‘Doing good and feeling good’: how narratives in development stymie gender equality in organisations

Abstract

This paper examines the challenges of working on gender equality in international development research projects and institutes, and how a code of appropriate emotions and behaviours is used to silence and stifle institutional change. Using my own experience at a science research institute, I argue that while senior leaders have acknowledged the importance of equity and diversity, internal institutional dynamics, workplace culture and hierarchies make change difficult. Furthermore, due to the nature of international development work, there is an affective norm (‘doing good and feeling good’) that surrounds the notion of working in ‘developing’ countries. This affect is gendered because a masculine camaraderie is generated. However, the affect shuts out self-reflexivity, because it would disrupt the narrative of selflessness and heroism of aid. The inside activists within the institute navigate between challenging the norms and having an unspoken code of civility imposed upon them, which is used to police and discipline how inside activists should behave. When inside activists criticise discriminatory practices and values, they are dismissed as being ‘angry’ and ‘uncivil’. The result is the depoliticisation of gender and feminist theories and practice, where people go through the motions of equity and mainstreaming without achieving meaningful change.

Keywords:

• Gender
• patriarchy
• institutional inequality
• affect
• intersectionality

Introduction

Integrating gender into development research and practice has been a long-term project for feminists and activists who work in the field of gender and development. The most common approach is gender mainstreaming, which is about integrating gender analysis, issues and responses throughout the project and policy cycle, so that gender inequality and discrimination are understood, highlighted and addressed at every stage of development work. Efforts to mainstream gender are well documented in a vast literature, primarily written by feminists who pioneered and pushed for theory and practice in the development sector.¹ If we plot these texts on a timeline, we can trace the strident call for gender mainstreaming, followed by practical guides and toolkits, then murmurs of dissent and doubts about its efficacy that grow into flat rejection of gender mainstreaming as a feasible way to transform systemic racism, sexism and heteronormativity in international development. However, what is absent from the literature is a feminist analysis of how emotions and affect are used to resist gender mainstreaming efforts in the international development sector. Therefore, how gender mainstreaming effort is perceived and felt by people – especially people in positions of power and privilege in development agencies – can become a vehicle for either positive or negative change. Jakimow (2021, 3) refers to affect as a means to augment power, in that ‘people manoeuvre within power’s configurations to secure resources’ from positions of either marginality or privilege. It is this sense of interconnectedness between emotions and affect that I use to describe how male dominance seeks to undermine feminists’ work on gender mainstreaming and structural equality. In doing so, I am subverting the stereotypical notion that feelings and affect are feminine, ‘women’s business’, and I argue that overlooking how male dominance uses feelings as punishments and rewards is detrimental to the feminist project of social and gender justice.

In showing how this affective norm is deployed, I draw on personal experiences and observations as a ‘gender person’ who was involved in a South Asia water resource management programme (‘the Project’) that was being implemented by an Australian science organisation (‘the Institute’). From 2016 to 2018, I worked with a team of predominantly male scientists to integrate gender into the Project. To do so, it was necessary for me to question and challenge the gender-blind norms and values of the Institute, which had a traditional Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) approach to viewing water (as a resource) and women (as passive users and recipients of aid). Some of my colleagues embraced this approach and collaborated with me. Others strongly resisted. What surprised me was the intensity of the relationship between emotion and affect, that ‘movement between being impressed upon, interpreting and acting upon that impression’ (Jakimow 2019). In reflecting on the Institute’s resistance to gender equity and mainstreaming, I found it useful to consider how male-dominant institutions exert power through the Code of Civility and Love Law to enforce obedience. I will explain what I mean by these two concepts below.

In human resources and management parlance, a code of civility refers to the set of behaviours and values that staff are expected to follow and exemplify through their actions. Aspirational words such as ‘respect’, ‘kindness’, ‘dignity’ and so forth are peppered throughout such codes. Such codes are helpful and necessary, because they contribute towards an inclusive and equitable work environment. However, what I found at the Institute was a patriarchal version of the code, one that valued obedience and respect for hierarchy. To follow the Code means you are accepted as an Institute member, and accompanying this Code is the Love Law. In Arundhati Roy’s (1997) novel, The God of Small Things, the Love Law is about social identities and boundaries: ‘the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much’. In the book, the Love Law had a devastating impact on the key characters, because the Law governed and constrained through rigid notions such as caste, class and gender. At the Institute, a Love Law also exists, one bound by the notion that foreign aid is about ‘doing good and feeling good’, as well as masculine hegemony, which reinforces patriarchy through complicity, dominance and marginalisation (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, Hearn and Blagojevic 2013). The Code of Civility and the Love Law are crude in their judgement and treatment of people. However, dominance does not require finesse.

This paper begins with an overview of the challenges of mainstreaming gender within the international development sector, followed by a discussion of how using feminist autoethnography is a powerful methodology and analytical framework to explore how patriarchal resistance to equity and diversity operates at individual and structural/organisational levels. Through the case study of the Project, I argue that patriarchal resistance against feminism and gender equality emanates from multi-spatial actors and levels of structure (from the organisational to the individual), and is deployed in a variety of affect expressions: from individual men’s emotions of offence and hurt caused by feminist critiques of ‘cultural norms’ to organisational resistance through imposing a code of civility that is used to silence those working on gender equality and changing the status quo. In response, those who work within the organisations – the inside activists who work on gender mainstreaming – use a feminised and feminist form of ethics to counter the patriarchal opposition. The paper ends with a hopeful (in)conclusion – the feminist project of gender mainstreaming and challenging structural inequalities is not over – but the work continues.

The troubled waters of gender mainstreaming and development

Development programmes aimed at changing patriarchal policies and processes have an evaporation effect when the scrutiny goes up a level to policymakers, managers and implementers. Water policy is a good example: at the micro, household level, the rights of women and girls as water users are visible because donors and policymakers alike primarily see them in their reproductive roles of cooks and cleaners. Going up to the national or state levels of water policies, this concern for gender evaporates as national water policies are classified as technocratic matters of water quantification and apportioning (Wu 2020). Hardy (2012, 119) ascribes this to the positivist foundation of international development, which has ‘typically been premised on appearing rational, professional, objective, effective and functional, grounded in measurable and quantifiable targets and outcomes, such as “growth”’.

As a feminist who commutes between the two spaces of the international development sector (‘the gender person’) and higher education (educator), I have seen how gender theories and practices have been introduced, debated and resisted in both sectors. However, what has been largely absent from study is the range of emotions that are displayed, enacted or performed during the contestations. In her study on emotions and affect in international development, Wright (2012, 1116) argues that ‘emotions are relational’, and whilst emotions are personal experiences, ‘they are powerfully imbued with colonial, sexist and racist logics’. Similarly, as one of the feminist inside activists who seek to transform patriarchal ideologies, behaviours and practices that prevail in institutions, I felt and experienced gender mainstreaming as a ‘product’ to be trialled in activities and programmes, as well as a concept and practice contested in emotionally charged spaces.

However, development policies and practice ignore these politics and politicisation of emotions, because it is pragmatically and politically convenient to treat aid recipients, aid workers and other stakeholders as homogeneous entities who can be rallied behind a single unifying project goal or outcome (Hardy 2012, 119). Whilst Hardy and others have identified this logic as neoliberal and western in origin, I argue that the suppression of emotions applies only to certain types of emotions that ‘hinder’ development progress. Furthermore, this is about patriarchy and the function of heteronormative masculine ideals about gender roles and norms, and what development policies and practices should look like, and what constitute appropriate behaviours and feelings from practitioners and researchers. While providing innovative feminist analyses about gender and intersectional inequalities, the general literature around affect has two key limitations: the (over) focus on the individual, and the difficulty of framing affects and norms within the socio-political contexts from which they emerge.

The study of affect is intimately bound to descriptions of interior, emotional landscapes in interactions with the exterior world, people and events. The challenge with this level of close, personal and personalised analysis is how to move beyond the individual’s experiences of affect and demonstrate how ‘social forces become embedded as individual experiences’ (Waterston, Alisse and Rylko-Bauer 2006, 409). For feminists, the process of mapping gender and intersectional power relations and dynamics of affect – of who gets to feel what, as well as who gets to articulate the affect – is vital, because ‘as feelings are processed, they are shaped by gendered ideologies and discourses and prescribe them and limit the range of emotions’ (Jakimow 2019). In the next section, I will examine how patriarchal organisations use affective norms as invisible, unwritten forms of control, and how this takes a unique turn within the development sector.

Doing good and feeling good: the compelling narrative of development

As organisations, development agencies have institutional norms and rituals that they inscribe, enact and enforce. Although some norms are regarded as positive (such as ethics guidelines or anti-harassment policies), norms and rituals can also be used to endorse patriarchal values, behaviours and emotions. This means the endorsement of rationality, objectivity, the dichotomy of development/underdeveloped, and a sense of ‘doing good’. The latter is most important for the patriarchal development narrative. ‘Doing good’ is heroism and knights in shining armour. It is the stock standard images of aid: a doctor treating a blind child; food air drops into war-torn famine regions; humanitarian workers prising earthquake victims from rubble; farmers talking rapturously to agronomists against the backdrop of a bountiful harvest. ‘Doing good’ is accompanied by ‘feeling good’. The literature on volunteerism has studied at length the positive emotions of volunteers (DiEnno and Thompson 2013, Jiménez and Fuertes 2005) – in particular, how those who volunteer can feel useful when they are helping those in need, and how they derive a sense of satisfaction that their activities are contributing to the greater good of the society. Likewise, the patriarchal development narrative encourages practitioners to feel good about themselves, because the nature of their work is intrinsically meaningful and makes a difference to the poor and the marginalised.

In questioning this narrative, I do not wish to diminish the achievements of individual aid workers. It is my belief that many who enter the development sector are genuine and passionate about social justice and equitably distributing resources. Some have given up more senior roles and higher salaries in the private sector because of their values and commitment to human rights and development. It is also a profession that is predominated by women (although senior management and leadership are still overwhelmingly male),² because the nature of development work is about supporting and nurturing communities, and it can be regarded as a pink-collar profession, with all the negative gendered impacts this entails.³

This paper examines how, at the organisational level, there is a set of normative behaviours and emotions expected of employees. For those who work in the development sector as ‘gender persons’, this is a challenging position, because part of the strength and value of feminism and gender theories involves engaging in critical self-inquiry and self-reflexivity while supporting others to do so too, in a nurturing environment (Ferguson 2015, 382). However, such work transgresses the patriarchal development narrative, because feminists examine and critique the rationale and politics behind the ethos of ‘doing good and feeling good’. The Project is an illustration of how the affect of ‘doing good and feeling good’ is destabilised by feminist inside activists, and how those who wield patriarchal development narratives seek to rebalance the power in their favour by invoking the Code of Civility to shut down pluralistic emotions, voices and dissent. In the next section, I will explain how the use of feminist autoethnography as research methodology as well as analytical framework can help in unpacking the complex interrelationships between structural and individual affective norms.

Patriarchal reality and feminist memories: autoethnography and the engendering of office politics and interactions

During the process of writing this article, I joked to myself that the paper’s methodology is part autoethnography and part crime scene reconstruction. The latter required poring over several years’ worth of notebooks (15 notebooks comprised of meeting notes, fieldwork observations, to-do lists, reflections and ‘incident reports’ from meetings and conversations that I felt were important to document), saved email correspondence, and various published paraphernalia, reports and annual calendars during my time at the Institute. As a qualitative researcher with an ethnographic research background, my note taking was extensive and I took notes every day, especially for meetings from which I needed to contribute materials for the write-up of the meeting summary. Partly this was due to my research training and experiences as a qualitative researcher, and partly because the topics of hydrology, engineering, environmental modelling and so forth were new territory for me and it was helpful to write everything down. From this volume of unpublished and published materials, I selected accounts and experiences that could best provide readers with an understanding of the Project, the gender politics of the Institute, and how mainstreaming and institutional change were subverted during daily practices and interactions.

From a methodological perspective, this meant reading and re-reading the above-mentioned materials, identifying encounters, conversations and anecdotes that were relevant. I then plotted a ‘timeline’ of emotions and affective norms: from the initial excitement and energy that I felt during the first year at the Institute, to the gradual and increasingly acrimonious environment of interactions with colleagues, conversations, meetings, and supportive work relations with other inside activists in years two and three. According to Ettorre (2017, 357) this analysing of stories is a critical part of feminist autoethnography, in which ‘We transform our personal stories into political realities by revealing power inequalities inherent in human relationships as well as the complex cultures of emotions embedded in these unequal relationships’. At the same time, this appraisal of my own life was not an emotionally detached, intellectual exercise. As I read through the materials, I re-lived and re-felt those three years, which was taxing both emotionally and intellectually. To avoid burnout, I took some time away from the research process to achieve a safe distance from the intense emotions that arose. I deployed the techniques learned during my time as a domestic violence counsellor: debriefing, self-care, giving myself permission to feel the range of emotions, and reading in-depth about other autoethnographic experiences and insights, especially drawing on feminist literature.

And yet, my courage wavers. In her powerful feminist memoir, Naheed (2009, 188) declares, ‘I have strung every moment like a pearl, a lustrous pearl, on the string of experience’. A few lines down, she confesses, ‘I am a cowardly woman; I can only walk in the shadow of my own confidence’. Likewise, sometimes I felt my personal narratives were worthy scholastic materials; other times I was paralysed by self-doubt – not just about whether by writing about affect and emotions, I was regressing into the binary gender norms of ‘men think, and women feel’, but also about the limits of autoethnography on the emotions of others. Beatty (2010) and Ellis (2004) expanded on the dangers of blurred lines between ethnography and fiction, especially when capturing the emotions and motivations of those you observe in fieldwork. It is not my intention to ascribe emotions and motivations to the scientists at the Institute; rather, the paper is an exploration of my experiences and my understanding of how, within the context of male dominance and hostility towards gender mainstreaming, individual attitudes and behaviours become codes of conduct that affirm structural inequality, and the negative impacts this can have. In this vein, Sara Ahmed and her relentless scrutiny of institutional inequity gave me the courage to go on.⁴ Academics such as Ettorre (2016, 2017), with their careful documentation of feminist autoethnography, gave me the discipline and procedures of the methodology, and I was enlightened by African American feminists’ use of autoethnography as ‘an innovative strategy of knowledge production’ through which Black Feminists ‘theorise and textualise our situated positions and elevate our subjugated discourses to levels recognised by both margins and centres of the discipline’ (McClaurin 2001, 56). The ‘situated positions’ mentioned by McClaurin are vital, because these positions of institutional discrimination are not abstract; they are experienced by individuals, and one of the impacts is profound trauma.

Context: ‘the Project’

The Institute is a large, government-funded research institute with global research partnerships and activities.⁵ For over five years, the Institute has been receiving funding from the Australian government to conduct a water resource management programme (‘the Project’) in South Asia. There is a large set of programme partners responsible for implementation, and they include multilateral organisations, government agencies, civil society organisations, universities and research institutes, and the private sector. These partners are geographically dispersed, and the Institute is primarily responsible for building the capacity of partner countries’ water and irrigation technologies and management. The key stakeholders for the Institute are South Asian government ministries and agencies (at national and provincial levels) with portfolios in water resource management. What distinguishes the Project from being a direct technology transfer activity is that the programme has a strong gender component, with one of the key overarching goals being the empowerment of women and girls in South Asia. This was a challenge for the Institute as, although it has a diverse portfolio of expertise, the water section of the organisation had not been familiar with the social sciences or gender and development concepts and research methods.

At the same time, the Institute had a very difficult start in gaining the trust of partner countries because of the bitter transboundary water disputes between countries in South Asia, which made them wary of sharing water data with a foreign government institute. During the initial phase of the Project, the relevant section worked closely with a monitoring and evaluation manager who also provided gender mainstreaming advice on project design and implementation. A significant portion of the manager’s work also centred on changing the mindsets and behaviours of the water scientists and engineers, who are predominantly male, although from diverse cultural backgrounds. A ‘women in development’ (WID) approach was used at the beginning, where the Project actively promoted the participation of female scientists from partner countries to attend technical workshops and training, which were conducted in Australia by the Institute and its local partner agencies. Support, such as additional airfares and stipends, was provided so that women’s families (typically husbands and young children) could join them; this was to encourage early and mid-level female scientists who might not otherwise have been able to travel overseas due to family responsibilities. Although well-intended, this WID approach never went beyond adding women into workshops, and some women faced jealousy and resentment upon returning to their home country and were ‘redeployed’ to lesser assignments.

How is gender promoted in the Project?

The Project is complex and made up of different stakeholders. There is the donor government, which liaises with and advises the Institute on a programmatic and strategic level. There are Australian and overseas partners who come from government, private and civil society sectors; they also work with the Institute from their respective portfolios. The governments in South Asia where the programme is implemented are the most important stakeholders because they are both partners and gatekeepers on research progress. The relevant ministries are water and irrigation, and they predominantly comprise men with engineering and hydrology backgrounds. Finally, there are the researchers at the Institute, who must make sense of this byzantine arrangement of stakeholders and power relations (both organisational and international relations) whilst delivering key results and outcomes. This section will provide a snapshot of the gender supporters from the key stakeholder groups, their motivations, and the challenges of working with/in the Institute to integrate gender.

The Australian government

As the donor of the programme, the Australian government has both policy and political imperatives to serve the Minister of Foreign Affairs’ international development policy priorities, which include women and girls’ empowerment and gender equality. The relationship between the government and the Institute is collegial and helpful, although due to quick turnover within the government department, the Institute has found itself re-establishing its relationship and having to debrief and familiarise new government counterparts on a regular basis.

The Institute – the ‘inside activists’

There are some researchers at the Institute as well as professional staff who are accustomed to interdisciplinary collaboration and familiar with feminist and gender theories and practices. Their goals are twofold: to push for more innovative scientific research that integrates gender and social sciences into biophysical research activities, and to support broader institutional change so the Institute is more equitable and respectful of diversity. The latter goal has been an ongoing concern, as the Institute is known for its ‘boys’ club’, especially among middle-aged and older cohorts. I call these colleagues inside activists because their work on gender and diversity goes beyond research methodology, also addressing institutional transformation through mainstreaming gender and intersectional justice into daily practices.

Scientists working on the Project

The scientists in the project are predominantly white men, although some are from diverse South Asian backgrounds due to the geographical focus of the Project. The scientists’ focus is to meet the goals and target indicators of the Project. The Project has been a challenge for them as researchers, because the stakeholder relationships with partner governments are very politically sensitive, and they must be constantly careful about transboundary water politics among the partner countries as well as the provincial governments within each country. Therefore, from the scientists’ perspective, gender mainstreaming is a ‘necessary evil’ that comes with the research funding, a form of social science methodology that must be ‘fitted’ into the research method or water modelling. My role as gender person involved working closely with the scientists, and for some, gender theories and concepts are intellectually and emotionally challenging, requiring them to reflect on the power relations between women and men. This makes the male scientists uncomfortable as it opens discussions about family, marriage and other issues that they regard as private or personal choices. Thus, the male scientists favour a WID approach, as well as the narrative that it is individual women scientists in South Asia whose capacity needs to be built, rather than examining how societal, cultural and structural inequalities make gender integration difficult. In reflecting on progress towards integrating gender into environmental sciences, Arora-Jonsson (2014, 304) aptly summarised the male-dominant interpretation of gender mainstreaming as follows: ‘Gender is taken up as if men and male privilege have nothing to do with gender and as if all women are interchangeable. Different women’s relations to different groups of men in particular contexts is ignored’. The STEM scientists’ unease and inability to see gender as relational will be elaborated on in the next section, as I discuss in detail the ways in which gender equality is resisted at an institutional level as well as by individuals.

For a social scientist as well as a feminist who believes that water resource management must involve learning from communities and diverse sets of stakeholders, this was a frustrating experience, especially as I have conducted extensive fieldwork on my own in so-called high-risk destinations. For the male scientists at the Institute, the restriction of mobility is frustrating but, paradoxically, it also affirms their sense of identity as men ‘doing good, feeling good’ in a developed country.

Because of the expense of such trips, the visits are always short: no longer than five or six days with a very packed schedule that starts around 7am and extends well into the night. As a result, overseas visits are a highly stressful and demanding experience for the scientists, and very different from the meandering ethnographic journeys that anthropologists undertake. Meetings with government officials (who are predominantly men from the middle to upper class echelons of their society) are also moments of intense diplomacy and negotiations on how water data can be shared, when they can be shared, how to analyse them (as this was Australian-funded research, the Project’s priority was using software created by Australian companies) and how capacity-building processes can be carried out. As a result, scientists who work on the Project are highly dedicated, and that dedication stems in part from a conviction that they are helping the South Asian countries to achieve national water security. ‘We are here to help’, is the common refrain heard at the Institute. The pressing water scarcity that faces the South Asian countries, the sensitive international relations around hydropolitics and the high-security risks of travel are mentioned often, which reinforces the importance of the Project and the role of the Institute – which, having arrived at this conclusion, is ‘only here to help’. The challenge with narratives about ‘doing good and feeling good’ is that they also engender a sense of conviction, and any self-reflexivity of one’s positionality (North vs South; colonialism and its role in the hydropolitics of South Asia; the male dominance of engineering) can be seen as a distraction from the Project’s progress. I use the word ‘engender’ deliberately, for it has the meaning ‘to endow something with gender, or to reveal its inherent gender: feminine, masculine, trans’ (Jolly 2019, 173) as well as the power relations that entails.

An example: being included in high-level official government meetings or obtaining a rare dinner appointment with a deputy secretary – these are signs of favour from the partner countries. Yet the inclusion into a male-dominated club means the exclusion of others: women, local activists and academics who might have offered a more robust critique of the country’s water policies. From time to time, I was an ‘honorary’ guest at such meetings or dinners, and I attended them with great discomfort: painful awareness of the exclusion of local women (I was the only woman, as well as being a foreigner, in the room); humiliation at having to ‘behave’ and listen quietly while the men talked about hydropolitics and science; and my anger at being asked token questions related to gender and community needs. Once, my frustration got the better of my manners, and I asked the men, ‘Why don’t you go into the communities and talk with the people? They can advise you more about their water situation than I do’. To which the scientists and South Asian government officials laughed and joked that since I was the ‘expert on women and gender’, I could tell them all. Jakimow’s (2019) reflection about gendered emotional repertoires, and how intersectionality defines who gets to feel what emotions, is an apt description of my encounter. I would also add that there is a level of complicity: I could have challenged the male scientists and government officials, or one of my colleagues could have spoken up and taken a stand against the male camaraderie. But to do so would risk offending our South Asian counterparts, and possibly jeopardise the Project. I could not risk my career for this outcome, and so I became silent and complicit in the goings-on. The cost of ‘doing good and feeling good’ means not questioning the status quo, and such decisions are deeply intersectional.

These gender stories are not unique to me. I can already envision feminists, gender and development academics and practitioners nodding (or shaking) their heads as they read this. On occasions when I do share these experiences with other women whose work involves gender mainstreaming and international development, it usually elicits an exasperated eyeroll and bemused laughter. This derision is a common emotion – and feminist resistance – to the patriarchal resistance against gender equality and mainstreaming. Or, as one former colleague at the Institute described it, ‘They want mainstreaming to be apolitical … add women and run workshops. When we demand institutional reform and behavioural change, that’s when the backlash happens. […] You must rise above it, see the humour […] or it will kill you’.

Despite my former colleague’s advice, it is painful to put these accounts into words. The jokes, secretly shared eyerolls and indignant email exchanges that I experienced at the Institute felt like a feeble strike against an immovable monolith. No one enjoys feeling small and disempowered, and while it is the practice for researchers to map out and articulate such experiences, I believe there is also risk in turning such experiences into banal academic exercises. Intellectual distancing rarefies the subject and turns it into an object of study. This is the constant tension for feminists and gender experts who work on mainstreaming: we are required to document, analyse and make sense of patriarchy and feminist responses, but in doing so, we are turning very personal experiences and emotions into objects and case studies to be judged upon. The misogynistic question ‘Did she ask for it?’ is not limited to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence but broadly extends to women who complain about patriarchy. In the remainder of this article, I will attempt to describe my own experiences and analyses with the Institute and the Project, with some trepidation of judgement, but also with the hope that readers can draw insights from my account of confronting patriarchal resistance.

The ‘Love Law’ of the institute

Earlier, I talked about the affective norm of institutions, and how emotions are harnessed by the Institute to instil the sense of a ‘doing good, feeling good’ narrative that motivates the scientists as well as creating a Code of Civility regarding how one should think and act without one’s explicit awareness, and it is used to create membership and exclusion. As discussed in the introduction, the Institute rewarded compliance through the Love Law, of who should be loved, and how much, as well as who should be punished for non-compliance. In my time at the Institute, especially towards the end, all I felt and experienced was that the Institute divided people into categories of Loved and Unloved, and that there was a governing system ruled by a law that was swift in judgement and low on mercy.

To be loved by other colleagues, and to thrive in the Institute, you must be ‘one of the boys’, or if not male, then you must comply with the status quo. One female former employee recounted her experience of coping with a male-dominant work environment and a ‘boys will be boys’ ethos:

The Institute Boys …. That’s how I see them now. I worked with [names withheld] during my time there. I remember we were out in the field, and I was walking along the dirt road. It had been raining, so it’s wet and muddy. Suddenly, a car whooshed past, and I was saturated in muddy water. All I heard were hoots of laughter. It was them. The Boys.

The former employee did not challenge her colleagues’ behaviour at the time, saying that she made a choice to go along with the men, so that she could finish the fieldwork without further difficulties. During our conversation, I was struck by my own tiredness at the mantra of ‘boys will be boys’. Grown men can behave unprofessionally at work, and others are expected to tolerate it.

The Love Law demands loyalty, even at the expense of being mistreated or discriminated against. A story was recounted to me where employees who are non-white and identify as LGBTQ were dissuaded from attending a meeting with politically conservative donors. This exclusion was rationalised as the Institute being aware that such a practice is discriminatory, but the Institute had no choice, because the donors might withdraw funding if they saw a non-white, LGBTQ person ‘at an important meeting’. They were told that if the donor took offence and the funding was withdrawn, their colleagues’ positions could become precarious. This became a very emotionally fraught dilemma for the excluded employees, because to be ‘loved’ is to accept that the project funding is paramount, that despite the inherent racism and homophobia, they must be understanding and put the Institute’s interests ahead of individual identity and self-worth.

Institutional analysis has examined the toxic combination of patriarchy and white supremacy (Ahmed 2012; Arora-Jonsson 2014). At the Institute, the men are culturally diverse, yet they are bound by the Love Law through complex reasons. As mentioned, the scientists work in challenging contexts for the Project. The risk of offending partner governments is high (because of the political sensitivity of sharing water data and advising on them); negative consequences could be the withdrawal of research and capacity-building partnerships, with consequences for bilateral relations and diplomacy. Thus, the scientists are very wary and cautious in their approach. This, combined with the high stress levels and perceived personal safety risks of working in those countries, forms a bond amongst the men. The rationale is that they work hard to pursue Australia’s interests in South Asia, the project is difficult, and they are ‘doing good’ for the countries where the water project is being implemented. While the scientists cannot see a clear link between their highly technical and biophysical research and gender equality, they reason that if water resource management is ‘solved’ at the national government level, then it will have a trickle-down effect whereby all citizens – including women and girls – will have better access to water. Closer examination of their values and the project’s actual progress towards achieving gender equality is unwelcome, because it disrupts this narrative of ‘doing good, feeling good’ among those who are loved.

The Code of Civility: a cautionary tale in vignettes

The unity of men across diverse cultures to resist gender equality is not a new phenomenon. It has been well documented in gender and development literature (see Mukhopadhyay 1995; Wu 2018). In response/resistance to gender mainstreaming, there is a weaponising of diversity principles and rhetoric: the Institute is a multicultural workforce, and discussions about gender equality or feminism in relation to patriarchal norms are seen as another form of imposition. I call this form of institutional control ‘the code of civility’. Codes of conduct and notions of civility are standard employee requirements in Australia and have the good intention of being a blueprint for respectful and collegial working environments. However, at the Institute, the code of conduct is underwritten by the patriarchal narrative of the Love Law and is distorted to become a ‘Code of Civility’, which is used as a way to silence dissent. ‘Offenders’ are deemed disruptive and disrespectful and are admonished for breaching the Code of Civility.

One might wonder, why would a non-white male scientist observe and comply with this Code of Civility? In a discussion about nationalism and exclusion, Ahmed argued that minorities may seek to ‘“show” how much they love the nation; they might aim to demonstrate their love even more forcefully given their previous exclusion from the national body’ (Ahmed 2012, 210, emphasis added). At the Institute, like other organisations, funding is competitive and job positions can become tenuous based on performance. In the manoeuvre to gain recognition, to be loved, scientists must comply with the male-dominant norms and values of the Institute, including exhibiting behaviours that reinforce patriarchy. This not a phenomenon unique to the Institute: in an ethnographic study on two multinational construction firms, Chappell and Galea (2017) found that the firms have unspoken rules and norms that reward men while women are expected to prove their loyalty. This section offers a series of vignettes to illustrate how the Code operates.

‘Worse than my PhD defence’

An example was when a newly appointed researcher from an ethnically diverse background presented their research proposal. The audience attacked the new appointee’s idea from every angle. The researcher’s background is in economics and their presentation focussed on economic modelling, yet they were criticised by environmental modellers for using the ‘wrong’ model (even though the model that was suggested would not have been applicable, due to the disciplinary difference and focus of the topic).

I was disturbed by my new colleague’s experience, who described it as ‘worse than my PhD defence’. When I raised my concern with a senior director, I was told that ‘At [the Institute], we believe that if your idea can be attacked from every angle and still survives, then it is a good one’. I replied that this practice is reminiscent of hazing new recruits. Nevertheless, the new researcher was resigned, and told me that they would ‘revise and change [the proposal] – whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t happen again’. In this case, the new colleague was made to feel they were in breach of the Institute’s unspoken Code. They were roundly and openly criticised and the effect was feeling and being seen by others as Unloved, the latter being a very powerful disciplining tool. The solution was to conform, in the hope that such disciplining would not happen again.

‘The ball exercise’

Another example is the story of a gender equity and awareness exercise that was reported to me. The trainer, ‘Elizabeth’, told the male and female scientists to line up against the wall in a certain way. Then she placed a wastepaper basket closest to the men. The exercise was about publication opportunities based on existing studies done about how gender, childbearing and childcare status, race and ethnicity affect researchers’ outputs. The white men were lined up at the front, closest to the basket, followed by men of colour, then white women. Women of colour were farthest away. Each person was given a ball to throw into the basket. The ball represented their publications. The reaction was ‘extraordinary’, according to Elizabeth. Some of the men laughed and treated it as a joke as they chucked the ball into the basket; a few men were embarrassed and refused to participate, or deliberately missed the target. Some women became upset and threw their ball at the men. A white, senior-level staff member was furious, and told Elizabeth the exercise was divisive and disruptive and that there was nothing wrong with men having wives who perform the bulk of house and care work. Privately, however, a small number of men thanked Elizabeth for the ­exercise and sought advice on what they could do to help make the Institute more ­equitable for their female colleagues.

I reacted to this story with equal parts of disbelief and anger: disbelief because of some of the men’s behaviour, that they thought inequality was amusing, and anger at the senior leader’s reaction, which seemed so typical of white male fragility when being confronted about privilege. For her part, Elizabeth took comfort in the fact that at least some men became aware of the inequalities, as well as their own unearned privilege. However, similar activities on gender equality have not been carried out at the Institute since then, and it reinforced the fragility of the Love Law and the Code of Civility, which cannot withstand being challenged by collective self-reflexivity about how the Institute was doing, and whether everyone was benefiting from the Love Law.

Unruly women = angry, crazy, lock ‘em up!

The Code is also used to judge and ridicule women who transgress the institute’s norms and cultures. The following quotes reveal how some people sought to falsely depict their female colleagues as ‘angry’ or crazy:

[The name of an inside activist]? Really? Is she still working on [gender]? She is so radical and angry.

There are ways of undermining, to imply lack of competence, or even mental illness. [Name] wasn’t at the training […]. It was not said explicitly, but the way some of them rolled their eyes, the hand gestures and the tone of voice. The unspoken message was that [Name] is mentally unstable.

The second quote was about me. Following my complaints about the scientists’ behaviour, I had been asked by the Institute to take a leading role in a diversity workshop. I refused to participate in the workshop, as I believed it was inappropriate to compel a person who has experienced bullying to work closely with people on behavioural change, particularly with those people who were instigating those behaviours. A few months later, a senior academic (who had been made aware about the workplace issues at the Institute and was communicating with the scientists) wrote an email to the Institute’s senior leaders and made false claims about my mental health.⁶ These bullying tactics were not directed solely at me. Other women experienced being shut out from meetings or being silenced as their male colleagues dominated conversations. In one instance, I consoled a female colleague who was distressed by a meeting in which ‘[They] just kept talking, laughing, being absolutely boys about it all. [Name] was really upset. She was almost in tears’. When asked why the women did not leave the meeting, I was told, ‘It wouldn’t have made a difference. [The men] wouldn’t have cared. We’d be dismissed as angry feminists’. In this case, the Code of Civility has a very elastic application – if women protest about poor behaviour, they are labelled as angry.

Although painful to share, my own experiences of transgressing the Code had cast me into the ‘Unloved’ category. At the beginning, it involved admonishment about the way I questioned things. Then it became a warning that a feminist approach was ‘too radical’ and ‘the men will oppose’. By year three, my status as Unloved was cemented. Interestingly, it was the non-white male scientists who became the enforcers and foot soldiers of the Love Law, where a few non-white men took the lead in ostracising me in the workplace, from not talking to me at lunch time to openly interrupting and shouting at me during meetings (with no intervention from other colleagues). One man, who was the team leader, took it upon himself to upbraid me loudly in the open office space for ‘missing’ reports or ‘inadequate’ work quality. When I complained about the three men’s behaviour, I was told that these men come from culturally conservative backgrounds, and that my behaviour was threatening to their worldview of how women behave, and that it challenged them too deeply about the nature of their work and their sense of authority. Instead of acknowledging my experience of being bullied, I was told to ‘respect [name withheld], because he is a man of colour and it’s hard to be a minority at the Institute’. The irony that I am also a woman of colour was lost upon the commentator. My experience is a textbook example of Ahmed’s (2012, 76) critique about the concept of ‘being diverse’, which pays lip service to genuine efforts towards diversity: ‘To be seen as “being diverse” can be a way of “not doing diversity”, because the organisation says it “is it”, or that it already “does it”, which means that it sees there is nothing left to do’. For the predominantly white Australian Institute, ‘being diverse’ means simply having a darker skin colour. The inside activists are disrupting this bonhomie by being critical and challenging what is perceived as norms. Breaching the Love Law results in not being loved, as I and others have discovered.

In response, the inside activists’ strategy is to be diplomatic and collegial. Accustomed to collaborative research, the inside activists would create opportunities for dialogue about gender theories; they actively listened to the male scientists and offered support and resources on gender mainstreaming; they sought to foster safe spaces in which early career scientists could articulate their opinions; some inside activists worked by co-developing journal articles, grant proposals and other activities that encouraged teamwork and thinking about how gender can be integrated into biophysical research.

However, the challenge for inside activists is that they are operating within an organisation that is deeply patriarchal and in which gendered traits are ‘loved’ if they adhere to the Love Laws. Thus, male scientists are rewarded for domineering behaviours, while women and inside activists are ‘loved’ if they demonstrate empathy, listening, collaboration and other nurturing and feminised characteristics. During a long conversation with an inside activist about gender mainstreaming and why male scientists are resistant, my colleague reflected, ‘Talking with you has made me realise […] I try to be empathetic, helpful and supportive of my colleagues. But how much of that is conditioned or has been conditioned into me to be passive while all this is going on?’ When I tried to reassure them that their effort is making significant changes, my colleague pondered, ‘Perhaps. Or maybe I am reinforcing gender norms’.

‘Your silence will not protect you’⁷: conclusion, or a call for resistance

Although I am no longer working at the Institute, reflecting and making sense of these experiences has been challenging. This is because having worked with the scientists and inside activists, I had also embraced elements of their behaviour and thinking. The ‘doing good and feeling good’ ethos, to be included under the Love Law, and even abiding by the Code of Civility – the conformity was about surviving whilst working in a male-dominant institution, but it also afforded me insights into why such affect and behaviours are appealing. It gave me the understanding that, in their genuine effort to understand gender mainstreaming and integrate it into the Project, the scientists picked up the routines of mainstreaming and replicated them without understanding or appreciating their meaning. For the Institute, gender equality and theories greatly challenge the male-dominant culture and structure, and its response is to absorb gender mainstreaming processes into the ethos of ‘doing good and feeling good’ by not doing much at all. In my work with the Institute, the micropolitics of workplace conversations and meeting discussions as well as people’s behaviours and emotions were very much affected by this contestation between doing good and paying lip service to gender mainstreaming, with the inside activists’ more radical vision of mainstreaming, which is about questioning the intersectional power relations and seeking to change institutional practices that maintain the status quo and reinforce inequalities. In this paper, I have given an account of how affective norms and patriarchy work within the workplace through the case study of the Institute, and it is important that we continue the feminist project of documenting and calling out patriarchal values and practices – who does what to whom, who gets to feel what range of emotions, and to what extent those feelings are validated, recognised, or dismissed.

In her advice on how diversity workers can make change, Ahmed (2012) suggests that one of the strengths of diversity workers is the perception of difference – that is, the perception that runs counter to the dominant views, code of conduct (formal and customary) and behaviours – and that they must be insistent: ‘You have to become insistent to go against the flow, and you are judged to be going against the flow because you are insistent. A life paradox: you have to become what you are judged as being’ (Ahmed 2012, 186). I cannot offer a proper conclusion for this paper, because the struggle for equity and diversity in the development sector continues. But I am hopeful that my story – a humble contribution to the existing feminists’ efforts – can ignite conversations and actions for change.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Special Issue Guest Editor, Associate Professor Tanya Jakimow, for her guidance throughout the process. I am most grateful for the thoughtful and encouraging feedback from the peer reviewers, and to Karin Hosking for the copyediting. This paper would not have been possible without the inside activists who provided me with so much inspiration and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joyce Wu

Joyce Wu is an academic at the University of New South Wales, and Deputy Editor for Development in Practice. Her research interests include gender mainstreaming, male behavioural change and violence against women. Her book, Involving Men in Ending Violence against Women, examined how this work was carried out by activists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Timor Leste.

Notes

1 For instance, there are longstanding influential texts written by feminists such as Jahan (1995), Kabeer (1994), Longwe (1997) and Moser (1989), which form the spine of the gender mainstreaming narrative. There are also key textbooks, reports and policy briefs which provide a sort of ‘roadmap’ on how gender mainstreaming could be implemented at organisational or project levels (European Institute for Gender Equality 2017; March, Smyth, and Mukhopadhyay 1999).

2 For example, while the total percentage of women employed by the United Nations is 42.8%, compared to 57.2% for men, women only occupy 27.3% of senior leadership roles while 72.7% of leaders are men (Black, Henty, and Sutton 2017, 7).

3 The term ‘pink collar’ refers to careers that are regarded as having a carer role, such as teaching, nursing, social work, and the beauty and hair industry. It was coined by USA writer Louise Kapp Howe in the 1970s and has since gained traction in describing job sectors that are lower paid and precarious and offer less opportunity for promotion.

4 Ahmed’s conviction and sense of justice was such that she quit a tenured position (Pells 2016) to protest the university’s failure to respond to campus sexual harassment complaints, an act hard to fathom after the COVID-19 pandemic, which has created even greater job precarity (and silencing) in academia.

5 To protect the privacy of individuals, names and identifying details of the case study have been changed.

6 The academic’s action was investigated by their workplace, and the person was subject to disciplinary action, including being required to write a letter of apology to me. It was a very difficult period for me, as I tried to work whilst being attacked by various individuals.

7 The quote is from Audre Lorde’s illuminating book The Cancer Journals (1980).