Tool: Participatory Exercise in Gender Analysis: Task Analysis by Gender
Purpose:
- To collect information, raise awareness and understand how household and community tasks are distributed according to gender.
- To understand how much role flexibility by gender is associated with the different tasks.
Time: 1 hour
Audience: Primarily community members (men and women); also useful for trainers, project staff and field level workers.
Materials needed:
- Three large drawings of a man, a woman and a couple.
- At least a dozen cards depicting daily household and community tasks, such as: ploughing a field, constructing a building, hoeing a garden, basket weaving, building a latrine, looking after a child, carrying water, growing crops, cutting grass, visiting a health centre, constructing a well, riding a bicycle, teaching, resting. The pictures can be of either male or female figures, regardless of whether it is a man or a women who usually performs the task in question.
- Blank cards should also be provided so that participants can draw tasks not already included in the set.
How to conduct the exercise:
[Note: It is useful to conduct the resource analysis and task analysis activities sequentially; taken together, they make it dramatically clear that while men control most of the resources, women do many of the burdensome tasks.]
- Place the three large drawings on the ground, in a row. Below these drawings, scatter the smaller cards.
- Ask the participants to sort the cards by categorising them under the three large drawings in columns, according to whether the task is generally performed by a man, a woman, or both.
- Let the participants take over the exercise and conduct the discussion.
- When some degree of consensus is reached, initiate a discussion about why the participants made the choices they did. Be particularly sensitive to including women in the discussion.
- Ask the group to analyse the workloads, both the relative amount of work involved in each task and the division of labour between men and women. Ask which are the most burdensome tasks. Discuss how much flexibility there is in changing the workload by task of men and women. Link the tasks and workload to project activities; focus discussion on the constraints and opportunities for participation by women.
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