Serving up change? Gender mainstreaming and the UNESCO–WTA partnership for global gender equality

Abstract

In 2006, UNESCO partnered with the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) claiming that women's tennis can help foster gender equality. This partnership was based on the notion that the empowerment of women and girls is integral to sustainable international development; yet, girls and women are positioned as both the barrier and solution to development. This document analysis uses the UNESCO–WTA project in Cameroon to critique the problematic nature of development assumptions and the approach of gender mainstreaming while contextualizing women's empowerment as a loaded term that often ignores social, political, and economic constraints. The implications of this analysis serve to reiterate calls for sport for development and peace initiatives to situate both sport and gender in their local contexts. It is also important to question the lack of accountability and transparency demonstrated by this particular corporate social responsibility partnership.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and reviewers of this special issue for their time and valuable feedback, as well as my thesis committee members Dr Margaret MacNeill, Dr Michael Atkinson, and Dr Bruce Kidd from the University of Toronto for their guidance throughout the research process. Lastly, I would like to thank Dr Richard Gruneau for his input on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Original 9: Billie Jean King, Rosie Casals, Nancy Richey, Judy Dalton, Kerry Melville Reid, Julie Heldman, Kristy Pigeon, Peaches Bartkowicz, and Valerie Ziegenfuss (WTA Tour, 2010).

^2. The WID approach emerged during the 1970s and simply fought to have women included in the development process. WAD progressed from WID by attempting to challenge patriarchal structures by creating women-only projects, but this approach treated all women as essentialized entities ignoring their differences. The GAD approach tried to focus more on the relationship between men and women with more of an emphasis on issues of race and class (Saavedra 2009).

^3. Contact and information searches were only conducted in English, which may have limited access to information in a bilingual country with many additional regional languages.

^4. Corrective rape refers to rape committed by heterosexual men against homosexual women in an attempt to ‘correct’ or ‘cure’ their sexual orientation (e.g. Brown 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was support by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 766-2010-4279].