| Seminar on Gender
and Access in South Asia
Organized by the IUSSP Panel on Gender and Bangladesh Institute of Development
Studies (Dhaka)
Dhaka, Bangladesh November 2006.
Call For Papers
While gender inequalities in many dimensions of women’s lives in
South Asia have been noted in the literature, the role of public policy
in creating or ameliorating these inequalities remains poorly understood.
Moreover, while public policies often attempt to work within the cultural
constraints (e.g. in providing home based maternal health care), the rigidity
or permeability of cultural boundaries themselves remain open to question.
These issues are particularly important in the context of increased privatization
and globalization.
South Asia provides an interesting opportunity to address this issue because
there are tremendous variations within individual countries in gender
relations and cultural norms but at the same time, there are many similarities
across national boundaries, for example, between West Bengal and Bangladesh.
So a regional discourse on gender and access in South Asia has a tremendous
potential for informing public policy.
The seminar will focus on the following aspects of gender inequalities
in South Asia: (1) Access to public services such as health care and education;
(2) Access to opportunities such as employment and credit; and, (3) Access
to Public Institutions and Public Spaces such as political participation
and leadership, legal protection, religious institutions and freedom from
sexual harassment in accessing public spaces and transportation systems.
In some parts of South Asia, public policies and grass roots actions have
been able to moderate some of the inequalities and have acted as a catalyst
for positive change. In others, the barriers remain high and policies
have either not tried to overcome them or been unsuccessful. A focus on
public policy must also contend with the changing nature of the state
in the region and ways in which global economic changes and globalization
increase the importance of the private sector in a variety of fields including
health, education and employment and may limit and redefine the role of
public policies.
We are looking for empirical papers using quantitative or qualitative
methods that examine these issues in specific regional contexts and foster
cross-national dialogue. Examples of specific themes might include:
• Changing gender inequalities in school enrollment
• Gender discrimination in employment opportunities and wages in
public or private sector
• Role of micro-credit programs in increasing women’s access
to services and incomes
• Changes in women’s political participation and its impact
on policies that affect women’s access to livelihood or health care
• Prevalence of sexual harassment and its impact on women’s
ability to access services or employment opportunities
• Political discourse regarding social construction of gender and
its impact on legislations affecting women’s lives such as rape
laws or labor laws.
Our goal is to generate evidence based discourse that helps us evaluate
the role of public policies and institutions in creating or moderating
gender inequalities in South Asia.
People interested in contributing to the seminar should submit online
either completed papers, which must be unpublished, or detailed abstracts
by April 15, 2006. Click here for Online
Submissions.
Applicants will be notified whether their paper has been accepted by
May 15, 2006. In the case of acceptance on the basis of an abstract, the
completed paper must be uploaded by September 30, 2006.
The organizers will pay for expenses at the meeting location for all participants,
but funding for travel is limited. Applicants are encouraged to seek their
own travel funding, but if they require travel assistance, they should
indicate it in the on-line submission form when submitting paper or abstract.
For further information, please contact Sonalde Desai: sdesai@socy.umd.edu
or Simeen Mahmud: simeen@sdnbd.org.
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