71: Using gender sensitive communications as a tool to build an inclusive culture

Shownotes

The language we use often reflects the widely accepted socio-cultural values, norms, and beliefs that society holds, including roles men/women and non binary people play. For as long as we know language has been used to undermine people making them seem less competent, confident and places an expectations on what people can aspire too. The constant use of such language reinforces assumptions.  

E.g. Assumptions that all members of a category (Director) share a gender or that all members of a gender share a characteristic (women prefer to look after children) 

E.g. Using gendered pronouns/nouns when you don’t know the gender or using he/him/man as the default 

However, language can also be used as powerful tool to help reshape culture and challenge stereotypes. In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with Parijat Ghosh and Souparno Chatterjee from PRADAN on the journey and learnings from the past 10 months to building a more equitable and inclusive organisation. 

I am super proud to have been invited by PRADAN to support the organisations in unravelling the layers and discovering who they are as an organisation and the gap that exists with who they aspire to be. In the last 10 months, I have run numerous workshops, listening exercises, audits, and had people share 100s of examples on how our culture, upbringing, the books we read, the movies we see, our lived experiences colour our usage of language. 

We are nearly at the end of the discovery phase, the next phase will be about mindfulness, and putting all the learning into action - in how we use language to engage with our peer group, with teams, with people on the field, the communities we work with, donors, governments, in the manner in which we write our reports. The measure of success is not that everyone will suddenly be inclusive, but that most people are conscious of the impact of their words, are willing to learn and build an inclusive organisation. 

And most importantly it is important to remember that language is not static, it changes and evolves every single day; like it has done since the start of spoken language many moons ago. 

Want to know more about the why and what of the gender sensitive communications initiative at PRADAN - listen here 👇🏾👇🏾

Memorable passages from the transcript

👉🏾 Thank you so much Sudha for inviting us. 

👉🏾Good morning Sudha. And thanks for bringing us here and it's a great opportunity to speak with you on this initiative that we have started in the organisation. So looking forward to the conversation. 

👉🏾I am Parijat, presently I work with PRADANs research and advocacy team. And as far as my interest are is concerned, I am interested in Adivasi livelihood because we are working ound the questions related to Adivasi livelihood, I'm also interested in the subject of gender equality both within the community, with whom we work and also within the organisation.

👉🏾 I am also a member of the steering group that is integrating PRADANs initiative towards making the workplace better for women as of now and I'm hoping that it will talk more about inclusiveness. 

👉🏾 I joined as a development apprentice and after a brief stint, I joined the operations unit. And since 2013, I started working in communications and ever since I've been communicating about PRADAN. I love communicating about PRADAN. 

👉🏾 Let me first start with how PRADAN embarked on the journey, why PRADAN took up this whole initiative, not only the gender-sensitive communication but the whole initiative of making PRADAN a better place for women,. So the skewed percentage of women actually has been a concern in PRADAN for a very long time. So I joined in 2004, and since then in almost every annual retreat, this issue was highlighted. And finally in 2014, that then formally instituted a scoping study to understand the reasons for the same.

👉🏾 Why this ratio is so skewed? What are the struggles women go through, and what are the hindering factors for continuing in PRADAN, areas of gaps? So based on that understanding or findings some strategies were instituted. One is women caucus, for all the women in PRADAN. who act as a pressure group, as well as a support for each other. And a regular gender audit within the organisation in all work units, so that we understand the status, present status of the situation and find the gaps and plan according to that. And the third thing was we designed a curriculum for the newcomers, the newcomers are called development apprentice in PRADAN. For them, we designed a gender guide, which talks about gender equality within the organisation. 

👉🏾 At some point in time, these were kind of all independent initiatives, there was a need to integrate all those so that all these initiatives, whether we're moving towards the desired direction or not. So In 2017 our steering group was formed and the role of the steering group was to kind of see the impact of all these initiatives, the points of integration etc... So based on the experience so far SG worked on developing a strategy. They came up with a strategy paper last year in 2020/21. And in this strategy, the importance of gender-sensitive communication came up as a very important area. Because all the time we work with human beings, both outside, inside with community, we talk and communicate all the time and that is our work. Therefore our communication actually says a lot about us - who are we, our gender biases, our gendered relationship with the organisation and community we work with colleagues, and our stance towards gender equality. And therefore we started work towards sensitising ourselves about this gender sensitive communication and inclusive language and we started taking help from you.

👉🏾 What Parijat said is absolutely, that's how it has been in PRADAN. But addition to what she said, I think that PRADAN has been working essentially for women empowerment. We found that when we reach out to the poorest of the poor, these marginalised sections, smallholder farmers, they have been put aside from the mainstream walks of development 

👉🏾 But if you look at the condition of the women irrespective of their age cycle, the life cycle, you see that they are at a more disadvantageous position in comparison to the men folk.

👉🏾 So there is poverty within poverty. But when you look at the people who are talking about these issues, who are identifying these issues, who are working with those women are men, mainly, majorly. if you look at the percentage that Parijat was referring to, that is heavily skewed towards men. And at the same time, it's not about just women empowerment, but you're talking about women's leadership in community-based organisations, how women will lead the process of change. who are talking about that, who are guiding that process of change, again set of men. 

👉🏾 And the organisation, which is talking about women empowerment day in and day out is led by men since its inception. The ED and various other key positions in the management have been heavily occupied by men. So what do you do to change this situation and adjust the situation, address this situation in terms of the gap of what is being preached and what is being actually practised. So we kind of realised that there is a gap and what is that gap and how do you address that gap. So that's how PRADAN thought of embarking on this journey of practising gender equality and thinking in terms of gender sensitivity inside the organisation, as well as outside the organisation.

👉🏾 Right. So, fortunately, as I shared earlier that in 2014, the leadership management unit, which is a top leadership node in PRADAN, that time it was called management committee, they decided to Institute this scoping study. So in the scoping study, they came up with a long report describing the reasons and also they came up with nine recommendations. the reasons were discussed, and then jointly we came up with these three-pronged strategies to initiate with, which shared earlier the caucus in a non formal space. Non-formal I'm saying because it is approved by the organisation, but it's not formal in that sense. So women are, I mean supposed to be encouraged at least in participating in caucus meetings and support each other and come up with issues and inform the organisation.

👉🏾 Similarly the gender audit in the formal space, formally to get feedback on what is the situation and orienting the newcomers from the beginning on the issue. So these three strategies were decided by the leadership. So in that sense, from the beginning officially we had a buy in that we are going to do this. 

👉🏾 But when we actually do something, then you can feel that resistance, for example, when women were going to the caucus meetings, so there will be comments like "So you are going to your complaint room.” “We are fearful so we cannot talk with you.”‘We cannot give you feedback because in caucus meetings you'll go and complain about that.”

👉🏾 But gradually we continued and probably the perception of PRADANites also that this is not about what we are thinking. I would not say that it is smooth yet but definitely the situation has improved a lot. They also contributed in identifying issues where policies need to be formulated. So in consultation we came up with new policies and all. So in that sense, it's a long process as I shared that the study wa