Away From Gender Equality: Rural Senegalese Responses to Women’s Empowerment Programs

• In Event: 248 - Section on Sociology of Development Paper Session. Inequality and Development

Abstract

Abstract: Most every currently active development project involves explicit “gender equality” or “women’s empowerment” programs. Yet, how do recipients of these programs respond to the meaning problem that arises when local cultural and religious notions of gender meet Western NGO (nongovernmental organization) gender equality discourse? I answer this question with survey and in depth interview data from three Senegalese villages that have received varying numbers of gender equality interventions. Empirically, I mediate between two opposed strands of the development literature. One shows that participants in gender equality programs abandon local cultural practices to adopt the gender discourse championed by a given NGO. The other holds that NGOs do not shift the cultural investments of program participants. The OLS regressions that I present reveal that Senegalese men and women in villages with the most gender equality interventions in fact reject gender equality. Generally, they actively entrench themselves in the local cultural repertoire that supports, and is shaped by, unequal interdependence. Theoretically, I respond to Swidler’s (1986) assertion that when two different ways of organizing action vie for predominance, the costliness of cultural retooling leads people to continue drawing from the cultural repertoire that is familiar to them. I show that when cultural retooling in rural Senegal takes the form of entrenchment in the familiar cultural repertoire, it does not appear to be prohibitively costly.

Author

• Kristen Nelson, University of California-Berkeley