I arrived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in June 1987 to carry out dissertation research on the political impact of the informal economy during the height of the economic crisis. Women's enterprises were at center of this untaxed, unregulated economy that was a main source of livelihood for most Tanzanians. My study was to show, in part, the extent to which the informal economy was gendered, and how this had affected economic liberalization in Tanzania.Footnote 1 I enthusiastically awoke on my first morning and went to a local fish market to talk to fish sellers, eager to plunge into my fieldwork and get a feel for the issues. I started talking to a woman in a long loose black veil (buibui) and asked her about her work, her life, how life had changed over the past five years, and what concerns the fish traders faced as the crisis deepened. She answered my questions without hesitation, but then abruptly turned around to ask me, “What is the benefit of your research? What purpose will it serve?”
I was taken aback. These were reasonable questions for her to ask, but not ones I had come prepared to answer. Responding that I was doing all this to get my Ph.D. sounded embarrassingly self-serving, especially given the extremely harsh conditions under which Tanzanians were living at the time. On the other hand, saying that my research was going to contribute to changes in policy toward women in the informal sector in Tanzania was presumptuous. What policies? To what end? And would she benefit? I was only 20 minutes into my fieldwork and I had fallen into an existential crisis of sorts. I don't recall how I responded to her and no one has asked me those same questions since then, even though I have subsequently conducted two decades of research in Tanzania and Uganda, and more recently in Liberia and Angola. But I have asked myself those same questions many a time.
These concerns about doing research that mattered drew me into gender/women's studies because I, like many, believed this was a field that was about transforming society. I would like to see a comparative politics of gender (CPG) scholarship emerge in which women still matter and in which the elimination of gender inequality is at the core of its concerns. The study of gender and the study of gender from a feminist perspective are not one and the same. We have seen the development of gender and politics in international relations (IR), where feminist IR gave rise to the study of gender and IR (GIR). However, today these are two related and intersecting approaches with some important differences between them. Many GIR scholars have antipathy toward linking feminist social justice concerns to scholarship and toward placing women as the subject of their inquiry.Footnote 2 Gender studies has grown to incorporate masculinity studies; studies of heteronormativity; analysis of intersections of gender with race, class, and sexuality; and even post-feminist, a-feminist, neo-feminist, non-feminist, or anti-feminist work.
Gender and politics research is at the same time becoming increasingly delinked from the social justice imperative of earlier feminist scholars as it has sought and gained greater legitimacy within the discipline of political science.Footnote 3 This gravitation toward the core of the discipline has been part of an important and necessary effort to legitimize the subfield. It has made it possible for scholars who do not have an overriding normative interest in advancing gender equality to legitimately study gender differences and focus on gender as a variable. At the same time, it raises concerns that scholarship will become less tied to notions and practices of interdisciplinarity, which are necessary in answering complex multifaceted problems; that it will be less problem driven; and that it will thus become less relevant to the real world concerns relating to gender.
These questions arise less from a concern about existing research and more from a concern about what the present drift toward disciplinarity means for CPG. From its inception, the academic field of women's studies was conceived of fundamentally as an interdisciplinary field that sought to create knowledge to respond to the needs of the women's movement and to challenge the existing disciplines. There has been a longstanding normative commitment to the empowerment of women and the importance of considering the agency of women. These assumptions have increasingly come under attack from gender studies scholars within political scienceFootnote 4 and without.Footnote 5 Indeed, debates over these concerns seem to have been especially lively in the area of feminist international relations,Footnote 6 but also more generally in the field of gender and politics.
CPG is a broad enough field to accommodate many approaches and areas of inquiry relating to gender, and in the interests of academic pluralism this should be encouraged. However, I would hope that core concerns of CPG can also respond to feminist politics defined globally. My concern arises from my feminist sensibilities, but goes beyond them. I wish to argue that as we embrace CPG, we need to find ways to see that it remains relevant to real-world concerns and that it responds to the many challenges confronting women around the globe.
This essay starts with a discussion of the parameters of CPG as it has evolved in the US. It situates its evolution within the context of the broader field of gender and politics and outlines the existing features of CPG. It goes on to argue for CPG scholarship that retains normative social justice concerns and is attentive to 1) the range and relevance of the questions we ask, the methods we use, and balance between disciplinary and interdisciplinarity in our work; 2) the research collaborations we develop, especially outside of the US–Europe nexus; 3) the ways that our work is disseminated; and 4) how it engages the policy and practitioner communities.
Key Components of a Comparative Politics of Gender
The study of gender in comparative politics is a fairly new subfield in the US, yet it has become one of the major areas of gender and politics research in a fairly short period of time. In fact, 31 percent of the members of the Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) identify themselves as comparativists, which is higher than the 21 percent proportion for APSA as a whole.Footnote 7 Many of us see ourselves not only as comparativists who incorporate gender perspectives, but as developing a comparative politics of gender.
CPG could be defined as an approach that looks at gender as central to political processes and institutions. Unlike the earlier women and politics literature, which focused on differences between men and women as political actors, voters, and consumers of politics through the media, the CPG interest is in understanding how masculinities and femininities interact with organizations, institutions and processes.Footnote 8
At its core is an interest in the ways in which political institutions—as well as social, cultural, and economic ones—are organized to maintain systematic gender-based inequalities and power relationships through norms and logics of domination. CPG looks at how these inequalities and forms of domination evolve, how they are maintained, and how they are dismantled.
CPG also looks at gender as it creates mutually constituted identities based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, and other differences. Sometimes these identities clash, at other times particular identities take precedence over others. This means that at times the gender identity may be most important one, but in other circumstances other identities might be seen as more salient.
CPG incorporates a notion of agency in so far as it pays attention to how various actors, including social movements, femocrats, and politicians are involved in challenging and transforming the gendered nature of institutions. This is captured in Karen Beckwith's notion of gender as a process in which actors can “work to produce favorable gendered outcomes.”Footnote 9
The Evolution of a Subfield
The emergence of CPG is a sign of maturity in the study of gender and comparative politics and an indication that we are coming into our own as a subfield. The evolution of CPG both parallels and departs from the trajectories of other political science subfields. Carole PatemanFootnote 10 has shown that as feminist political theory evolved, it started with feminist analysis of classical texts, then moved on to expand the range of questions being asked in political theory and ultimately developed a distinctive feminist theory. Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes argued that this process was compressed in the evolution of feminist IR, which engaged all three steps simultaneously, because it was able to build on existing interdisciplinary and political theory perspectives.Footnote 11 The consequence was the emergence of a post-positivist perspective from the outset. More recently, gender and IR has parted ways with feminist IR, which is more engaged in critiques of mainstream IR and its constitutive categories and frequently addresses its own marginality in the field. GIR, on the other hand, encompasses a wider range of questions relating to gender and is more interested in working within and engaging mainstream IR. Whether or not GIR has been mainstreamed remains to be seen.
In comparative politics we have largely skipped the first and second stages that Pateman outlined, having drawn from other disciplines for many of our basic understandings of the distinctions between sex and gender, difference and equality feminism, intersectionality, critiques of essentialism, and other such concepts. We have also built on the ideas of other political science subfields relating, for example, to the gendered nature of citizenship, nationalism, democracy, civil society, and the public/private dichotomy. We have broadened the scope of comparative politics to incorporate topics not previously considered, e.g., inquiry into women's movements and how they affect state policy; how democratization has not had the same effects on women as men; the role of femocrats, the role of women politicians, and other such actors; state feminism; and the gendered impacts of various electoral rules and systems through open and closed systems, district and party magnitude, gatekeepers, nomination procedures, electoral quotas, and the like. We have looked at why some states are more open to demands of women's movements than others and why women's movements have been able to influence some state institutions more easily than others.
However, unlike political theory and feminist IR, the new comparative politics of gender has focused less on critiquing the basic concepts of conventional political science and has been more interested in looking at the ways in which institutions, policies, and processes are gendered. How are courts, legislatures, and bureaucracies gendered? Which institutional strategies for women's rights reform work best in which countries? Which types of gender frames work best for which types of policy reform? Under what conditions are states most amenable to gender-related reforms?
Is There a Place for Social Justice in a Comparative Politics of Gender?
Recently within gender studies there have been new debates about the longstanding goal of linking scholarship to practice. Outside of political science, Robyn Wiegman, for example, sees the academic feminist imperative to inject a practical agenda into academic feminism as part of a counterproductive “attempt to write movement subjectivity as the field's origin and reproductive goal.” She believes that the ideal of feminist praxis generates a disciplining function for the field of women's studies and creates new disciplinary hegemonies.Footnote 12 Others within political science, like Marysia Zalewski,Footnote 13 similarly argue that the idea that feminist theory can be used normatively to address social injustice is based on the false premise that there can be a coherence to academic feminism that would contain the basis for global policy prescriptions.Footnote 14 For GIR theorists, the social justice goals of feminist IR become an obstacle to greater acceptance in the general field of political science.
Unlike Wiegman and Zalewski, I do not regard these relationships between theory and praxis as problematic. First, not all academic questions need to be driven by the many, diverse, and even conflicting concerns of practitioners. There certainly is room and a need for theoretical developments outside of practical or political concerns. Indeed, there must be spaces where more abstracted feminist theorizing can occur. There is no reason for every theory to inform a practical concern directly, not only for reasons of academic pluralism and continued vibrancy of scholarship, but also because one often needs theoretical developments at many levels to inform more practical concerns. Second, there are no perfect solutions to “real world problems,” nor are there absolute agreements on the best policies to advocate or pursue among feminists or others for that matter. Sometimes there isn't even agreement on the problem. But not to use one's knowledge to inform change creates paralysis and undermines one of the core purposes of institutions of higher learning. It ultimately resigns our research to irrelevance in society. This pertains not only to gender and women's studies, but to the broader academic enterprise. Finally, not only is there inherent value in using knowledge to benefit society directly or indirectly, but our questions and ultimately our theories would also improve if they were informed by and reflected questions that needed answers in the real world. It is here where the major breakthroughs in theory can be most fruitfully made.
Thus, if the research that we do, especially as social scientists, is going to make a difference, it needs to respond to questions that come out of feminist global practice, however messy the process. There still remains the dilemma of whose theory and whose practice? Not all academics have the same viewpoint and some have quite contradictory approaches. What does practice mean in such a context? How should multiple feminist theoretical perspectives be reflected in such diverse agendas? These are questions that will remain and will ultimately be sorted out through political processes.
Comparative Politics and Gender Questions and Methods
The methodological preoccupations of the political science discipline have led many gender and politics scholars to focus on questions of female representation and public opinion because of the privileging of quantitative methodologies and the increasing availability of crossnational data in these areas. Certainly the gender gap in political representation is one of the most glaring inequalities globally. While these studies are important and necessary (and I too have contributed to them), it is at the same time disconcerting that there is minimal expertise anywhere to analyze the gender implications of this global economic crisis globally and crossnationally other than in the most cursory way. There have been virtually no academic studies by comparativists of some of most significant trends globally relating to the feminization of globalization and of labor.Footnote 15 A recent study by the APSA Task Force on Difference and Inequality in the Developing World mentioned women only in passing, yet some of the most severe inequalities in the world today fall along gender lines. The preoccupation with political equality has pushed to the side important issues of economic inequality, as Anne Phillips argues, with serious implications for women.Footnote 16
We desperately need quantitative and qualitative research on the political dimensions of countless areas that we know little about. In the study of gender and human rights, for example, we confront questions like: How do we resolve tensions between cultural and women's rights in concrete circumstances? How and why are new constitutional reforms incorporating women's rights? How should we understand gender relations in the context of customary law in legal pluralistic societies? What does citizenship mean for refugees and internally displaced peoples, most of whom are women? Studies of access to resources might consider: What are the gender implications of access to water? How does gender affect land tenure regimes in agrarian countries? In the area of gender and conflict: What have been the constraints on the implementation of UN Resolution 1325 on women in conflict and post-conflict settings? Why have women's rights advocates made more gains in advancing women's rights in some post-conflict countries than in others? With respect to policy concerns: Why do countries unsympathetic to democracy adopt legislation favorable to women's rights? What policy frames have been most advantageous for women under what circumstances?
Many new questions have also emerged as a result of movements of people (migrants, refugees, legal and illegal laborers, trafficked sex workers, professionals creating brain drains), but also transnational flows of ideas, cultures, remittances, and capital. What are the gendered dimensions, impacts, and challenges of these transnational flows?
Answers to such multifaceted problem-driven questions require that we go beyond narrower disciplinary approaches.Footnote 17 Interdisciplinarity makes it easier to align knowledge with action, recognizing that real-world problems generally do not present themselves in disciplinary packages.Footnote 18 However, interdisciplinarity runs against the disciplinary grain that is gaining momentum in the study of gender and politics and poses real challenges to those who bring insights from other disciplines.
Related to the types of questions asked are the methods employed. Our choices regarding methods, regardless of whether they are quantitative or qualitative, should derive from the questions we ask. We should avoid the impulse that one finds in sections of the discipline to develop questions in order to employ particular methods and easily available data. Many of the aforementioned types of questions cannot be answered without going to the “field” and learning first hand what is happening.
Gender and comparative politics is a fairly new area of inquiry and has thus far remained fairly grounded in women's concerns globally, largely because fieldwork is such a central component of what comparativists do. Fieldwork serves as a strong antidote to irrelevance and triviality. There is nothing like talking directly to people affected by a particular problem to give one a sense of the real issues at hand and their complexity. It requires taking the lives of women and men seriously, including their values, perceptions, problems, hopes, joys, and fears. It is the centrality of fieldwork in the study of comparative politics that gives me confidence that our questions will remain grounded and useful.
Fieldwork also makes it possible to make micro/macro linkages, connecting what happens in the daily lives of people to the macro changes, processes, and larger institutional developments. Our ability to look at politics from the bottom up, from the point of view of the dispossessed and marginalized, is one of our strengths and one of the unique contributions that CGP can make. This is especially important for those working in developing countries, where we see some of the biggest gender gaps in access to resources and development capabilities.
Nevertheless, there are tendencies in the discipline and beyond to engage in work that is driven by methods rather than problems in the world. In response to such tendencies, Rogers M. Smith astutely observed that “it is both prudent and responsible to make political science centrally concerned with political questions that command wide interest, to do this work honestly, and to present our results in ways that many can understand.”Footnote 19
International Research Networks
Many of the aforementioned questions, especially the ones related to transnationalism, cannot be answered by scholars within one country alone. While we need single country case studies, in order to develop theory we ultimately need comparisons. While some comparisons can be done within one country or longitudinally, more often than not we need to look at multiple countries. Depending on the scope of our questions, we thus need to incorporate international perspectives and global collaborations.
The complexity of the types of questions that need consideration require broader collaborations and a variety of skills, training, knowledge bases and resources. Moreover, they require a depth of background in countries that few scholars can master on their own given the requisite time, language skills, and cultural and political background. There currently exist excellent collaborative models, including Research Network on Gender Politics and the state (RNGS), “Quality in Gender + Equality Policies (QUING) and the European Commission MAGEEQ project on gender mainstreaming.Footnote 20 More such interdisciplinary collaborations ought to be developed, especially beyond North America and Europe.
Engaging Policy and Practitioner Communities
More, not less, effort needs to be made to understand competing policy frames, to address policy- and process-related questions, and to create knowledge and develop theories that can inform such questions. These may be questions that are of concern to women's movements; legislators, bureaucrats, and policy makers in the US and abroad; policy makers in the United Nations and other multilateral agencies; foreign donors; the media; international non-governmental organizations, e.g., Amnesty International and International Crisis Group; and most of all, women themselves.
Feminist practitioners often critique gender studies for being irrelevant to their concerns. For example, Charlotte Bunch, who is a leading US advocate for women's rights as human rights in the United Nations and other international policy circles, observed that “not enough of the theory is being related to feminist practice … the way that I see theory being discussed in the university often seems to ignore the concrete struggles … of most women in the world.”Footnote 21 Sometimes such critiques can be seen as misdirected at social scientists when in fact their targets are scholars in the humanities who engage in work that is not intended for policy makers. At times there is also insufficient knowledge of and acknowledgement of existing work that does provide a basis from which to inform practice. There is much that is done, for example, in comparative political science gender research that is very pertinent to the real-world concerns of practitioners like Bunch.
However, seen from the perspective of practitioners outside of academia, there is insufficient work that addresses their concerns. In the area of comparative gender studies, for whatever reason, our expertise is not greatly sought after by national or transnational women's rights organizations, nor by United Nations agencies, the World Bank, independent think tanks, foundations, governmental agencies, international non-governmental organizations, and other decision makers.
A few years ago I participated in a discussion between academics and high-ranking individuals working on gender and security issues with the United Nations Foundation for Women (UNIFEM), the UN Office of the Special Advisor on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women, the Department of Disarmament Affairs, the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, and the UN Division for the Advancement of Women. We were discussing ways in which academia could interface with such agencies around issues of women and civil conflict. Although there had been calls from leaders of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs to strengthen ties to academics, little had happened on this front. The UN Resolution 1325 to increase women's participation in all aspects of peacekeeping included the mandate to accumulate as much knowledge as possible on women and peace building and in general there was interest in establishing broad knowledge networks involving academics.
Some participants in the aforementioned discussion were quite candid about the constraints on tapping into academic expertise; in part they found it difficult to identify scholars who did the kind of research they could use. The mechanisms to identify such scholars did not exist. They were concerned primarily that academics did not do the kind of research they needed or found useful. At the same time, they felt academics would find the kinds of topics on which they needed expertise to be too applied and therefore not of interest. They felt scholars would not perceive such subjects as acceptable as dissertation topics, nor would they help in getting tenure. Their turnaround time for consultancies did not fit the academic schedule. I found most shocking that not one of these organizations had access to academic databases for articles like Web of Knowledge, Proquest, JSTOR, or Academic Search. One individual in this group of eight policymakers had a library card at Columbia University that she used on rare occasions. The kind of research we did in general was not of use to them and when they did need background information, they drew on the gray literature on the web. We were told point blank that universities were virtually irrelevant to their mission although they indicated that they were interested in collaborating with universities and welcomed such initiatives.
There are several aspects to this dilemma, which is partly a product of differences in the evolution of cultures of academia and of practitioners. Part of the dilemma has to do simply with where we publish and the ways in which knowledge is packaged, conveyed, and distributed. We don't make it a practice to condense our findings into shorter, more readable and accessible pieces, complete with the requisite executive summary bullet points. Often the academic style of writing is inaccessible to many practitioners and policy makers. If the writing is not jargon laden, the quantitative presentation of data may become another barrier. We also don't publish or make our work available in venues that are read by policy makers. In other words, we don't take the extra step of “translating” our work to be read in more user-friendly venues, as Susan Carroll puts it.Footnote 22 Moreover, there are few academic incentives to publishing in policy journals, in newspapers, or online. Such problems are not peculiar to gender studies. They affect academia as a whole.
Other problems pertain to practitioners themselves. The fast-paced, deadline-driven culture of these types of agencies affords little time to absorb background research of any kind.Footnote 23 And these agencies typically lack awareness of and appreciation for the existing work that is done within academia and how it might be of value to practitioners. For example, with respect to the policy-making community's engagement in security issues, Andrew Mack explained that “policy is often determined by mandates, past practice and politics, with little reference to the findings and prescription of academic researchers, much of whose work tends to be viewed with skepticism. This is particularly true at the UN which, unlike the World Bank, has few resources with which to undertake in-house research and lacks a research-oriented culture”.Footnote 24
Conclusions
An emerging comparative politics of gender approach looks at the ways in which masculinities and femininities influence institutions; norms; and social, economic, and political processes around the globe. It uses gender as the analytical lens through which systems of inequality are laid bare. It also looks at gender, as it is constituted through its intersections with other socially significant identities like race and class, among others. It looks at the gendered workings of institutions, but is able to also see how they are formed, maintained, and transformed through the agency of actors. It links the micro foundations of people's lives with political macro processes, and is especially concerned with those who are most disempowered.
I have thus advocated for a Comparative Politics of Gender that is scholarly and yet also responds to the challenges facing women, men, and children around the world, and especially to the needs of practitioners within women's movements and international institutions. This involves problem-driven rather than methods-driven research, and it involves drawing on interdisciplinary approaches that are best suited to answering the complex, multidimensional problems of the real world.
I have also called for new international forms of collaboration and research, especially beyond the US–European nexus, that better respond to the comparative challenges of data collection and theory building. Becoming more engaged in global collaborative research is key to strengthening our theories, making them more attentive to the complexity of the human experience, and more relevant to real-world problems. And better engagements between academics and practitioner/policy communities will enhance both the intellectual and the ethical value of our work.
Answering the Dar es Salaam fish seller's question—“What is the benefit of your research? What purpose will it serve?”—was difficult because even if my answer had been “to do good” and “to expose the concerns of informal sector workers,” intentions do not always translate into positive action. How does one determine “good?” Good for whom? Whose idea of good? How good? There are many interests and many ways to respond to those interests from a policy perspective. As Burkinabe historian and philosopher Joseph Ki-Zerbo (1922–1996) put it: “Professional intellectuals are fully aware that thought is not an innocent exercise.”Footnote 25 Even if we ask the right questions, gain better understanding of each other's languages and concepts, use interdisciplinary approaches to answer them, and gain useful insights, it is worth bearing in mind that knowledge can be put to many uses, including those we do not intend. But the best way for us to ensure that our knowledge promotes good in the world is to be mindful about the values we support, attentive to the complex linkages between scholarship and political practice, and always open to a revision of our understandings in the light of experience.
