 So, gender equality and forestry are considered to be re-emerging on the global development agenda and they're considered to be very important for achieving economic and environmental sustainability. And the links between economic and environmental issues sort of were made on the global agenda in the 1980s and got consolidated by 1992 at the UNC said in Rio. And the argument, one of the arguments that's being made both about gender and forestry is that both achieving gender equality and conserving forests are important for achieving sustainable development. So, considering the links between these two, considering how gender is connected to forestry, that kind of imperative is coming within this context of addressing economic and ecological sustainability. Very briefly, the way gender is operationalized within forestry research, within environmental research is gender is equated with men and women, relations between men and women, and gender is considered sort of synonymous with women. So, I'm not saying that this is how it's defined, I'm saying this is how it's operationalized. If you wanted to research on gender, this is how you proceed or this is how work is done. You draw on sex disaggregated data on qualitative data and follow and see what kind of role women and men play vis-a-vis forest management, how they draw, you know, what are their roles to vis-a-vis managing the forest for fuel, food and other livelihood needs. This kind of research has been going on for a long time, very broadly speaking what it finds is that women play very, very active roles in forest management or draw on forest and natural resources for fuel, forests and fodder, that women and men have very differential access to natural resources, including to forests, and third, that this differential access and the inequities of access have impacts not just on gender inequities but also in having positive outcomes for environment and in economic sustainability goals. So this is what's found, this is sort of the data. The interpretations of the data broadly take these kind of roles that to address this kind of inequity, we need to educate, empower and incorporate women within existing environmental and conservation projects, and second, that this kind of, and sorry, backing up, the inequities, gender inequities are understood to be, de facto understood to be consequences of local power relations, specifically power relations between men and women, and second, addressing those requires incorporating and empowering women to participate in existing projects or existing approaches to addressing environmental and ecological sustainability. What I want to argue today, the title of my talk which says that women are to gender, what trees are to forests, what I want to argue is that they're necessary but not sufficient to understand issues of gender and power relations. And this is for a variety of different reasons, I'm just going to like the previous ones to sort of point out to a few things. Applications of inequities don't draw into consideration other kinds of power relations that may play a role in gender inequities. Gender inequities or inequities between men and women are not necessarily the consequences of inequities between men and women. They may be reflections of other kinds of inequities or channeled through those inequities. So one of the points that I want to make is addressing gender as women or relations between men and women does not give you an adequate explanation of power relations. Second, how are these relations changing? They've been changing over time, not just through the consequences of empowerment and incorporation measures but they've been changing over a long period of time. And what are the results of those changes? The assumption is that incorporating and empowering women into existing projects is going to lead to positive outcomes. That has not always proved to be the case. In fact, empirical evidence shows that the results are incredibly contradictory. The same kind of processes could actually have negative impacts on women, right, while also having positive impacts. So this whole dichotomy, this binary of men, women, external, internal, is not sufficient to pay attention to what's going on. So what I want to argue is that, and finally, again, this empirical evidence and the conceptual frameworks on gender that have been developed over the past 40 years, draw attention to the issue of heterogeneity. You can't generalize about gender roles, about relations between men and women. They vary across pace and time. So what do you do with this heterogeneity? What is this heterogeneity telling you? It's telling you a variety of different things. What I want to say is that by paying attention to these heterogeneities, paying attention to gender or using gender as a lens or as a way of looking at the world, can open up new ways of asking questions and new ways of looking at the world. What is it that we're seeing? What is it that we're not seeing? What is it that we're assuming? What is it that we're not assuming? What are the consequences of our assumptions? So focusing on the one assumption that we're making, that incorporating women, empowering women to participate in existing processes, is going to bring about positive outcomes. That assumption does not allow or does not take into consideration our own assumptions, our own positionality, the power relations that may exist between us as researchers and the entities that we're drawing upon. It does not necessarily open up questions about the models that we are using or models within which of economic and ecological sustainability within which we want to incorporate women. So what I want to argue is paying attention to this heterogeneity, paying attention to the fact that this one model of gender relations doesn't seem to be existing across the board. There are certain kinds of patterns that replicate again and again and again, right? In the West, where arguably gender equity has been achieved, where as many women would be sitting on this podium as men, you would assume that this little microphone would be able to go both ways, but it doesn't. So why is it that certain kinds of patterns stick and why is it that there are certain kinds of changes? So what I want to argue is that that heterogeneity opens up rooms for us to ask different kinds of questions about our social and natural world. And I'll leave it there. I have lots more to say, but I'm just going to leave it there for the moment. Thank you. Thank you. I can say the same thing about, you know, I'm left-handed and when you have the knife for the fish, it's only made for the right-handed people, so I'm very annoying. Why is it persisting? But let's open the discussion in the sort of, who has something to react and to propose. How can we solve this issue of addressing gender and inequalities in our research about forestry issues? I think that you have convinced everybody. I was going to say I've stunned them with my eloquence. If I may take the first question. Thank you very much for the very thought-provoking presentation, Kiran. Just a question. So you mentioned that in explanations of inequity is not always or is not just located between relations between men and women that sometimes their reflections of or channel through other inequalities. Could you perhaps elaborate on that a little bit, please? Thank you. Thank you so much, Bimbika. Actually, it's almost like a planted question because I didn't mention that part. So, you know, when you think about a man or a woman or any social identity, we're not just men or women. We belong to a particular location, a particular class. We're embedded in complexity of relations and gender or our gendered identity is... I don't want to say it's a sum, but it certainly is a reflection of all of those. So, when we're thinking about unequal relations, just saying unequal relations between men and women doesn't work, right? Am I... I mean, Mrs. Gandhi and Mrs. Thatcher. And look at me, I'm talking, calling them Mrs. Gandhi and Mrs. Thatcher. Or, you know, Prime Minister Gandhi and Prime Minister Thatcher were women. Their relationships with their chaparazis or their shayaks was very different from their relationships with their men. So, there's gender relations or our relations or reflections of power relations across many different axes, of ethnicity, of race, of class, of sexual orientation, and not necessarily a conglomeration of those, right? I mean, I could be disempowered or lower in one kind of hierarchy, but higher in another kind of hierarchy. So, how does that play out? And how does that reflect when one is trying to address a series of inequalities? Yeah, thanks for the presentation. There was a time in the 90s, maybe in the early 2000s, when the CGIR had a gender and diversity unit, and the entire emphasis was on gender and diversity, but a lot more emphasis on the diversity than the gender, maybe. And that kind of got lost over the last 10 years. It's become much more of a gender agenda, and I think we've lost sight of a lot of the things that you're trying to raise again. Do you think there's lessons that we can learn going back to what was done at that time and the approaches that were used at that time? Absolutely. I mean, part of, again, what I want to say is that the approaches to gender that are being taken right now and the work that I did with Annie Shatak and with Bimbika looking at the really, through Terry's projects about the role of gender and women in forests and food security, the approaches that are being taken are approaches that were introduced in the 1970s. Important ones, they're focusing on visualizing the role of women and gender in these issues. But since then, a lot of work has been done. Since the 1970s, there's been about 40 years of excellent scholarship and excellent research on women, gender, and natural resource management, women, gender, and development. And the current re-emergence of women and gender doesn't seem to be drawing on those lessons. Similarly, I could say that kind of practices or kind of projects on environment and economic sustainability are also replicating the kind of approaches that were taken in the 1950s and 60s. They're not exactly the same, but there seems to be relatively little attention to the lessons of history or lessons of what was done before. So, yeah, I would agree absolutely that we need to pay critical attention to it. Now, where I would, and perhaps somebody's gonna ask me this question, so maybe I'm ahead of myself, one of that approach from the 70s with respect to development, with respect to gender is again the issue of application. How can we apply what we learn to make the world a better place? How do you apply something? And again, part of what critical gender scholarship is trying to do is, let's ask questions about this application. Why this imperative of application? What is it that we want to incorporate within what? Can we ask a different kind of question? How did this model emerge? Why is it understood to be a good model? What is good about it and what is not quite working? Is there something within the internal dynamics of the so-called good outcome that is contradictory? So, when I say let's go back and learn from history, it's not just applying those lessons of history, that may happen, but we might need to take a step back and ask questions about the questions that we are being asked to ask. Maybe I will ask one myself. Don't you think that we are trying to address, in a sense, two different things? One is the fact that if you are doing anything about our old survey, looking at people, I mean, if you ignore 50% of the potential, then it's bad science. There's something wrong in your design, so that that's the whole issue of gender-desegregated data and what you can say about that, and there is a lot of that in the CGR. And then you have what is happening in sort of the wider world, where you see that in the OECD country, for the same job, women are still paid 20% less than men, which is, for me, something different, in a sense. And I have the feeling that what we are now, getting back in our domain is, in fact, is a reaction to the fact that you have these big macro things happening in general that women are less paid than men for the same job, that women are less represented, that men in corporate board, that women are less represented, that men in assembly policy arena. And in the end, it has very little to do, in fact, with the power relationship at the household level or at the village level, and how you understand that. So, part of what the sex-desegregated data is trying to do, and I think it's important, is because it's trying to say, what kind of patterns do you see? So, you actually, you know, helping me remake the point that I started making is that the sex-desegregated data is giving you some sense of the patterns, but it's also pointing out the gaps in the patterns or the kind of things that this particular relations or these particular household data does not reveal. What is the role of broader structures? What is the role of, if you were to expand the household to a corporation or an institute? So, for instance, if you were to collect this kind of sex-desegregated data or other kind of desegregated data at a variety of different institutions, what would it reveal? Would there be same kinds of patterns? Are there other kinds of patterns? Could you overlap them? Could you, you know, what is the quantitative information going to show you and what are some of the things that don't appear? Like, again, I didn't think about this microphone. This was not the point I was going to make, but it's interesting that this microphone is structured in a particular kind of way. So, what I want to say is that let's ask those kinds of questions and pay attention to the contradictory answers that those questions might give us. And let's pay attention to the stickiness. Why is it that it continues to stick? Is it that we're doing something wrong? Is it because it's really, really hard to change? And I think that, I mean, at the open tables discussions that I've been having over the last year, the discussion about gender was one of the most difficult one to have. You can discuss forests, you can discuss households, you can discuss climate change, but all of us have a gender and we're all very immediately embedded in these kinds of relationships that are very, very contradictory. And so, it requires us to kind of sort of step back and say, you know, well, how is this playing out in terms of how I'm seeing the world? How is the way I'm seeing the world sort of not quite congruent with what I want to do with the world? From a very kind of more applied perspective, I sometimes, it's a bit of a frustration that because these issues are so complex, we tend to use very simplistic measurements of what is a gender appropriate approach, whether it's gender sensitive, gender empowering, gender transformative, and very, in terms of like recommendations for our research kind of design at C4, for example. What recommendations would you have for, for example, improving and addressing this nuance to go beyond the checkbox measurement? Have you gender-proofed your research project? I mean, do you have gender-desegregated data? What recommendations would you have? Great question, and I'm going to answer it in two very, very different kinds of ways. On the one hand, notice it. I mean, gender and forestry, I was at a conference in mid-January at a forestry conference, and 98% of the panelists were men. I was put on many, many panels, and I think part of it is because my name, Kiran, is both a woman's and a man's name. So just noticing it and start by sort of, you know, trying to bring more, I mean, there's plenty of women scientists. So bring those into the picture, one. Second, and this is perhaps not the answer you would expect vis-à-vis practical researchers, stop being afraid of asking very, very scary and controversial kinds of questions. Bringing up issues of gender is going to be difficult. It's going to invoke all kinds of, you know, not so easy to answer questions. It's going to generate precisely the kind of questions that you're asking. And again, C4 is a great place in recognizing this and sort of having a gender team that's trying to address those particular kinds of issues. I think that, so let me, you know, let me go back to my sort of starting point, which is that we want to address issues of gender in the same way that we address a whole bunch of other things, that we want a methodological and technological solution or approach to address development and to address gender. And the focus on gender actually questions, you know, brings into question that particular approach. What if the methodological or technical approach add, you know, what in feminist scholarship is often called add women and still? What if that approach doesn't work? Then we might need to sit and ask, you know, different kinds of questions and then be willing to have different kinds of discussions. So I would say it's like, you know, let's very pragmatically when you're designing these things, let's be willing to have those kinds of discussions, not get bogged down and mired down by them, but say, okay, in our research, here are some of the things that we might be able to get, others that we're not going to be able to get. So then when we're coming up with recommendations and we're forced to generalize, and this again is coming up again and again and again in the work that Annie and I are trying to do with respect to forest food security and gender and with respect to some of the work that Huria and folks are trying to do with respect to climate change adaptation. There's a hunch that women and gender play a key role in climate change adaptation in food security, but the data reveals all kinds of very, very mixed things. So then what do we do with this kind of messy data? And if we are forced, or not forced, forced by our own personal politics and funding exigencies to say, no, women are really, really, really important and we have to generalize, in our research papers, we might somehow sort of have, might want to say, well, you know, it's not bearing out. There's something that seems to be missing and what might be missing is, they're not important, maybe they need to just go back home. I sincerely believe that that is not the case. I think that there's something wrong with the way we're looking at things and the kind of discussions that we're having. Not wrong, I don't want to say wrong, I don't actually believe in the right and wrong models. That there's some, there's a series of, it's the structural imperative that makes us again and again and again ask certain kinds of questions and fall into certain kinds of approaches. And I'm saying this as a biologist who became a social scientist. I noticed gender relations when I was a biologist in the 1980s and it was like, this is too confusing, it does not belong in my framework, I put it out. So what happens if that which doesn't belong is put into the framework? And Brian was talking about this, we said we at the annual meeting, we said we, I mean I don't think it was your language but about knowledge production, what's considered knowledge and what I thought about with science and technology studies. There's lots of work that's being done in science and technology studies that pays attention to what is considered science, what are the approaches that you take to science. So pragmatically when we're talking about gender, is it going to change the way we do science? Is it going to change the way we think about what science is supposed to do? Can I just follow up Robert's question earlier of the sort of the two objectives of the gender of focus and gender approaches? I mean one of it is we need to understand gender roles, the distribution of benefits and opportunities in order to manage forests more effectively. But the other, the women's empowerment and all of the power structure issues that you're talking about, is the right point of intervention forestry research? Right point, well let's start with the word intervention. Intervention where? I think actually yes, the right point of intervention is forestry research and all other kinds of intervention. But what's the locus or loci of intervention? That's where I would want to sort of turn the lens and say is the intervention supposed to be just out there? What if we change the loci of intervention inwards? What is it that foresters and forestry might learn from paying attention to gender dynamics or the lack of gender dynamics in forestry research? So I would say yes, absolutely, it's all those loci. Does that, you don't seem convinced. You're coming back to the first objective. Let's understand how people manage forests and what do we need to know in order to improve that. But the other side, the dealing with power differentials and the actual empowerment of women, how do we get there through a forestry research avenue? That's what I mean by the, what do we do differently that's actually going to empower women through the forestry side? We could perhaps start by listening to, how do they define forests? How do they manage forests? Are the different kinds of management strategies that are being proposed right now for forestry research actually dis-empowering women? Is it actually removing, again, Amy's proposing to do some research on, and again, look, the answer is not going to be, it's not necessarily going to be the same across loci. You might be managing a forest for economic productivity, economic growth, with the assumption that it's going to trickle down to development, but perhaps those precise strategies, in fact, the early 1970s work done by a Danish economist Esther Boestrap, who was looking at women's role in agriculture productivity, found that development interventions actually had an extremely negative impact on women's empowerment, that women were actually controlling a lot of resources, played key role in economic production measures, but development interventions invisibilized their roles and made them more dis-empowered. So is forestry research? Yeah, I would say that that and many others would be, that would be a role, that would be a loci of intervention. But again, I'm also insisting that we turn back and that would require us to see. We're making the assumption that our intervention is for good, but what if we were to ask a question about our intervention and role? There's a degree of hubris to our research. To some extent there has to be, but if we shift that, it's a very uncomfortable kind of feeling, but one that I think is absolutely imperative to ask. Yes, sir, on the last one. I think we also should be more honest about the extent to which the vision of gender equity is shared with our stakeholders and our vision of what that means. There are plenty of countries where we work where people have gender identities and norms with regard to what they regard as appropriate. That's, and our partners who we work with, they do not necessarily share our opinions about exactly what the role should be even in the research process in terms of research ethics. I mean, these are, we can't assume that this discussion which is much more focused on a scientific academic discourse and maybe at a very high policy level that that trickles down to even our boundary partners in each country. Thank you. Actually, this is again, I love it. I think it's almost as if all my questions have been planted. What I was going to say, one of the points that I want to make is that when we addressing those issues of economic and environmental sustainability and gender equities, again, there is a tendency to not engage with or to think of those as being disconnected from local kinds of struggles or other kinds of struggles. And those, what are the kinds of struggles that are going on in those places for human welfare, for recognition of different kinds of cultural practices, for democratic rights and struggles? So they may be different, but again, in all loci, no set of relations or no social dynamics are static. They change over time and there are struggles for those changes. So how our interventions or our approaches congruent with or not congruent with the kind of struggles that are going on the ground. So our notions of gender equity, whatever those are, and again, I don't think that our notions of gender equity are by any means going to be uniform, but how do they play out at the site of intervention, if you will. So yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Kiran. Thank you, everybody. That's the end of our Science Attender. I'm sure that's not the last one about gender. I hope that we will have some more challenging one or so trying to understand how we do this work, because it's important and what are the questions we ask. So thanks again, big clap to everybody and see you for the next Science Attender.