Tag Archives: gender

Hypermasculine organisations and barriers to women’s career progression in Nigeria

Dr Vanessa Iwowo shares the findings from her latest research into gender inequality in the workplace in Nigeria.

Discussions around the barriers to women’s career progression are not new to the public agenda, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has highlighted the unequal division of domestic labour and caring responsibilities in the home.

However, the majority of research in this area has been developed in the global north and thus overlooks the significance of specific economic, social and cultural conditions that exist in other contexts.

With my colleagues Toyin Ajibade Adisa (University of East London), Chima Mordi and Ruth Simpson (Brunel University), I sought to uncover the specific barriers facing women’s career progression in Nigeria.

Why Nigeria? Often referred to as the “giant of Africa”, the country is notable both for its economic prosperity and entrenched patriarchal values. The barriers to women advancing their careers in Nigeria could have wider implications for gender equality in the global south.

Gender inequality and Social Dominance Theory

Despite legislation which supports gender equality and Nigeria’s participation in international agreements to eliminate gender discrimination, the problem persists. Prior research into 190 Nigerian companies found that just 10.5% of board seats are held by women. In the civil service, where women account for 24% of the workforce, they hold less than 14% of overall management positions.

Examined through the lens of Social Dominance Theory (SDR), which purports that social groups are hierarchically positioned, we see how cultural ideologies and institutional discrimination work together to produce group-based inequality. A gender-based hierarchy dominates, where men are consistently favoured, gaining disproportionate positive social and material value at the expense of the subordinate group, women.

This group-based oppression is driven by systemic individual and institutional discrimination and supported by stereotypes, attitudes and beliefs which dictate the norms that govern institutions. These hierarchies are especially hard to break down as they are embedded in social systems.

Challenges to career advancement faced by women in Nigeria

Entrenched stereotypical attitudes about the role of women in Nigeria means that management and leadership are viewed as the exclusive domain of men, while women are seen to belong in the domestic sphere.

This hypermasculine context only serves to exacerbate the barriers faced by women in their careers. In interviews with 43 women working in the five major administrative capitals of Nigeria, we identified three key barriers to progression at work:

  1. Systemic and excessive male-group-based domination

Every woman that we spoke to identified a bias in recruitment and promotion decisions in their organisation, which inhibits women’s progression to more senior roles. An approach based on merit is overruled by a preference for a male candidate, regardless of capability. What is more, this bias is openly acknowledged, with the allocation of male candidates to senior roles seen as a foregone conclusion.

  1. Corruption and the exchange of favours

The vast majority of women that we spoke to (39 out of 43 interviewees) had personally encountered corruption in the workplace in the form of “godfatherism”, the practice wherein a woman is expected to exchange money or sexual favours for progression in the workplace.

The consequences of godfatherism are both devastating and wide-reaching: either a woman is cut off from career advancement, or she is coerced into a sexual relationship in order to progress. Such is the commonality of this practice, that the promotion of a woman is often associated with this exchange in the eyes of employees.

  1. Domestic responsibilities

The expectation that women will take full responsibility for domestic arrangements is entrenched from a young age, when girls are made to take on household responsibilities while boys are left to play. A few women also reported being overlooked for a university education in the family, due to the assumption that this was an unnecessary expense for them to fulfil their predetermined roles as wives and mothers.

A unique national context

Our research suggests that Nigerian women are being held back in their careers by discrimination and corruption particular to their national context, such as entrenched patriarchal values, assumptions about the role of women and ingrained cultural and religious beliefs.

While male dominance and barriers to women’s career progression are not unique to Nigeria, the way in which patriarchal structures are embedded across all systems and institutions is particular to the national context.

For example, there are some potential commonalities to be drawn between godfatherism and the western #MeToo movement. However, where corruption in the west is widely challenged, godfatherism is normalised. Indeed, it forms part of a wider cultural context in which it is seen as fundamentally “un-African” for a woman to lead.

Aside from denying women the right to self-actualization and economic independence, hypermasculine organisations which exploit and enforce entrenched gender roles are limited by a lack of diversity in the workforce. Social Dominance Theory would suggest that the way to overcome these barriers is through challenging the status quo and “mainstreaming” hierarchy-attenuating attitudes from non-dominant groups. A deeper understanding of these attitudes and how they manifest in the workplace may go some way towards challenging entrenched beliefs and practices and working towards a more equal future.

This blog is based on the paper ‘Social dominance, hypermasculinity and career barriers in Nigeria’ in Gender, Work & Organization.

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Why do women favour working in the public sector?

Research carried out by Birkbeck’s Dr Pedro Gomes and Professor Zoë Kuehn from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid aims to understand why women self-select to the public sector.

The public sector is a large employer, accounting for between 10 and 35 percent of total employment in OECD countries. In most countries, the public sector hires disproportionately more women than men. With my colleague Zoë Kuehn, I developed a model to try and understand this imbalance.

Through the lens of our model, we view the gender bias in public employment as driven by supply, meaning that it is not the government that acts explicitly to hire more women, but it is women that choose the public sector more so than men. Our objective was to better understand this selection, in particular, how much of it is explained by public sector job characteristics that are related to management, organization and human resource practices in the public sector.

We documented gender differences in employment, transition probabilities, hours, and wages in the public and private sector using microdata for the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. We then built a search and matching model where men and women could decide whether to participate and whether to enter private or public sector labor markets. Running counterfactual experiments, we quantified whether the selection of women into the public sector was driven by: (i) lower gender wage gaps and thus relatively higher wages for women in the public sector, (ii) possibilities of better conciliation of work and family life for public sector workers, (iii) greater job security in the public compared to the private sector, or (iv) intrinsic preferences for public sector occupations.

A natural explanation for the gender bias in public employment could be that certain types of jobs that are predominantly carried out by the government could be preferred by women. However, our research revealed that, for the US, the UK, and France, once we exclude health care and education, women’s public employment is still 20-50% higher than men’s. Interestingly enough, the gender bias is less pronounced within public health care and public education compared to other branches of public employment.

Regarding transition probabilities, we estimated that the probability of moving from employment to inactivity is higher for women, but we found this probability to be significantly lower for public sector workers.

We also provided evidence that gender wage gaps and working hours are lower in the public sector. Individuals holding full time jobs in the public sector work between 3-5% fewer hours compared to similar individuals holding full time jobs in the private sector. However, fewer working hours are just one aspect of a better work-life balance (next to additional sick days, holidays, flexibility to work from home, employer provided child care etc.). In our model we wanted to capture differences in work-life balance across sectors in an ample sense, and hence we do not use these estimates to identify any parameters. Nevertheless, our results on fewer working hours in the public sector support the claim of a better work-life balance in the public compared to the private sector.

The results of our research suggest that women’s preferences explain 20 percent of the gender bias in France, 45 percent in Spain, 80 percent in the US, and 95 percent in the UK. The remaining bias is explained by differences in public and private sector characteristics, in particular relatively higher wages for female public sector workers that explain around 30 percent in the US and Spain and 50 percent in France. Only for France and Spain do we find work-life balance to be an important driver that explains 20 to 30 percent of the gender bias. Higher job security in the public sector actually reduces the gender bias because it is valued more by men than by women.

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Public-Private Partnerships viewed through a gender lens

In a new paper, published in the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, Dr Jasmine Gideon argues that despite their current popularity, Public-Private Partnerships need to be reviewed through a gender lens in order to establish whether they are really enabling the health sector to address wider social determinants of health and to ensure the longer-term success of any pro-women healthcare interventions.

Credit: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development.

Credit: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development.

Good health and sustainable development are widely acknowledged to be inextricably linked, and the promotion of health and well-being is an essential element in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  Within SDG3, ‘Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages’, governments have pledged to ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) care services by 2030.

One of the approaches often cited as necessary to provide universal access is through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in health. The term PPP has been used in a variety of different contexts, but in the case of delivery of SRH services, PPPs have been used to fund and implement social franchising and health care voucher programmes in the Global South. They typically tie the recipient to a specified good or service package, such as medical consultations during pregnancy, provided by specified service providers who are often private practitioners or private sector facilities.  The approaches have grown in popularity since 2000 because:

  • they have been promoted by a range of aid donors including DFID and USAID
  • they are relatively easy to administer and to measure and monitor,
  • they are considered to be a way of encouraging poor households to use services e.g. family planning that they would not otherwise access.

However, there is criticism about the lack of evidence to sustain the claims made about the effectiveness of PPPs in improving access to health care services, and a recent paper by Benjamin M. Hunter, Susan F. Murray and I has argued that such PPPs may do little to address gender inequalities in health. We highlight the need to apply a ‘gender lens’ to the debate around the effectiveness of PPPs in SRH. We propose three key questions that should be asked of all PPP programmes to determine whether issues of gender inequality have been considered:

  1. What are the assumptions underpinning agendas in SRH-PPP interventions?
  2. How are SRH-PPP programmes framed and judged?
  3. To what extent do the SRH-PPP interventions take into account, reinforce or confront the existing realities of gendered social and economic life?

Applying these questions to a case study of a voucher scheme in India, we found that the design of the voucher programme was based on an assumed relationship between use of formal healthcare and decreased mortality and fertility, and the assumed superior effectiveness of private healthcare ‘markets’. The programme was framed as ‘innovative’ yet programme documents indicate the emphasis was on demonstrating rather than testing vouchers as a healthcare delivery model, and claims of success were made based on changes in healthcare use that were not adjusted for government programmes running concurrently.

The scheme in India did little to confront gender norms and values that are deeply embedded within health systems as well as the households that interact with them. For example despite the claims in programme documents to give pregnant women a choice of facility where they wish to give birth, in reality the decision was made by a husband, mother-in-law, female community health worker or the worker’s male supervisor.

The case study also shows that while PPPs claim to address gender-based inequalities, they do so within a limited framework whose simplistic focus on the gaps in women’s health fails to consider the socially constructed relations between men and women. Such PPPs therefore become part of a wider trend of interventions that have contributed to the depoliticization of women’s health and instead maintain a simplistic focus on maternal health that ignores the gendered power relations.

We argue that despite their adoption as the buzzwords of the moment it is not clear that PPP arrangements move us closer towards the ability of the health sector to address the wider social determinants of health that are critical to ensuring the longer-term success of any pro-women healthcare intervention. Applying a gender lens to review the evidence is one way that we can move closer to this goal.

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Handbook on Gender and Health

This post was contributed by Dr Jasmine Gideon, senior lecturer in Development Studies at Birkbeck’s Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies. Here, Dr Gideon offers an insight into her new book: The Handbook on Gender and Health

My monograph ‘Gender, Globalization and Health in a Latin American Context’ develops the idea of a gendered political economy of health and uses this framework to consider health reform in Chile. Compiling the Handbook on Gender and Health offered me an opportunity to develop my ideas further through directly engaging with a wide range of

Dr Gideon's book cover features an piece by Gambian artist Suelle Nachif titled 'Faj' ('heal')

Dr Gideon’s book cover features a piece by Gambian artist Suelle Nachif titled ‘Faj’ (‘heal’)

academics and policy makers working in this area.

The Handbook offered an opportunity to highlight empirical examples from across the globe and draw attention to case study analysis of specific issues that I was not able to include in my own book. Working on the Handbook was also a chance to think about what my ‘dream team’ of authors would look like and bring together a wide range of writers working on a variety of health-related issues, ranging from the historical development of health systems and how women and men are located within this to more ‘contemporary’ debates around migration, climate change and low paid labour which all have critical implications for health, particularly when viewed through a gender lens.

The Handbook brings together a wide range of disciplinary perspectives to consider four overarching themes, all constituting distinct but over-lapping elements of a broader gendered political economy of health. These are:

Gender equity vs gender equality

The first theme is the tension between ideas of gender equity and gender equality and how these translate in practice when applied to the health sector. Chapters explore the difference between ‘reductionist’ approaches where categories of women and men are not sufficiently explored, for example by failing to address how other axes of inequality (e.g. race/age/ class) can affect people’s ability to engage with health systems. In contrast a gender equality approach seeks to promote gender justice.

According to UN Women (2010), this entails ending the inequalities between women and men that are produced and reproduced in the family, the community, the market and the state. However, at the same time it requires that mainstream institutions are more accountable and transparent and points to the second theme discussed in the book.

Dr Jasmine Gideon

Dr Jasmine Gideon

The gendered nature of health systems

Several of the chapters reflect on the need to uncover the gendered nature of the health system itself and shed light on the diverse ways in which women’s interests are frequently marginalised or health policies work to reinforce women’s gendered roles and responsibilities.

Including marginalised voices

The third theme that is examined is the importance of incorporating the voices of excluded groups in policy processes as several chapters highlight the health costs of failing to engage with marginalised sectors of society.

Challenging ‘one size fits all’

Finally the fourth theme that emerges from a number of the chapters is the importance of appropriate policy responses and a move away from the ‘one size fits all’ approach, often espoused by international donors and global health discourses.

Within the Handbook authors from the Global North and South highlight how many of these challenges have wider relevance to all of our lives and that ‘gender’ remains central to any analysis of health, regardless of the level of development within the health system or wider economy.

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