What’s in a Design?: Mainstreaming Gender in Anti Corruption research

As part of FCDO’s Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme, SOAS and Global Integrity researchers will discuss why and how gender matters to our corruption research, both in terms of agency (how we focus on empowering actors) and impact (taking gender into consideration for public service delivery).

Our research teams will present challenges and opportunities they have faced in incorporating gender in research design, and explore why many researchers still stray away from working with “gender” when designing research. Does this difficulty stem from the fact that sectoral specificities with complex power imbalances make it difficult to focus on gendered dynamics and solutions? Or is that, despite the discussions and guidelines on gender mainstreaming, we still don’t have a shared understanding of the value of gender? Most important, are there things we are not studying that we might if we had a gender angle.

In this event, we will interrogate the challenges the programme has faced in successfully ‘mainstreaming gender,’ showcasing projects that have tackled these questions successfully, and discussing how we — and others — might drive potential solutions in future corruption research. By making our own challenges explicit, we hope to enrich our perspectives, acknowledging there are researchers who have employed a gender lens and have advanced the anti-corruption field significantly.