 I think it's just been a very technical process and in many ways when you start looking at what's happening in country around red when you look at the national policies everything's caught up in these really technical things about how you set reference levels and monitoring and verification programs and how all this works and different sources of data and it's very complicated I mean it's not only women who are excluded it's everybody from that kind of debate it's just very hard to understand. Putting gender into that at that level at the policy level is probably not all that relevant where it becomes relevant is down when you're talking about benefits sharing when you're talking about monitoring on the ground if there's going to be a community level monitoring things like that and obviously when you're talking about actual the actions and strategies being done to try to change forest use then what are those actions what are those changes what are you asking people to do are you asking them to stop shifting cultivation are you asking them to produce in smaller areas so then who are you affecting are you affecting the women's agriculture are you affecting men agriculture you know that's where it gets really complicated and definitely there has to be gendered questions asked at that level. So gender is relevant at that level because any kinds of policies that come in and start changing your rules about land and forest use are as likely to affect women as they are to affect men I mean again it's going to depend very much on the division of labor in those communities how different people are using the land and so on but if you don't ask the question you're not going to know how those things are happening. So on the ground there there are many ways in which women could be affected so that's why it's so important for them to understand to know be informed about these processes from the beginning as informed as men and in order for that to happen that's very that's difficult because as one of the people asked here earlier women may spend may spend they said they do but obviously depends on the community four hours getting water every day or they're doing all the household labor of course they aren't as informed and so you can't put the burden on women either to say you know okay we have more things we need you to do but in fact you know women do need to be informed we need to know whether or not these policies or which ones of them are likely to have an impact on women. This research is still from the early red projects we've just done the second round of research on those same projects to look at two years later down the road how things are happening but that that data has not yet been analyzed so it's just looking at the data from the early red project initiatives and to what extent well what we ended up doing was having a women's focus group in order to understand some of the gender dimensions of forests in the communities and then we also had village surveys and they weren't comparable so that's important to know we didn't ask all the same questions to everybody but the some of the questions were the same and one of those was assessing the extent to which people were familiar with red but they understood what it was if they had a basic understanding of this thing that was happening in their community whatever it was called the project name or red or whatever and we found a major difference a significant difference between the the women the percentage of women's groups that under that did have a basic understanding of red and the percentage of this village focus groups and the village groups were mixed gender but they were about 66 to 67 percent male so they were predominantly male across in on average and we found that 41 percent of the women's groups had a basic understanding of red but 67 of the mixed groups did I wasn't sure what we would really find and it was somewhat surprising to find this difference across the boards so it was sort of a it was a proxy to say okay very early on who's being informed and then but what we thought would be we would find is that well where women are really active in their communities they're probably pretty well informed or where women you know so our question we have several questions one about whether or not women are involved in the leadership body of the have an elected position in the leadership body of the community but the main one was really asking women if they feel they have an influence on village decisions and the general percentages across the board were pretty high but when you compared them to the results of knowledge about red it didn't make any difference there was no correlation at all and similarly we thought okay well they're probably places where women don't even use for us that much right that was one of our one of our co-authors arguments on this was why should women be involved they're not involved anyway they don't do anything in for us so we looked at that data to see how much women used for us but we found that even in the places where women women and men's use of the forest here to be equal in terms of the amount of time they spend in the forest or where women use the forest more than men you still didn't see a difference in terms of that gap between knowledge about on knowledge about red so clearly these are women you would expect to have a vested interest in for us and yet you don't see them being equally informed as the men in their own communities so really the only place where it made a difference was where women were we specifically asked women if they were involved in forest rulemaking and that is the place where we found that in fact women were more likely to have a similar knowledge to men or the gap was less well if these if something like red is going to happen and you already see many projects happening around the world that are called red and some that haven't you know have changed their names now but there are interventions in communities that are going to affect how people can use forest resources we have to look at how vulnerability if we don't take a gendered approach we're likely to do more harm than good for women I mean my my closing statement was that if if you don't address the inequities and you go in with the project you're going to come out with inequities you know you have to you're just going to perpetuate them if not make them worse unless you take them into account at the beginning and design them into your project