Gender Analysis for Diplomacy & Development Course @ George Washington
Gender expert Kristin Haffert and development expert Jenna Ben-Yehuda will co-teach a new 1-credit skills course at GW entitled: Gender Analysis for Diplomacy and Development in summer of 2019. A link will be available to sign up for this course by the end of 2018.
ABOUT THE CLASS
Women comprise nearly half of the world’s population, but policies and programs are often formulated with little regard to their impact on women, often yielding diplomatic and development outcomes that can exclude or worsen women’s lives. More troubling still, when policies and programs are designed specifically to addresses women’s challenges, they often fail. Why? This 1-credit course will offer an overview of policymaking through a gender lens to gain a sense of why such policies have failed with attention given to case studies that highlight great successes.
The course will then guide students through an understanding of how to conduct a proper gender analysis to provide a framework for understanding the role that gender plays in international development and diplomacy. The tool will provide a systematic process for understanding gender-related needs and how programs and policies can address these dynamic needs, dependent upon a society’s cultural and social norms and expectations. The course will convey how gender analysis is used as a tool to strengthen programming and foreign policy decisions that may lead to more nuanced and effective outcomes. It will provide an opportunity to leverage the systematic tools required to examine case studies of organizations and diplomatic scenarios that measurably benefitted from applying a gender analysis.
Students will be given the opportunity to conduct an organizational analysis of a development implementer through a gender lens to test the application of utilizing proper gender analysis tools. Co-taught by experienced practitioners of gender in foreign policy and development, Jenna Ben-Yehuda and Kristin Haffert, this course will be directly beneficial to students of any gender identity seeking to deploy effective means of crafting successful gender-inclusive policies and programs in diplomatic and development spaces.