Gendered research, and how research reproduce gender

The webinar focused on gender being socially constructed, masculinities and examples of how projects can succeed to integrate gender and intersectionality. Experts within both forestry, sociology, gender, food safety, veterinary public health and medicine participated and presented how a gender discourse can be integrated into different research fields and stages of a project, and the consequences if not. 

“Depending on what questions we raise and how we formulate them - we may end up with very different results,” says Gun Lidestav, Researcher at the Department of Forest Resource Management.

Gwendolyn Varley, Postdoc at the Department of Urban and Rural Development, emphasised that how we incorporate a gender dimension and which methods we use when measuring women´s empowerment is crucial for the outcome. Highlighting the importance of critical reflection on the structure of chosen methods is important to include intersectionality, such as:

• Whose perspective is it built upon?
• Who is benefiting from the research?
• What is being quantified and why?
• Does it capture the whole picture? Which groups of society are not included?
• Where are the tensions, limits or trade-offs?

Read more about SLU´s work on gender equality and equal opportunities

Read the blogpost “Countering the pitfalls of gender mainstreaming in development through gender transformative approaches”, by Karolin Andersson, PhD student in Rural Development at the Department of Urban and Rural Development, SLU.

Read an interview with Gwendolyn Varley