Gender in World Politics

Introduction

Feminist perspectives entered the International Relations discipline at the end of the 1980s, at
about the same time as the end of the cold war. This was not a coincidence. During the previous
forty years, the conflict between the USA and the Soviet Union had dominated the agenda of
international Relations. The decade after the end of the cold war (1989-2000) was one of relative
peace between the major powers. Many new issues appeared on the International Relations
agenda. More attention was paid to economic relations. There were lively debates between
proponents of economic globalization and those who claimed that it was not helping to reduce
world poverty. The meaning of ‘security' was expanded to include human as well as state
security. International Relations began to pay more attention to ethno-national conflicts and to
the high number of civilians killed or injured in these conflicts. More attention was also paid to
international organizations, social movements, and non-state actors. As the globalization theme
of this book makes clear, international politics is about much more than inter-state relations. This
broad set of issues seems the most compatible with feminist approaches. Feminists are not
satisfied.

Feminism as an academic discipline grew out of the feminist movement of the 1960s and l 970s-
a movement dedicated to achieving political, social, and economic equality for women. Many
feminists link constructing knowledge to political practice. This form of knowledge-building is
called emancipatory knowledge. It means producing knowledge that can help inform practices to
improve women's lives. The most important goal for feminist theory is to explain women's
subordination, which exists to varying degrees in all societies, and to seek ways to end it.
However, feminists disagree on the reasons for this subordination and, thus, how to overcome it.
There are many different types of feminist theory. They all give us different reasons for women's
subordination. They include liberal, Marxist, socialist, post-colonial, and poststructural. Liberal
feminists believe that removing with framing international politics solely in terms of inter-state
politics. While women have always been players in international politics, their participation has
more often taken place in non-governmental settings such as social movements rather than in
inter-state policy-making.

Women also participate in international politics as diplomats' wives, as nannies going abroad to
find work to support their families, and as sex workers trafficked across international boundaries.
Women's voices have rarely been heard in the halls of state power or in the leadership of
militaries. Nevertheless, women are deeply affected by decisions that their leaders make.
Civilian casualties constitute about 90 per cent of the casualties in today's wars, and women and
children make up the majority of these casualties. Women are the majority of the world's poorest
population. Economic policies, constructed in distant centres of power, affect how resources are
distributed in local communities. Broader global frameworks are more suited to investigating
these issues.
Feminist Theories

 There are many feminist theories. They include liberal, Marxist, socialist, post-colonial,
and poststructural.
 All feminist theories are trying to explain women's subordination: however, they all have
different reasons for women's subordination.

Feminists define Gender

 Feminists define gender as a set of socially constructed characteristics that define what
we mean by masculinity and femininity.
 Gender is a system of social hierarchy in which masculine characteristics are more
valued than feminine ones.
 Gender is a structure that signifies unequal power relationships between women and men.

Putting a Gender Lens on Globalization

 IR feminists use gender-sensitive lenses to help them answer questions about why women
often play subordinate roles in global politics.
 Liberal feminists believe that women's equality can be achieved by removing legal
obstacles that deny women the same opportunities as men.
 Post-liberal feminists argue that we must look more deeply at unequal gendered
structures in order to understand women's subordination.
 Feminist critical theorists show how both ideas and material structures shape people's
lives, and how changes in the meaning of gender have changed the practices of
international organizations over time.
 Feminist constructivists show us the various ways in which ideas about gender shape and
are shaped by global politics.
 Poststructural feminists claim that there is a link between knowledge and power. Since
men have generally been seen as knowers and as subjects of knowledge, this influences
how we see global politics.
 Post-colonial feminists suggest that women's subordination must be differentially
understood in terms of race, class, and geographical location.

Gendering Security

 Traditional stories about war, which portray men as protectors and women and children
as being protected, are severely challenged by today's wars, in which women and children
are being killed and injured in large numbers.
 War's association with masculinity and the image of a soldier as a heroic male are
challenged by an increasing number of women in militaries around the world.
  Militarized masculinity is popular when states are preoccupied with national security
threats; consequently conciliatory options in policy-making tend to get discounted and it
is difficult for women's voices to be regarded as legitimate, particularly in matters of
security policy.
 Feminists define security broadly to include the diminution of all forms of violence:
physical, economic, and ecological.

Gender in Global Economy

 A gender-sensitive perspective helps us see how women's relative disadvantage to men in

terms of material well-being is due to the gendered division of labor.
 The gendered division of labor dates back to seventeenth century Europe and the
subsequent separation of paid work in the public sphere from unpaid work in the private
sphere, a separation that has an effect on the kind of work that women do in the public
sphere.
 Women are disproportionately clustered in low-paid jobs in garment industries, services,
and home-based work, or in subsistence agriculture.
 In addition to paid work, women perform most of the unpaid reproductive and caring
labour in the private sphere, labor that is invisible in economic analysis. This constrains
women's choices in the public sphere.
 Since waged work can be empowering for women, even when they are paid less than
men, we must not overgeneralize about the negative effects of the gendered division of
labour.

Using Knowledge to inform policy Practice

 Much of the success in moving towards gender equality is due to women's organizing in
NGOs and social movements. This has resulted in getting women's issues on the policy
agendas of the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations.
 Feminists believe that feminist knowledge should be useful for improving women's lives,
and many feminist social movements are informed by feminist knowledge.
 Data disaggregated by sex are vital for identifying women's problems and lobbying for
change. The adoption of the Gender Development Index by the United Nations has
helped us to see where problems are most acute and to track evidence of improvement.
 Gender mainstreaming, which has been adopted by certain international organizations
and national governments, is a policy that evaluates legislation in terms of whether it is
likely to increase or reduce gender equality.

Conclusion

Feminists define security more broadly-not just in terms of the security of the state, but also in
terms of the physical and economic security of individuals. Evidence suggests that women as a
group suffer certain economic insecurities by virtue of being women. To explain this, IR
feminists point to a gendered division of labour. Data disaggregated by sex are vital for
identifying women's problems and lobbying for change. The adoption of the Gender
Development Index by the United Nations has helped us to see where problems are most acute
and to track evidence of improvement. • Gender mainstreaming, which has been adopted by
certain international organizations and national governments, is a policy that evaluates legislation
in terms of whether it is likely to increase or reduce gender equality. Differing expectations about
what is meant by women's and men's work lead to problems when women end up in lower-
paying jobs and with a larger share of the unremunerated work in the household.

We have seen that IR feminism can tell us some new things about global policy-making and
about the workings of the global economy that other approaches do not. This does not mean that
feminism can tell us everything we need to know about global politics. However, it is important
to note that since all global actors have a gender identity, gender is present in all global
processes. For this reason, it is hard to separate feminist approaches from other IR approaches in
the same way that we can separate realism from liberalism or from Marxism. We have seen that
IR feminism is grounded in different IR theoretical approaches, such as liberalism,
constructivism, and post structuralism. One further question we might think about is how our
gender-sensitive lenses might help us to see these other approaches in new ways.