Breaking with legacies? Gender Mainstreaming and Women's NGOs in Ukraine.

• In Event: Civil society and gender

Abstract

Soviet legacies are seen as having negative impacts on institutional and economic arrangements, in particular with regard to nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and civil society more broadly (Kamerade et al., 2016). The unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought to the fore the continuing political tensions across what can be seen as the 'post-Socialist' space. The war also illustrates countries' divergent paths. This is even more so in areas that not only require legislative but also cultural changes, such as gender equality.

In this paper, we use the concept of 'gender mainstreaming' or GM to explore the role women NPOs play in gender equality in Ukraine. Following the 4th UN Conference on Women in 1995, GM is accepted as 'a globally accepted policy strategy that promotes the assessment of institutions, legislation, policies, and programs to determine their potential or real gendered impacts with the ultimate goal of advancing gender equality' (Hankivsky, 2010: 631). Ukraine, while having legislation that ensures gender equality, it remains a concept detached from Ukrainian society and culture (Barrett et al., 2012; Vijeyarasa, 2012). Consequently, laws on prosecuting and preventing domestic violence and criminalizing trafficking have made little difference to women's lives (Barrett et al., 2012; Vijeyarasa, 2012). Furthermore, the perceived need to break with Soviet legacies to assert a Ukrainian national identity (Kuzio, 2002) has focused on maternalism and family (Hrycak, 2006; Kebalo, 2007). Thus, this raises the question of whether and how Ukrainian Women's NPOs can advance progressive ideas such as GM.

To explore this, we operationalize data collected from the Ukrainian women's movement before the invasion in Feb 2022. Using a semi-structured interview approach with seven women's NGOs, we present discourse that highlights the continuing influence of Soviet cultural antecedents, coupled with an operating environment hostile to the goals of women's organizations, that have a limiting effect on the scope of their operations, and by extension GM.

These include hetero-normative assumptions on gender roles, the rejection of 'feminism' as a legitimate construct and the conflation of gender and sexuality as something inherently negative. These findings mirror scholars' insight of women's NPOs in the Russian Federation (Rivkin-Fish, 2010; Lemova, 2021). However, Ukraine does not prevent women's organizations from accessing overseas donor funding or have strict regulations on who can and cannot register as an NPO (Ljubownikow et al., 2013). Yet despite this, our data indicates that Ukrainian women's groups have struggled to contextualize global movement trends (for example, #metoo), challenge cultural norms, and/or advance GM. Instead, they have focused on women's assistance and empowerment, specifically working to help victims of trafficking and domestic violence, as well as education aimed to ensure economic independence. Hence, women's NPOs focus on addressing what they perceive are pressing needs as well as their perceived causes (economic dependence). In so doing, women's NPOs mirror approaches from the Soviet women's movement, which aimed to help women combine child rearing (a pressing need) and career (economic independence).

References

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Authors

• Jo Crotty, Edge Hill University

• Sergej Ljubownikow, Sheffield University