Gender Responsive Research
in the CGIAR
Jacqueline Ashby, Senior Advisor for
Gender Research, CGIAR Consortium. April 2015

Topics
• Why gender?
• Architecture of Gender
Mainstreaming in CGIAR
• Strategic Gender Research
• Integrated Gender Research
Example: Gender-Responsive
Breeding

Why gender?

Terminology
Gender
Socially defined and
learned differences
between men or
women
Gender relations
the ways men and
women share or
compete for resources,
bargain and have
power over each other

The “gender gap” in agriculture
(FAO, 2010)
In most regions of the
world, one out of five
farms is headed by a
women
Women comprise about
40% of people working
on farms in low-
income countries
Mali women collect firewood for cooking on the dry bed of the Niger
River (photo on Flickr by United Nations).

The “gender gap” in agriculture (FAO,
2010)
Inequalities between women and
men producers:
• hold back agricultural
productivity (yield gaps of 20-
25%)
• perpetuate poverty and
unsustainable resource use
• make women more vulnerable
to climate-change impacts on
agriculture
• are obstacles to the CGIAR
achieving its strategic results
Photo P. Casier (CGIAR).

The “gender gap” in agriculture (FAO,
2010)
Inequalities between women and men
in:
• Assets for agriculture --land, water,
trees, fisheries, livestock, especially
insecure property rights
• Labor markets
• Access to services- financial,
advisory, business development
• Knowledge and skills
• Technology
• Organization
• Supportive institutions and policy
Mali women collect firewood for cooking on the dry bed of the Niger
River (photo on Flickr by United Nations).

In farming, gender inequality is
pervasive:
Gender inequality affects:
(1) Decisions about agricultural
production and marketing
(2) Control over use of resources
like land, water and livestock
(3) Control over food availability,
spending and income
(4) Leadership in organizations and
bargaining power in markets
(5) Time use and workloads

New technology is not
adopted
Review of 24 multivariate studies of technological input use,
access, and adoption fertilizer, seed varieties, tools, pesticide
use, access, and adoption.
• 79 percent of studies found men have higher mean access
• 59 percent of studies found when unequal farm size, credit,
capital, extension and other factors are taken into account,
the farmer’s sex has no significant effect on output.
• Inequality is what counts!

Benefits from increasing gender
equality
• Yield gaps of 20-25% between
men and women producers are
eliminated
• Marketing and value chains
include women on a fair,
competitive footing
• Poor rural women increase the
food and income under their
control which is positively
associated with improvements
in nutrition, education and
welfare for the whole
household.
Objective
• To improve the relevance of the
CGIAR's research to poor
women as well as men (reduced
poverty and hunger, improved
health and environmental
resilience) in all the
geographical areas where the
work is implemented and
targeted by end of 2012.
• By 2015 progress towards these
outcomes will be measurable.

Institutional Architecture
for Mainstreaming
Gender in Research

Gender Mainstreaming in CGIAR
Objective: Gender is fully integrated
into research priority setting,
research design and implementation,
and final evaluation such that CGIAR
innovations do no harm with respect
to worsening existing gender
inequities and foster positive change
in female empowerment.

Gender Monitoring Framework for
the CGIAR (Fund Council)- CO
reports at each FC meeting to:
• Monitor the integration of gender into research
priority setting, implementation and evaluation,
• View budgetary allocations and expenditures with
respect to gender,
• See key data related to the numbers of male and female
staff in key leadership positions in the CGIAR,
• View progress being made in staffing, research and
budget allocations, with respect to gender
• Recommend and implement course corrections as
necessary.

Gender Budget for:
• Strategic gender research: addresses
questions related to WHY and HOW there are
differential results between men and women,
such as how does adoption of a new technology
change women and men’s income
• Integrated (applied) gender research:
addresses questions such as what are the sex-
disaggregated impacts of adoption of a new
crop variety. It does not investigate the reasons
for gender differences.

Consortium Board Policy to
mainstream gender in research
•CGIAR (2011) Consortium Level and
CRP Gender Strategies
•Gender budget (POWBs and Annual
Reports)

Consortium Level Gender Strategy
Component 1
Component 1: CRP Gender
Strategy
Gender Strategy
Planning considers all relevant
gender constraints to the
research process and the uptake
of research outputs.
Implementation, monitoring and
review throughout all CRPs
Greater expertise in gender
analysis
Research outputs and outcomes
remove constraints faced by
women farmers
BETTER
ACHIEVEMENT OF THE
STRATEGIC LEVEL OUTCOMES
Component 2: Diversity and
Gender in the workplace
Broad understanding of why
diversity and gender are relevant in
research for development
Equality of career progression
within the CGIAR
CGIAR succeeds in attractingand
retaining some of the world’s top
scientists and service function
professionals
.

Implementation of Consortium Level
Gender Strategy
Research Planning
•CRP Gender Strategy must be approved by Consortium Board
•CGIAR Strategic Results Framework has gender as a research priority
• Gender research required in annual Plans of Work and Budget
• Gender research –a criterion for a successful CRP Proposal (2nd
Call)
Research Performance Monitoring
•Results in narrative Annual Reports
•Performance indicators (Annex 2 of Annual Report template)
Gender Research Network fosters cross-program synergies
Plan for Diversity and Gender in the workplace supports recruitment of world
–class social science expertise for gender research

Gender Budget
Key investor issue: accountability
Consortium level policy:
The Consortium Board has explicitly made an
approved CRP Gender Strategy and a satisfactory
implementation of this strategy in the CRP
program of work and budget 2014 - 2016
prerequisites for CRPs to receive funding from
Windows 1 and 2 in 2014 and beyond (Consortium
Board, September 2013)
CRP level:
Accountability of line managers for implementing
gender commitments in POWB

Are results commensurate with budget ?
CRP Annual Reports
GENDER RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS
•What were the major gender research
achievements as set out in the gender strategy?
•To what CRP outputs and outcomes did they
contribute?
•What progress was achieved along the gender
impact pathway compared to the initial
situation?

Attention is on results

Gender “Action Plan”
• Approved at FC11 (April, 2014): USD
$6M for 3 years
• Designed to:
- Speed up development of gender research
expertise in CRPs: Postdoctoral fellowship and
Partnership Fund
- Scale up scope and significance of gender
research, strengthen cross-CRP knowledge
sharing: Global Study; methods to measure
gender and nutrition impact ; joint M&E of
gender IDO; on-line learning

Support from the Gender Research
Network
• Postdoctoral fellow awards
• Advanced research training, coaching
and collaboration to support publication
• Communications, Data Management and
Knowledge-Sharing Platform – CIAT
team supports this
• Cross-program research; sharing
methods, synthesizing results

Integrated Gender Research.
Example:
How can we make plant
breeding more gender-
responsive?

The unintended outcome
Varieties focused on high yield potential:
Are left on the shelf
Fail to meet poorly understood, user
preferred quality traits
Fail to reach full potential adoption
Slide from G. Thiele

Users have gender-differentiated
preferences for varietal traits
• Time to maturity
• Taste
• Color
• By-products
• Storage characteristics
• Cooking qualities
• Field labor
requirements
• Fertilizer efficiency

Trait prioritization has a gender
dimension
Trade-offs: Women have practical and
strategic needs
Practical: e.g. less laborious food preparation
Strategic: e.g. control over food and
marketable surplus
Increased yield of a so-called “women’s crop”
can lead to men taking over the crop and her
loss of control while better storage quality can
improve her control over crop use.
– so trait prioritization matters.

Example:
The power of bitterness
Women preferred bitter cassava varieties.
Sweet cassava can be too readily uprooted and converted into cash
Ownership of the cassava harvest
“If you only plant non-bitter cassava in your field, you will get a lot of
stealing. Especially the young men think it is their right to harvest the fruits of
our labor.”
“ Men can plant non-bitter cassava because they can call in a diviner and use
juju-magic to protect their fields so something evil
will happen to a thief”
Control over the cassava harvest
The necessity to exhaustively process the bitter roots for safe consumption
gave women more control and the power to decide independently when to
harvest them
Chiwona Karltun et al.

User preferences are shaped by
the users’ social characteristics:
“Women” are not a
single market
segment:
The interests of
different types of
women vary with
poverty, culture
and roles in
farming

Only differentiating men from women is
misleading
Women potato sharecroppers
without cattle
have different interests
from women potato
producers who own cattle
and do not sharecrop

Breeding for segmented user
groups
• The information we
need to set priorities
and define breeding
targets is incomplete
and hard to compile
(e.g. see World Bank
study of PPB, 2008)
• BUT private enterprise
confronts this challenge
by prioritizing market
segments (users) and
targeting them

Making a typology helps define
segmented user groups
• A social typology is a
description of different
user types
- with minimum variability
within types
- maximum variability
between types
- Uses multivariate analysis
• Enables classification of
individuals into groups
with a common set of
preferences

Example
Wheat varieties, Highlands of
Ethiopia
•Small farmers -76% of wheat
production
•Few improved, rust-resistant
varieties adopted
•Women contribute actively to
wheat production but are not
considered “farmers.”
•Gender roles are distinct and
women prefer traditional
varieties with good “quality”

Example: Use of conjoint analysis
Statistical technique from
market research used to
estimate individual
preference models, based
on how people value
different traits of a product
Respondents rate a set of
potential (future) products
with different combinations
of traits
The valuation of different
traits can be determined –
and trade-offs analyzed

Conjoint analysis
• The study used participatory
evaluations of wheat
varieties to identify
important traits and
preferences
• This generated 6 traits and
14 trait levels to create 18
hypothetical varieties
• Men and women farmers
from different wealth strata
rated 18 of the possible 144
combinations of traits
• Analysis estimated the
importance each
individual’s preference gave
to each trait
Cluster analysis
• Grouped respondents
with similar preferences
together -> segmented
user groups were
identified
• Profiles of user groups
defined:
Multinomial Logit model:
predicted cluster
membership based on
gender, wealth,
education,

Segmented markets
identified
• 7 distinct clusters of trait
preferences were
identified- each cluster of
people values the varietal
traits differently
• Overall, cluster
membership was weakly
correlated with gender
• Some, but not all clusters
had predominantly female
members
• Source: Nelson, K. 2013

Varietal adoption decisions
Are the product of interactions among
-Characteristics of the Variety
-Social characteristics of the end Users (inc. gender)
-Characteristics of the socioeconomic Environment
Successful delivery to our intended users takes account
of
V x U x E
Defines “segmented user groups”

Harmonization and standardization of methods is essential
EG.
Use the correct definition of
gender: sex of an individual not
“female-headed household”
Survey instruments need a standard
module to collect sex-disaggregated
data so these data can be pooled to
characterize user groups
Tools for eliciting user trait
preferences are wildly diverse and
so data are hard to compare or
combine

Harmonization and standardization of methods would
permit identification of:
Priority cross-cutting traits for gender
responsive breeding
•Recurrent gender-differentiated
preferences for traits that occur across
mega-social- environments
Priority local traits
•Specific or unique clusters of
preferences and traits that can be
targeted to benefit a priority target user
group

SUMMARY:
How can we make plant breeding more gender
responsive?
Precise socio-
economic
targeting of
segmented
user groups
1. Harmonize soc-econ methods
and get beyond “village” studies
of gendered trait preferences
2. Start with “who?”
i.e. a target population
3. Develop a social typology of
men and women users in this
population
4. Types of men and women
users to be targeted by breeding
can then be prioritized

SUMMARY:
How can we make plant breeding more gender
responsive?
Precise socio-
economic
targeting of
segmented
user groups
5. Profile varietal preferences of the
priority, gendered user types
6. Link gendered user types to
relevant products and varietal traits
7. Investigate trait trade-offs
Breeding can then deliver more
accurately to a pre-defined demand
from the priority user group(s),
including women

A final word-- to be gender-
responsive
• Target well-defined user groups
very carefully before you start
technology development
• Always consider women in
relation to men: gender
differences are embedded in
gender relations
• Avoid using gender differences
simplistically (men vs. women):
Female users can often have more
in common with male users in a
similar socioeconomic situation,
than with other women whose
circumstances are different

For more information:
http://cgiar.org
How we do
research/ Research
on gender in
agriculture

Thank you.