“Equal relations between genders”. All of us have heard this or similar statements over the past years. I, for one, still do not know what such a thing really means. What alarms me, though, is the great extent to which “gender” is present in my work overseas where I meet and work with people of other cultures.

What I do know is that the people who use “gender” in their language are my colleagues in the development business: educated in high institutions like myself, sometimes nationals, sometimes foreigners. The distinction which I am emphasizing is that it is not where one lives, rather how one lives. “Gender”, therefore, I have come to believe to be a concept attached exclusively to one culture, my culture, the frontier-free culture of technological society (global in scope). But because “gender is not only discussed by my colleagues in light of ourselves, but also imposed (I do not use this word lightly) on the development projects in which I work, I have come to to doubt that “gender” is about equality. Much more, I now find that “gender” is about power, not between men and women, but between social classes, both abroad and at home in Canada.

The situation was described by my father after he read a full essay which I have written on the “gender” issue. He wrote the following:

Gender in Development may be a natural union of two huge cultural forces (one being western feminism and the other industrialism), strange bedfellows, led into the mission field by a moral conviction similar to the zeal of evangelists of other eras, and at another level, equally oblivious of their own covert, passionate needs for power, for destruction, and for the paradoxical rewards of futility and sacrifice.

My father’s observation implicitly states that some people are benefitting and others suffering from “gender”. Very crudely, I might sum “gender” up by saying that, rather than equality, “gender” is about removing many men and even women out of classical employment (work/labour), drawing other women out of their independent and traditional economies, so that some men and some women of a certain class (classically defined as bourgeois, contemporarily defined as technocrat) are able to obtain or maintain positions of economic and political decision-making authority. Too clearly, the evangelical zeal of those who believe in “gender” as equality blinds us all from what is actually happening.

Due to the emphasis on equality, I would like to touch on the myth of democracy which plays a very significant role in “gender”. Here in the so-called third world, the last thing we of the development class are is elected; we arrive from elsewhere, essentially uninvited. Then development practitioners equate active participation of women and men in a development project to a democratic process. Yet participation in a development project is simply participation in the development project; few practitioners have the time or resources to determine whether their development projects reflect the local polity (or local community, if you like). And at home, municipal amalgamations which reduce each person’s access to representation, growing economic disparity exacerbated by reduced redistribution of wealth, globalization. These too belie equality in its democratic sense. I return to the statement and ask, what are “equal relations between the genders”? Deceptive at least. And what if the primary beneficiaries of promulgating “gender equality” are not so much women and men, but rather women and men of a given class? Equality between the sexes does not make for equality between the classes. The question suggests that, rather than raising a general societal consciousness, “equal relations between the genders” is more akin to propaganda. So, of those who insist on incorporating such a phrase in their public language, I am deeply suspicious of, as my father suggests, a covert need for power.

February 2, 1997

jp melville