on gender roles and expectations, such as Ann Whiteheads notion of the conjugal contract (Whitehead, 1981), which points to the culturally specic implicit understandings of the exchanges between women and men in marriage as the basis for what are

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considered to be legitimate claims and expectations of partners. Such norms are not unchanging but constitute the discursive resources which women and men draw upon in justifying individual negotiating positions. These movements in understanding intrahousehold relations are profoundly policy relevant, and not, of course, only for gender policy, but for development in general. The move from the notion of a unitary household to one of separate interests and preferences has entailed distinctive policy implications, for example, the latter approach suggests that it matters who in the household receives income subsidies, and that policy failure may arise from ignoring how intrahousehold inequality patterns technology adoption. Finally, Sens formulation of his cooperative conict model of intrahousehold relations which brings together Nashs bargaining theory with important lessons from gender analysis must surely be testimony to the vigor of hybridity in economics (Sen, 1987). He drew directly on gender analysis when he argued that individuals sense of their personal wellbeing is gender dierentiated in ways that profoundly aects bargained outcomes, that gender relations within households are intimately linked to broader social landscapes of gendered advantage and disadvantage outside of households, and that subjective approaches to well-being must stand alongside objective assessment of well-being. He was therefore able to devise a model which, by recognizing the signicance of perceptions to bargaining, and the connectedness of relations within and without the household, oered real movement forward in understanding how gender inequities operate and change. 2 It is increasingly common to see gender disaggregation of data in research by economists, and this is valuable and welcome. But it does not, of course, amount to gender analysis, and such work alone is not an adequate response to the challenge of researching gender for development, nor is it reasonably called interdisciplinary. Gender disaggregation is useful since it reveals gender gaps and variations, but unless harnessed to an understanding of gender relations, is analytically impoverished. For example, documenting gender gaps in education, was only a descriptive start, and showing the statistical signicance of educating girls for the achievement of various development goals such as fertility reduction, was an important next step, but it is the explanation of quite how ed-

ucation produces the eects that it does that demands social and cultural analysis. It has been clear for some time that changing fertility behavior is dicult to account for in terms of material factors alone such as the costs and benets of children and that ideational change plays an important and underrecognized role (Cleland & Wilson, 1987) in this. Measuring the eects of culture may lie within the purview of economics but understanding its workings, the connections between economy and culture and how the apparently economic is also profoundly cultural, is not. Development studies has been slow to take the cultural turn of other social science disciplines, but the social relational focus of gender analysts combined with the ongoing debates on the cultural character of the material within feminism (e.g., Butler, 1999; Fraser, 1999) means that we are poised to make a major contribution here. 3. MULTIDISCIPLINARY EXCELLENCE FOR GENDER KNOWLEDGE If interdisciplinarity allows the exploration of research questions which would not otherwise arise within the boundaries of a single discipline and is therefore the source of much that is original in development research, it is also, however, at risk of a lowest common denominator eect, where only relatively straightforward research questions are posed. Multidisciplinarity, however, i.e., parallel disciplines in close conversation about the same problem, rather than integrated within the same study, is not subject to this risk, and single disciplines can achieve a particularly valuable kind of depth. Inequality is itself multidimensional and cannot be the preserve of a single discipline; alongside mainstream economics, anthropology, sociology and politics need equivalent research resources to pursue those research questions where they hold a clear advantage in terms of conceptual scope and methodological appropriateness. Why does excellence in gender research for development require sociology, anthropology and politics (SAP)? One answer is that development objectives have changed in ways that make SAP knowledges increasingly critical. First, development used to be shorthand for economic development, but it is no longer. Social development, human rights and democratic participation have greatly increased their importance in development activity during the

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1990s, as indicated by the stang of bilateral agencies such as DFID, and with them the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and politics have become central to development research. 3 This disciplinary expansion followed on from two signicant changes to how poverty and inequality were conceptualized. Alongside the older notion of private consumption poverty have developed both Sens capabilities and functionings notions of wellbeing (Sen, 1985), and Chambers subjective characterizations of poverty (Chambers, 1988), which, while very dierent, both introduced a social institutional element into poverty thinking, for which social anthropology, sociology and politics clearly were central. Theorists of social exclusion now see poverty as multidimensional, dynamic, and as a process rather a condition (de Haan & Maxwell, 1998; Rodgers et al., 1995). Second, the recognition in development discourses that inequality was based not only on class but also on other forms of dierentiation, notably gender, created openings for SAP since the theorizing of gender roles, relations and resistances has never been more than a minor interest for mainstream economists; it was others who shaped the eld of gender analysis (Chodorow, 1978; Edholm, Harris, & Young, 1977; Molyneux, 1985; Ortner, 1974; Rubin, 1975). Another answer is that interdisciplinary research may reach a point at which, as in the case of intrahousehold gender relations outlined above, progress requires disciplinary depth and detail, in this case, ways to think about perceived personal welfare and the valorization of work. The former will need to be based in anthropological work on personhood, how this is constructed over the life course, and the cultural specics of how a person is conceived as a bounded individual, or rather as a social being in which persons largely exist in relation to other persons (Strathern, 1988). The latter depends on research by political analysts and sociologists on how gender interests and aspirations develop and express themselves. In this eld there has been a vigorous and useful debate about false consciousness, the question of how gender interests are dierent, from class interests (e.g., age is very signicant to gender interests while social mobility between genders is not), the extent to which they are recognized, mystied and mutable, and the ways in which resistances to gendered subordination can be understood (Agarwal, 1994; Kandiyoti, 1988, 1998; Molyneux, 1998).

Sociology, anthropology and politics should not, however, be seen as there simply to help solve the knottier problems of human behavior as individuals, groups and societies, and in a service capacity to economics. They bring entirely new issues into development research, pose important research questions that would not have arisen in their absence, and have superior conceptual and methodological traditions in relation to some development questions. An eminent World Bank economist was recently asked about his vision of inter and multidisciplinarity in research and he replied that his ideal was to have a (named and equally eminent) social anthropologist available to telephone about questions that puzzled him. 4 Simply servicing economics is, however, not a conversation between equals, nor does it begin to recognize the value of the agenda of anthropology in its own right, and the importance of equivalent resourcing of disciplines other than economics. To accept a service role for SAP is to block o the important gender research questions which originate from the wellsprings of disciplines other than economics. One example is research on accountability and organizational cultures. The work of sociologists and political analysts on the organizational explanations for the policy achievements and shortcomings in GAD policy is both original and broadly relevant to policy sciences, including much of development studies. They ask what were the factors behind dierential adoption of the gender agenda by agencies? How can organizational cultures constrain gender policy? What does gender accountability consist of? How do beneciaries engage as actors in forming policy? This research shows that the gender identities of development personnel aects the ways in which they work with participants of dierent genders (Goetz, 1997; Staudt, 1990), that development project participants actively shape project activities and outcomes through dierential levels and styles of cooperation and engagement (Villareal, 1992) and that therefore the distinction between participatory and nonparticipatory projects is spurious, and it analyzes the conditions under which gender accountability, i.e., responsiveness to womens interests, is eective (Kardam, 1995). Furthermore, introducing gender equity policies in development has entailed confrontation of a range of distinctive problems relating to the far from universal acceptance, among donors, agencies and hosts and partners, of the legiti-

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macy of this development goal. Studying how this has been (partially) achieved, is especially relevant today when the tensions between conditionality of assistance, and relationships conceived of as partnerships, loom large. This research strength has a great deal to oer those currently concerned with making development agencies more pro-poor. The broader implication is that social science disciplines other than economics should not be bolted onto economics but given room and resources to establish their own parallel strategies for development knowledge. 4. GENERIC STRENGTHS OF SAP FOR GENDER ANALYSIS OF DEVELOPMENT The recent World Bank Policy Report Engendering Development (2001) proposes a strategy based on institutional reform to establish the legal and economic institutions for equality, economic development to generate employment and social infrastructural investments for equality, and improving womens access to resources and political voice to reduce persistent gender disparities. It states that gender research needs to move beyond gender gaps, such as those in education and health, to questions of autonomy, leadership and voice. All of these suggest a new salience for SAP. The complex issues raised by autonomy, and the emphasis on leadership and voice, recognizes the importance of creating the conditions in which women in developing countries can themselves more eectively make demands and inuence priorities of states and agencies. Researching voicewhat will be the content of those demands? which womens voices will be heard? will women represent the interests of other women?is a proposal in which the politics of speech looms very large, and for which SAP disciplines are uniquely relevant. In this section, I briey outline some of the special strengths brought to such a project by sociology, anthropology and politics. (a) Social relations Methodological individualism has never been as rmly entrenched in SAP disciplines as economics and therefore they are able to conceptualize gender in terms of not simply the dierences between women and men as separate social categories, but the relations between

them. 5 A social relational focus involves approaching women not only as individuals, and as a social category, whose problems appear to be somehow connected to characteristics of this category, but as parties to sets of relations (involving resources, rights, responsibilities and meanings) with men and other women through which what it is to be a woman, in that time and social place, is dened and experienced. Autonomy for women, as an objective of development, has to be problematized, for the autonomous individual does not necessarily enjoy greater well-being. At a material level for example, Guyers research in Cameroon shows, through comparison of incomes and expenditure of married and unmarried Beti women, how adult women gain access to resources through the culturally dominant ideology of the marital relationship (Guyer, 1988, p. 163). Fraser (1997) also points out the negative consequences for women when the state, in her analysis of the United States, assumes that autonomy is good and dependence bad. The question of dependence and autonomy are complex precisely because the social relations of gender which subordinate women are also simultaneously implicated in the experienced well-being of women through, for example, the variable but not insignicant levels of physical protection, emotional and sexual satisfaction, cultural approval and material well-being delivered by marriage. (b) Social identities The assumption of genderless individuals has been at the heart of many policy failures which have not anticipated the dierential experience of interventions, such as new technologies, by women and men. Rather than assuming a universal, implicitly male, person, within SAP individuals are held to carry a number of social identitiesof which woman is onewhich inuence what it is possible for them to be and do (e.g., Lister, 1995 on citizenship). While gender disaggregation of data helps to describe the signicance of gender identities for outcomes, e.g., in well-being comparisons, it does not explain how those identities are formed, contested, and co-exist with other identities such as ethnicity. For example, we know that there is excess mortality among girls in a number of south Asian countries, but why girls are subject to foeticide, infanticide, and aggressive neglect requires a full analysis of gender identities and relations over the lifecourse and disaggregated

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by class and caste. Important elements in explaining this phenomena are forms of marriage exchange, notions of personhood, the gendered hierarchies within belief systems, sanskritization and the content of hegemonic masculinities. (c) Agency, action and social change Engendering Development (World Bank, 2001) asks why do gender disparities persist? The framework suggested (World Bank, 2001, p. 99) as an explanation for the persistence of inequalities, however, has nothing but the dead hand of structure at worksocial and cultural norms, socialization, and a determining economy. The question deserves better. To me, it is a good question, important because it directs attention to social change and because it reects dissatisfaction with old answers (because of patriarchy, silly!, or because our policies have been awed), and because it implies a search for explanations in which women are not simply the dupes of patriarchy, nor passive recipients of development aid. If we need to understand the engagement of women with their experiences of gender-based inequality as an active process characterized by agency, as much as structural constraint, then those disciplines which have grappled with theorizing social action, and the exercise of power, will be increasingly signicant in development research. (d) Power and interests The empowerment of women is now an objective of an enormous array of development activity, which therefore requires concepts and methods for studying resistance, compliance, inuence, and interests. Casually adding empowerment to project and policy goals has little meaning without clarity over which of a number of notions of power is being deployed. In a post-Foucauldian world where we no longer think that woman is to man as weakness is to power, we need the help of disciplines which can conceptualize women as agents, sometimes acting up to, and against, the social structures they live within, and at other times acting in ways which perpetuate gender disparities, and disciplines through which the distinctive character of gender interests can be analyzed and brought to bear on the issue of why disparities persist.

(e) Essentialism problematised Debates about how women are essentialized, i.e., treated as if being a woman is to embody a set of characteristics (essences) that can be spoken of in generalized ways across time and space (Fuss, 1989) may seem rather abstruse, but their absence from policy research has, I would argue, led to some misconceived policy directions, for example, in environmental elds. It is still common practice to speak about women with almost no dierentiation beyond an occasional regional descriptor, and condent generalizations readily imply naturalized essentialisms. Thinking about essentialism, about the variations among women, and always asking which women?, is a guard against treating women in an undierentiated and decontextualized manner. The continuing presence of overly essentialist assumptions about women is indicated, for example, in the suggestion that, in the relationship between gender and corruption, there may be intrinsic dierences in the behaviors of women and men that lead to cleaner government when more women are in key government positions. (World Bank, 2001, p. 93, my emphasis). Corruption studies appear to show that women are less corrupt than men (Dollar, Fisman, & Gatti, 1999), they are less likely to condone corruption or to be involved in bribery and countries which have higher levels of representation of women in parliament have lower levels of corruption. Swamy, Knack, Lee, and Azfar (2001, p. 15) handle the essentialist implication with delicacy, refering in their tentative explanation to both sociobiologist accounts based on womens role in reproduction, and to criminology research suggesting that women are socialized into greater honesty, greater risk aversion, greater expectation of being caught, greater respect for laws because of physical vulnerability and higher levels of self-control, but it creeps back into the interpretation of this work by the Bank. The problem of essentialisms for policy is that they suggest generalized and enduring behavioral dierences between genders that can be relied on in gender dierentiated policy. Thus women emerge as thrifty, responsible, altruistic, unselsh, hardworking, law-abiding, peace-loving and environment-friendly, and men the converse. While Swamy et al. (2001) argues that the gender gap in crime in all societies suggests that governance policies can rely on women remaining a force against cor-

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ruption, this gap is narrowing as gender relations change. Women may be as good as they appear, at least partly, because of their subordination. (f) Epistemological strengths Social science disciplines have dierent theories of knowledge which implicitly or explicitly guide research practice. Feminist epistemologies have made important contributions to gender analysis, a consequence of which is that, within development studies research, gender work is often distinguished by a greater epistemological awareness, if not by consensus. Examples of this are the debate about epistemological privilege; 6 the promotion of reexivity in research; and the recognition of the politics of speech and testimony. To say that reliable knowledge is knowledge from below (Rose, 1994, p. 32) because women have lived experiences of subordination (see also Sen & Grown, 1985) is to suggest just such a privileging. A similar approach to poverty might suggest that only the poor themselves really know about poverty, and implicitly informs the Voices of the Poor project of Narayan (2000, 2001) for the World Bank, which assumes that they have a special access to the truth. 7 Arguments about the validity of such a stance have ensured that uncritical representations of womens voices are frequently challenged in ways that would greatly benet those working on poverty and development. Mosses work in western India is a good example of a critically reexive approach to gender and participatory research (Mosse, 1993) in which PRA activities are shown to be used as a public arena for ocializing discourses of powerful individuals, representing personal views as community opinion. To accord uncritical epistemological privilege to what the poor are represented as saying is unwise, since they are, of course, diverse and internally dierentiated participants representing complex positions and interests, and with expectations of the research process itselfall of which patterns what is said. Speech is never unmediated by the circumstances of, and audiences for, speech. It is unfortunate that the Voices of the Poor volumes, and related literature on the project (Petesch, 2001, p. 31; World Bank, 1999) gives little discussion of the limitations of the research, and which a reexive awareness would involve, e.g., of how the identities of the research teams, and respondent

expectations might aect what is said, how the authors selected material to emphasize, and felt able to generalize from such material, and indeed why the reader should accept the conceit of the book as simply a megaphone for the poor, when perhaps it is more akin to a ventriloquism of the poor. 8 Even the title of the rst volume Can anyone hear us? implies a direct unmediated communication which erases the multiple interlocutors involved in the production of the work. The use of systematic content analysis is said by Narayan et al. to let the data speak for themselves and that the voices of the poor may be amplied not mufed (2000; p. 295). But content analysis, however systematic, cannot erase the eects of researchers. Discourse, meanings, representations and talk are all resources, and research activities are all social processes which require a critical and reexive engagement, i.e., one in which researchers consider how their presence and their subjectivities are part of what gets found out in research. Testimony is one of the primary ways in which we come to know. Yet testimony cannot be taken to be either independent of social identity, or conversely, completely determined by identity in essentialized notions of, for example, womens ways of knowing. Furthermore the ability to speak, rather than the content of speech, is itself socially variable. Ardener (1975) developed the notion of mutedness to refer to the silencing eects of the discursive exclusions experienced by those dominated groups, such as women, who stand in a dierent relation to language and vocabulary, compared to dominant groups such as males of particular ethnic groups. In a related vein, Spivak (1988) famously argued that subaltern women cannot speak. 9 The implication here is that the speech of subordinated groupsin contexts from survey respondents to participants in political processes and bodiescannot be taken at face value. Or, as Herring puts it,
data [need to be] recognised as products of social interactions and situated in a specic social matrix of production. At the point of production, some individual confronts another, both with interests and cognitive frames that aect the nature of the outcome (Herring, 2001, p. 91).

Ethnographic research is as subject to this as any other kind of research, but at least the ethnographer has some sense of their own

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positionality and of the possible interests and frames of respondents. Even without the extended time scale of ethnography, there is much to be said for adopting the emphasis in SAP methods on the importance experience of researchers face-to-face encounters with respondentsthis indeed was one of the most valuable elements of the PRA innovations. (g) Social and historical context Harriss (2002) has already argued for the importance for economic theory of the confrontation with social reality. Knowledge about the messy particularity of life in specic times and places is an important counterpoint for those concerned with generalization and theory, not only for the reasons given by Harriss, but also because seeking such knowledge entails dierent training regimes and produces distinctive research cultures of great value. While economists frequently use large-scale data sets for comparative research on countries that they have little special knowledge of, this is uncommon in SAP where methodological traditions emphasise the importance of context in explanation. Indeed, it is the dierence between noncontextual and contextual approaches which is seen by some as a better distinction than quantitative/quanlitative divide between economics and other disciplines (Hentschel, 2001). These disciplines start from an assumption of the uniqueness of particular places and times, cultural specicity and historical background. Their research training regimes therefore give great prominence to eldwork with direct primary data collection and local language knowledge. Economists on the other hand are inevitably more distanced, by the need to supervise enumerators dealing with very large numbers of respondents, from this intense relation with respondents. Bringing the experiences of SAP researchers with their rich reference points in intensive study into interaction with economists is invaluable, and can serve as a safeguard against some ights of fancy in economists assumptions. 10 Where economics needs to simplify to proceed, because of both the realities of large-scale data collection and also the parsimoniousness of theorizing and explaining, SAP brings back the complexity. Good examples of this, which relate to assumptions about womens positions within households, are the many studies which show historical change in household forms (e.g., Vaughan, 1983), the overlapping but rarely

coterminous functions of households (e.g., production, residence, reproduction), and the demographic dynamism of household membership (e.g., Francis, 1998). Economists are, of course, not alone in decontextualizing research, and pic n mix qualitative research is equally unsatisfactory. While what follows points to the value of largely qualitative research, this should not be taken to suggest that gender analytical work is only qualitative; indeed the importance of quantitative approaches are widely recognized. After all, without the census analysis of sex ratios in India, for example, one of the major gender issues confronting south Asia would have remained unrecognized since it is only at a very large scale that adverse ratios can be identied. 11 But a great many research questions posed by gender analysis do demand indepth methods of study which are beyond the reach of large-scale sample surveys. One obvious example is the area glossed as decision making. Heroic eorts may be made to produce simple indicators on this for use in quantitative surveys, but they produce little of value because of the complexity of the interactions called decision making which can rarely be reduced to anything cut and dried enough for use in questionnaires. In general, why and how questions need in-depth research, with the intensity of interaction that large-scale surveys cannot approach and with an openendedness of interaction that is not possible with the necessary simplications of large surveys. (h) The telling as well as the typical Clyde Mitchell (1993, p. 238) used this phrase to indicate the role of case study work. Sample surveys claim to tell us something about the populations they are taken to represent and therefore typicality is important to the forms of knowledge that we derive from surveys. The in-depth case study is dierent, however, since it aims to be telling, i.e., to reveal processes and connections by a focus on the particular and the detailed, nested within a broader context. Indeed, to be telling, research may legitimately seek the atypical, the unusual and the rare. For example, in a society where marriage is almost universal, case studies of individuals who have not married can be very revealing about the workings of marriage systems. It is therefore mistaken to criticize case study work as being

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untypical (due to small numbers and sampling methods), and more appropriate to support case studies as both a complementary and stand-alone method which increase the explanatory range, the reliability and the relevance of gender and development research. Murrays research in Lesotho (Murray, 1981) was an early and important example of case study research which was tellingin showing the domestic strength, resilience and power of women despite virilocal marriage and exclusion from descent group ideologies. Qualitative research is not always purposively sampled, and there are good reasons for sometimes using random sampling (to avoid bias, even if statistical analysis is not anticipated), and for nesting case study work within a larger more quantitative analysis, but clearly the appropriate sampling approach depends on objectives. (i) Scale variations A number of development puzzles reveal a contradiction that appears to be associated with diering analytical scales. One is the generally favorable view of the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction at a macro scale, and the markedly less favorable view of this relationship which emerges from micro studies (see Palmer-Jones, 1993). Another example, in the gender eld, is the relationship between poverty and gender which appears rather dierent at dierent levels of analysis. In the long historical term, gender equity has generally risen as poverty has declined, but in the contemporary world this relationship is complex. While some hold that When economic development raises incomes and reduces poverty, gender inequalities often narrow (World Bank, 2001, p. 18), there is also evidence from micro studies for changed, and sometimes deepened, gender inequalities in the short to medium term, associated with poverty reduction (Jackson, 1996; Razavi, 1999). These perspectives maintain in valuable tension. Small-scale, in-depth studies contribute important insights, from a viewpoint situated somewhat closer to the lived experience of people in developing countries, and researchers with such styles should be engaged in a mutually critical dialogue with researchers of largescale data relationships. Furthermore, a recent statistical review of gender and poverty in 10 developing countries concludes that in coun-

tries where women are consistently worse o than men, cultural and institutional factors are responsible (Quisumbing, Haddad, & Pena, 2001), which adds further weight to the argument for more research on gender and poverty linkages by those disciplines best equipped to analyze such factors. In conclusion, this section has argued that excellence in development research requires support for sociology, anthropology and politics, not only in association with economics research but in pursuit of their own research agendas which are increasingly relevant to development goals. I have suggested that these disciplines have conceptual and methodological strengths which are particularly suited to current gender research priorities. Contradictions arising between disciplines should be celebrated as a springboard to further research, and the importance of surprise and argument in research cultures acknowledged rather than avoided. Finally, I see multidisciplinarity as a form of triangulation, for where disciplines, from their dierent vantage points, nd agreement, is likely to be rm ground for policy interventions. 5. CONCLUSION: GENDER ANALYSIS AND WOMEN RESEARCHERS It used to be thought that the gender composition of development organizations was essentially an equal opportunities issue, quite separate from the implementation of policy and practice. But gender identities of sta in development agencies have been shown to affect the ways policy is implemented, for example, women sta use their discretion in dierent ways, and therefore the gender composition of an organization is directly related to how it works. This is not, however, an argument about women being inherently better at doing gender work, simply a recognition that the experiences of women often shapes their approach to their work in distinctive ways which leads to distinctive understandings of development priorities and ways of working with others. Researchers identities aect the research they choose to do and the manner of its execution. This is, of course, no surprise to sociologists of science, who have shown how women have been excluded as knowers and connected this to how the supposed universal person of man in science, was actually a male subject

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with a particular gender identity. These gender based clusions matter because, as Rose argues, the social practices of women, grounded in the caring parts of the economy, gives rise to distinctive approaches to knowledge and therefore to their conduct of research. 12 Haraway (1989), for example, showed how in the eld of primatology male scientists interpreted primate behavior to emphasize aggression of males as functional to the evolution of the species, whilst a later generation of women primatolgists began to challenge this account with their careful observation of primate behavior in the wild, and emphasize the importance of females in groups, cooperation rather than aggression as conferring selective advantage, and the importance of time spent on feeding and survival rather than sexual domination. The connections between gender identities of researchers and the character and content of their research is complex and varies with different branches of science, but it is no accident that most gender research is done by women researchers. 13 This is because of the values which we all bring to our research, and a degree of identication between women across cultures and classes. Furthermore, pragmatically, the gender agenda has also created a niche of implicit positive discrimination for women researchers, in an otherwise male-dominated world, which has also created incentives for women researchers to take up gender elds of research. One interesting, admittedly anecdotal, observation on the marriage of economics and gender analysis is that in general the family of economics is decidedly cool about the match, 14 and there seem to be particular disciplinary

diculties faced by women gender analysts within economics, a striking number of which seem to face disciplinary rejection, evidenced by moves to sociology or geography departments. A broadening of development research beyond economics may therefore have a serendipitous eect on gender balance amongst development researchers. I am suggesting here that the gender composition and organizational cultures of research institutes and structures make a dierence to the successful pursuit of gender research and development objectives. Increasing the numbers of women researchers is important, and furthermore, such researchers should not be concentrated in junior positions alone, since information about women tends to receive policy recognition in proportion to the social and political signicance of the informer (Goetz, 1994, p. 28). Capacity-building work through scholarship programs, training and research partnerships must include training in sociology, anthropology and politics, and cognate disciplines, and eorts should be concentrated on building such expertise in developing country research institutes and universities. A shift of emphasis toward SAP is unlikely to be easy for institutions dominated by economics, for the parties to a bargain need to see that the benets of cooperation outweigh the disadvantages; SAP scholars have much experience of tokenism, and for their part economists may be satised with the status quo and unconvinced by the advantages of a properly equal relationship with other social science disciplines. This collection of papers aims to contribute to a change of heart.

NOTES
1. Gender analysis as used here is not the same as feminism, which is, at root, a conviction that women are generally disadvantaged in relation to men and that political mobilization must change this (Moore, 1988). While gender analysis diers from feminist researchin not assuming the disadvantage of women and detachment from political mobilizationit does carry with it a concern for social justice, and is clearly linked to feminism through the identities of researchers and through important methodological shared ground which is discussed further. In light of this distinction, it is a little confusing that the rst body of work I discuss is termed feminist economics, but I stick to this term since it is in general usage. 2. Sens model has not escaped critiquesee Agarwal (1997) and Kabeer (1994). 3. I am interested in an apparent dierence between multilaterals and bilaterals in this regard thoughwhy is it that the former have remained dominated to a much greater extent by economics than the latter? 4. At the Global Development Network Annual Meeting, 2001. 5. Recently, economic philosophers have also begun to work on the value of social relations as goods in

DISCIPLINING GENDER? themselves rather than as means to ends (Sugden, 2000, etc.). 6. I.e., the extent to which one accords analytical privilege to certain voices because they are believed to have a dierent, and superior, knowledges. 7. This has two implications, one for the way in which research is conducted, and two, for who conducts research; the latter is taken up in the last part of this paper. 8. There are only a few sentences remarking on the inuence of NGOs in India and Bangladesh (Narayan, 2000, p. 7), on the unrepresentativeness of the data, the underrepresentation of the very poor, and the demands of the eldwork. The description of the process leaves a strong impression of the intense inuence of research teams on the data production process, although it is said that researchers we were careful to distinguish between their own opinions and interpretations and what was actually said (2000, p. 16). Community data were aggregated to district data and then to national reports, involving yet more actors and authors. Yet in the end the words of poor people themselves are used to communicate what has been agreed to be the message because their voices are more direct, vivid, powerful and authentic than ours (2000, p. 18). 9. Both the British colonists, against sati, and the Hindu theological elite in favor of it, denied women a voice or subjectivity. Unlike the subaltern studies historians, busy trying to recover the subaltern voice, Spivak declared the subaltern to be unable to express a separate and countersubjectivity because of subordination itself.

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10. Jokes about economists often turn on their assumptions. For example, a chemist, a physicist and an economist were shipwrecked on an island, where a can of baked beans was fortunately washed up one day. The chemist said Lets soak it in sea water until it corrodes, the physicist said Lets heat it up until it bursts, and the economist said Lets assume a can opener. . .. 11. See for example, The Professional Geographer, 47, (1995), collection of papers on Should women count?. 12. She adopts a constrained essentialism in making this case. For example, when women primatologists came into the study of primates they clearly took a more empathetic and emotional approach to their subjects Jane Goodall formed strong relationships with her apes and Diane Fossey also had very strong and protective relationships with them. This is not irrationalbut could be argued to oer a kind of superrationality, of a better science. 13. Of course, men can and should do gender research of all types, but it is likely that they will do this dierently. 14. While Nobel prizewinners in economics may indeed tend to be interdisciplinary, it also seems to be the case that interdisciplinarity may be especially problematic in development economics. Ruttan recently observed of the postwar generation of development economists, that professional opinion did not deal kindly with the reputations of development economists who made a serious eort to incorporate knowledge from the other social science disciplines into development theory or into the analysis of the development process (Ruttan, 2001, p. 17).

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