Fwd: Engaging men as fathers and caregivers: an entry point to advancing women's empowerment and rights
Rimjhim Jain
From: <jo...@menengage.org>
Date: Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 6:53 PM
Subject: [MenEngageConnect] Engaging men as fathers and caregivers: an entry point to advancing women's empowerment and rights
Dear MenEngage Alliance members and partners,
The latest edition of the International Journal of Care and Caring features an article contributed by MenEngage Global Alliance entitled “Engaging men as fathers and caregivers: an entry point to advancing women’s empowerment and rights”. Find the article attached, or view it here.
The article provides a critical perspective on initiatives to engage men and boys in caregiving and asks the key questions:
- How do we connect programmes that engage individual men with efforts to challenge stereotypical social norms around caring, and transform systems and institutions towards the recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid care work?
- How do we increase the uptake and scale-up of such initiatives, while ensuring quality, local contextualisation and ownership?
- How do we ensure that these programmes engaging men are accountable and meaningfully contribute to women’s economic empowerment, women’s rights and gender justice?
It stresses the importance that such programmes are implemented in ways that further strengthen the feminist agenda. “The Alliance acknowledges that fatherhood is a crucial entry point to reach men but argues that it should not stop there. Rather, programmes supporting men to become more engaged fathers and partners can serve as a starting point to explore more difficult conversations about masculinities and men’s roles in gender inequality, including about challenging topics such as gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health and rights.”
The article emphasizes that in order to change the attitudes and behaviours of men, and to create the large-scale societal transformations that are needed, programmes to more equally distribute care work need to be scaled up and adopted by governments and service providers. However, it argues that “upscaling does not simply mean copying ‘successful’ initiatives across from one context to another, but that approaches are contextualised to reflect local realities. To do this, initiatives to engage men and boys in caring must be implemented in partnership with women’s rights organisations and networks working in the local context”.
It also argues that work with individual men must be combined with efforts to transform the care economy more broadly, such as public services and social protection policies that support families and enable the redistribution of care work within households; efforts to redistribute care work from poorer households to the state by financing, providing and regulating care services; and progressive parental leave policies.
It concludes, “Achieving the ultimate goal of gender equality in the provision of care will be a challenge. It will require a fundamental shift in how caring, gender norms and masculinities are perceived, and will depend on efforts at all levels of society, from individual efforts with men and boys, to the adoption of progressive policies and legislation, to the transformation of institutions. Crucially, it will require both government support and action and meaningful partnerships with local civil society organisations, including those that are women-centred and women-led, to ensure that initiatives to engage men in caring contribute to the overall goal of a more gender-just world for all.”
Please feel free to share the article among your networks and, as always, let us know any thoughts or suggestions on this matter.
Warm wishes,
MenEngage Global Secretariat team
Joni van de Sand
she/her (what's this?)
Director
Global Secretariat
MenEngage Alliance
1875 Connecticut Avenue NW, Floor 10
Washington, D.C. 20009, USA
Mobile: + 1 202 375 3281
E-mail: jo...@menengage.org
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