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Social Exclusion and Gender: Does One Size Fit All?

Author: C Jackson
Date: 1999
Size: 12 pages (94 KB)

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Summary

Are social exclusion frameworks adequate for understanding the links between marginalisation and poverty? What are the gender implications of the core concepts of these approaches? Concepts of social exclusion claim to offer an integrated framework for analysing social disadvantage. However, this paper by the University of East Anglia, UK, argues that such approaches are often simplistic because they rest on unquestioned assumptions about power, marginality, and agency. Gender analysis can strengthen social exclusion perspectives by revealing the specifics of particular forms of disadvantage.

Concepts of social exclusion are becoming increasingly prevalent as part of social policy approaches in development agencies. They have emerged as the result of the general shift in considering poverty as multidimensional and a process rather than purely economic. They are popular because they claim to capture both the material and cultural aspects of deprivation, and try to integrate the various forms of disadvantage in a single framework. However, closer analysis reveals a number of problems with the core concepts underpinning them. Gender critique and analysis of experience in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Nepal shows that:

• Marginalisation is not necessarily negative. It offers both limitations and opportunities. It is also possible for women to be included and excluded simultaneously.
• Inclusion is not necessarily positive, but usually has a price. Women often face a choice between inclusion and servitude or autonomy with hardship.
• Exclusion is not necessarily involuntary as social exclusion theorists assume.
• Gender mediates forms of exclusion, but does not produce categories of people excluded in uniform ways.
• Power is dispersed, contingent and unstable. Social exclusion approaches have a too simplistic view of power in which the included are powerful and the excluded powerless.
• Individuals shape social processes and institutions, and are not just passive recipients of their effects. Social exclusion theories see such factors as structural, and do not adequately embrace concepts of agency.

Social exclusion approaches are in need of a better understanding of marginality, the limits of a dualistic notion of power, and the need to consider the excluded as agents within the process of exclusion. In particular, the idea that men and women are gendered subjects rather than bounded groups is important for policy formulation. Extending men’s rights to women, in for example, land or employment matters, may not deliver the kind of social inclusion anticipated. Deepening social exclusion approaches with gender analysis will enable policy makers to:

• Ensure that labour-based social inclusion programmes build positive perceptions of contributions in household relations and do not transform one form of dependence into a worse variety.
  

  Better understand power relations and the resistance or absence of resistance by the excluded through providing an understanding of subjectivity.

• Better understand the gendered processes behind entitlement failure, which the social exclusion approach does not analyse adequately.
• Avoid social inclusion at the cost of cultural exclusion.
• Avoid the pitfall of treating gender as a synonym for women, which is a tendency in social exclusion approaches.
• Be more exact in differentiating the nature of exclusion in the different social identities of race, gender, disability and age.

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Source: Jackson, C, 1999, ‘Social Exclusion and Gender: Does One Size Fit All?’ The European Journal of Development Research, Vol. 11, No. 1
Author: Cecile Jackson , Cecile.Jackson@uea.ac.uk