240001 VO+UE VM7 / VM3 - Gender at work in development (2023W)

This course seeks to enable participants to interrogate and intervene in the ways in which hierarchies of gender influence people’s work, its material and symbolic rewards and conditions. ‘Gender’ is understood here as the culturally diverse and historically changing meanings given to perceived differences of sex, plural meanings that go beyond the feminine-masculine binary.

The course highlights the gendered distinction between productive and reproductive work, with feminised reproductive work being characteristic of many cultures (re)shaped by local patriarchies. This distinction is crucial for social policies that are directly and indirectly related to work and employment, aggravating inequalities if such policies are formulated in a gender-blind manner. We will discuss examples of how these gendered divisions of work are intertwined with other social hierarchies, starting from class, but also including race, caste and generation, among others. Many of these discussions will be informed by feminist political economy perspectives.

The course centers around the challenges that workers of different genders experience at work. We will learn from the creative interventions that workers themselves have developed for greater gender and wider social justice. These solutions simultaneously counter gendered material structures and discourses and use such structures and discourses as a resource.

Day 1: Understanding gender@work

This session introduces definitions of work and employment and their feminist critiques, the course’s structure as well as its participants.

Before the start of the course, participants will be asked to upload a picture of themselves that is related to gender@work on an online document. During the morning of Day 1, participants will get the opportunity to introduce themselves and their motivation to join the course based on this image. Sharing a picture related to gender@work visualizes participants’ implicit understandings of work and employment, that way providing a springboard into the discussion of definitions of work and employment as well as feminist critiques. After a break, the objectives, components, and flow of the course will be introduced, including the Gender@Work wiki (see description above).

In the afternoon plenary of Day 1, course participants will be asked to note down terms for work and employment in their native languages. The diverse connotations of terms related to work and employment in participants’ mother tongues will enable a contextualized discussion of definitions of work and employment and prepare the ground for an engagement with feminist critiques.

The film screening of ‘Udita’ (Arise) in the evening of Day 1 (19-21hrs) will provide an opportunity for informal exchange and a relaxed conclusion of the first day of the course.

Learning objectives
At the end of this day, course participants will be enabled to:
Formulate definitions of work and employment as well as critiques raised by feminists in their own words.

Film ‘Udita’

Day 2: Diverse genders intersect with the world of work

Day 3: En-gendering workers’ collective agency

Day 4: Debating gender justice in employment policies

Day 5: Harvesting and conclusion

Contents
The first part of Day 5 will be devoted to the harvesting of learnings from the Gender@Work wiki entries. Authors will communicate and exemplify their entry after which they will be discussed collectively. The session concludes with an evaluation of the course week.