Gender Studies

Ever heard of Mrs Begum syndrome? It’s not in any medical textbook, but I heard it regularly in clinical spaces during my training in Wales, Birmingham and London 🏥. Repeated casually, by clinicians from every background. Some may be more familiar with the same idea framed differently: The South Asian woman attending with “all-over body pain”. Not a diagnosis. Just a shortcut. A way of dismissing complexity, distress and lived experience. And this dismissal does not happen in isolation ⚠️ Across the UK, South Asian women face well-documented health inequalities that affect outcomes and access to care 👇 🌸 Menopause and HRT access Only about 6.2% of Asian women aged 45–55 in England are on hormone replacement therapy (HRT), compared with 23.3% of White women, showing a stark disparity in access to effective symptom management. Wellbeing of Women ❤️ Cardiovascular disease and long-term risk Women from South Asian backgrounds experience a heavier burden of cardiometabolic disease, including hypertension and heart disease, compared with White women. The King's Fund 🩸 Type 2 diabetes prevalence People from South Asian groups in England have more than twice the prevalence of type 2 diabetes compared with White groups, contributing to poorer long-term health outcomes. 🤰 Maternal health outcomes UK evidence shows that women from South Asian backgrounds have higher risks of severe adverse outcomes in pregnancy and childbirth, contributing to persistent inequities in maternal health. So when symptoms are minimised or not taken seriously, the consequences are real - delayed diagnoses, missed prevention opportunities, and deepening mistrust in healthcare. This is not about individual intent. It’s about how bias becomes embedded in language and clinical practice - and how easily that shapes who gets believed. If we’re serious about tackling health inequalities, we have to start by listening 👂 Because disbelief is not neutral, and inequity is not inevitable. #HealthInequalities #SouthAsianHealth #WomensHealth #BiasInHealthcare #NHS #PatientVoice

Over two decades of working in public health, education, climate resilience, livelihoods, and gender in India and South Asia, I’ve learned to value measurement and recognise its limits. ToCs and log frames are essential. They bring structure, clarity, and accountability. But when treated as compliance exercises rather than learning tools, they risk disconnecting reported success from real change. In Bihar, a skilling program for adolescent girls boasted 90% completion rates, yet only 12% transitioned into paid work. The ToC missed barriers like unpaid care work and mobility restrictions, which surfaced only through qualitative interviews. In Tamil Nadu, salt-tolerant paddy was introduced for climate resilience. Quantitative indicators flagged yield drops, but fieldwork revealed the real issues: lack of credit, market gaps, and social resistance to non-traditional seeds. In Maharashtra, a WASH programme reported 100% toilet access in public schools. Yet girls in SC/ST hostels avoided food and water to avoid using unsafe facilities—flagged only via behavioural observation. In Bangladesh, cyclone shelters met all infrastructure benchmarks. But many women refused to enter them during an actual event, citing fears of sexual violence and lack of privacy—data missed in the original evaluation. These examples are not anomalies. They illustrate what happens when we define success narrowly—by what’s easy to count, not what truly matters. This isn’t a case against measurement. It’s a call to design for it differently: fund ethnographic follow-ups, use participatory tools, and train MEL teams to notice silences—not just check indicators. Most importantly, ask: who defines success? Community voice, contextual insight, and behavioural nuance must be embedded from the start, not added on as anecdotes at the end. Development in South Asia isn’t linear, and our evaluations should not pretend it is. What have you learned when the numbers looked good—but the reality on the ground told another story? #Evaluation #MixedMethods #DevelopmentEffectiveness #WEE #PublicHealth #ClimateResilience #LearningNotJustCounting

"Where are all the women over 45?" That question, posed by Gopinath Parakuni from Cividep India at last week's Fair Wear Foundation symposium, stopped me cold. In garment factories across South Asia, you see women aged 20–45 on production lines. Almost none older. Not because they retired or moved on, but because the work becomes physically impossible to sustain. Many are mothers. Many work far from home. Many hold families together on wages that don't reflect the true cost of their labor. When they disappear from factory floors, they also disappear from our supply chain data. This is what "gender-blind" due diligence looks like in practice. After moderating discussions with brands, suppliers, unions and civil society organizations at the symposium (9 Dec, Amsterdam), one thing became undeniable: due diligence that starts with compliance checklists will never see what due diligence that starts with people's lived realities reveals. Three shifts stood out: 1. Purchasing practices ARE due diligence: prices, lead times, last-minute order changes. These aren't separate from human rights. They directly determine wages, working hours, and whether safety investments are even possible. You can't audit your way out of unfair sourcing. 2. Stakeholder engagement is not a tick-box. Workers and unions aren't "consulted" after you've made decisions. They ARE the experts. Due diligence without their leadership is designed to fail. 3. Gender isn't a side topic It's central. When women bear the physical, economic and social costs of our supply chains, and then vanish from view when those costs become unsustainable, we have to ask: who is our due diligence actually protecting? The good news? Real collaboration is happening. Brands, suppliers, unions, MSIs and civil society are building models that center equity, voice and shared accountability. One concrete question for you: Think of your most recent supplier audit or due diligence report. Did it capture the reality of the people doing the work or just the paperwork confirming processes exist? If it's the latter, what's one question you could add to make it the former? Photo: Moments from Fair Wear Foundation's symposium "Impactful Supply Chain Due Diligence in Practice" | Photo credits: Asiket Dhillon #SupplyChainDueDiligence #HumanRights #GenderEquality #LivingWages #FreedomOfAssociation #ResponsibleSourcing #FairWear

Sustainable intensification is an approach to agricultural development that aims to raise farm productivity and reduce the environmental footprint of food production without expanding the amount of land under cultivation. It has attracted considerable R&D investment over the past two decades, including in South Asia. How its benefits and costs are distributed across #gender and #social groups, however, gets less attention than the productivity and environmental related aspects of the concept. In a new perspective published in #nature Sustainable Agriculture, led by Vijesh Krishna, which I co-authored with A. G. Adeeth Cariappa (PhD), Surjit Vikraman, and Monica Fisher during my time at CIMMYT, we examine these issues in more detail. Focusing on case studies from the #Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia, or CSISA, a project that involved the CGIAR research centers CIMMYT, International Rice Research Institute, and International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) working across the region's Indo-Gangetic Plains, we unpack some of the challenges associated with ensuring gender and social inclusion in agricultural development. We present two case studies from India that tell different but related stories related to social inclusion in sustainable intensification. In the state of Bihar, herbicide adoption, which is aimed at reducing labor drudgery and improving productivity, resulted in the displacement of hired women laborers from historically marginalized castes -- women whose income depended almost entirely on manual weeding -- with few other pathways for income generation. In the state of Odisha, efforts to expand sustainable intensification practices in #maize cropping systems through women's self-help groups resulted in greater farmer adoption, empowerment gains across several dimensions, and better household nutrition. But while these are positive outcomes, we also describe how these efforts resulted in an increase in women's workloads in terms of on-farm labor demand. Increased workloads may compromise the long-term sustainability of management practices associated with sustainable intensification. These are complex and thorny issues that point to how design choices made at the outset of an agricultural development intervention contribute to who may bear their longer-term costs. More deliberate, pro-active, and concerted efforts are needed to factor risks such as these into agricultural development planning and implementation. Read the paper here: https://lnkd.in/gQEsPz9J CGIAR Gender Equality and Inclusion CGIAR Scaling for Impact

Only 1 in 12 Pakistani wives are older than their husbands. But 1 in 7 are more educated than them. Two very different numbers — and together they tell us something about which social norms are shifting in Pakistan, and which ones aren't. Using PDHS 2017-18 microdata (14,492 currently married couples), we compared wives directly against their own husbands — not national averages, actual spouse-to-spouse pairs. **On age:** • 85% of husbands are older than their wives • Only 8.3% of wives are older • Average gap: husbands are 5.2 years older (37.2 vs 32.0) • Remarkably stable across every province — Punjab (9.4%) and KPK (5.1%) differ by only a few points **On education:** • 13.1% of wives are more educated than their husbands • 47.4% have the same education level • 39.5% of husbands are more educated • Punjab (17.4%) has more than 5x the rate of Balochistan (3.2%) • Rises sharply with wealth — 4% in the poorest households to 20% in richer ones Why does this matter? Both statistics are proxies for bargaining power inside the household — and household bargaining power shapes outcomes that show up in every welfare survey we run: contraceptive decisions, child health spending, girls' school enrollment, and whether a woman works outside the home at all. Research across South Asia consistently finds that when wives have more education or are closer in age to their husbands, they have more say in these decisions. The contrast between the two numbers is the real finding. Age hierarchy in marriage looks like a near-universal, deeply entrenched norm — barely moving across province, wealth, or urban/rural lines. Educational hypogamy is far more common and far more responsive to context — province, wealth, and urbanization all shift it substantially. That's a useful distinction for anyone working on gender and development here: education is a lever that responds to policy and economic investment. Marriage-age hierarchy, so far, isn't moving nearly as much — which means interventions aimed at shifting household power dynamics may get more traction focusing on education and economic opportunity than on marriage-age norms alone. Data: PDHS 2017-18 · Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics #Pakistan #GenderData #Demographics #DataAnalysis #GallupPakistan #WomenInPakistan #HouseholdDynamics

Why do well-intentioned programmes for women sometimes fail to deliver real empowerment? On #InternationalWomensDay, Akshara G. and I wrote in Hindustan Times about how the answer often lies in who actually controls resources and decisions. Policies that transfer money, assets, or opportunities to women do not automatically shift power if social norms redirect those benefits elsewhere. Evidence from multiple studies shows that design details matter: whether women truly control the resources they receive, whether programmes account for household dynamics, and whether policy focuses on agency, not just access. It also reminds us that empowerment cannot be designed for women alone. Shifting norms often requires engaging households, communities, and men and boys as part of the process. Good intentions are not enough. Policy design has to engage with the realities of gender norms and bargaining power. This piece draws on insights from research and evidence generated through work at Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and beyond. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/gXRJeCyu More on J-PAL’s work on gender: https://lnkd.in/gUgr3J4r J-PAL South Asia Seema Jayachandran Antara Keswani Parnika Jhunjhunwala Arushi Bedi #GenderEquality #WomenEmpowerment #EvidenceBasedPolicy #JPAL

Naila Kabeer is one of The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)'s finest minds. She has been going back over her decades of ground-breaking work on Bangladesh, women and patriarchy and shares some conclusions here: 'Multiple pathways to personhood: How Bangladeshi women managed to renegotiate patriarchy' In charting Bangladesh’s remarkable progress on a range of social indicators since the 1970s, she explores the critical role played by women’s agency. How were women able to challenge existing gender norms in the context of the “lived” Islam of their culture? What are the lessons of this episode  – and what nuances are offered vis-à-vis the more “universal” path to progress and emancipation generally assumed by Western feminists? https://lnkd.in/e4iruv5h LSE Department of International Development Department of Gender Studies LSE

🧠 Applying Research to Practice: Therapy in Collectivist Cultures After publishing our study on Couples’ Relationship Standards and Satisfaction in Pakistani Couples in an APA journal, the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, I’ve been reflecting on how these findings translate into real-world clinical practice. In collectivist cultures, relationships are deeply intertwined with extended family expectations, community values, and shared responsibilities — a sharp contrast to the individualistic lens that dominates much of Western therapy. 🔑 What our research suggests for therapists working in collectivist contexts: 🔹 Relational harmony and emotional closeness are key drivers of satisfaction beyond personal fulfillment 🔹 Family roles and traditions must be respected and acknowledged in the therapeutic process 🔹 Models of therapy must be culturally flexible, incorporating values like interdependence, loyalty, and spirituality 🔹 “Standard” Western expectations may not align with local realities and should be adapted thoughtfully This work is a small step toward decolonizing relationship science — ensuring that therapeutic models speak to the lived experiences of the people they aim to support. 📌 Culturally informed therapy isn’t optional - it’s essential. 📄 Access the full paper here: 👉 https://lnkd.in/dhjtuAz5 #APA #TherapyInContext #CulturalPsychology #CouplesTherapy #MentalHealthMatters #SouthAsianResearch #PsychologistInPractice #CulturallyInformedCare #AppliedResearch #WomenInAcademia