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Each year in November we give thanks and show appreciation for the people in our lives that inspire us. November celebrated Foreign Service National (FSN) Appreciation Day and Thanksgiving, this edition of the Learning Digest is appropriately brought to you thanks to dedicated work by an FSN, Mahabat Alymkulova from the Kyrgyz Republic Mission, alongside Evidence and Learning (E&L) staff from the Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) Bureau. Mahabat joined the E&L Team as a FSN Fellow this summer sharing her expertise and experience with the entire Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG). As a leader in the Agency’s efforts to empower women in public life, she also played an instrumental role in the implementation of the Women’s Political Participation and Leadership (WPPL) Assessment Framework to identify the barriers to gender-inclusive democracy in the Kyrgyz Republic. She is just one example of the many dedicated FSNs who are exploring innovative ways to improve our work and contributing evidence and learning not just in their country and programs but also the development of DRG globally. Thank you Mahabat, and thank you FSNs all around the world!
 In Indonesia, KIP Aceh worked to change norms to increase WPPL through a voter education workshop and polling simulation for persons with disabilities to increase participation of persons with disabilities. Photo: USAID/Indonesia.
The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) has identified women’s equal participation and leadership in political life as essential to achieving sustainable development. However, more than 40 years after the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and despite ratification by 189 states, a tremendous gap in the political participation of women remains. Although women make up half of the world’s population, they are still largely restricted from public spaces and decision-making power. Data shows that women are underrepresented at all levels of decision-making. As of September 2023, only 26 countries have women heads of state or government, and women fill only 22.8 percent of cabinet positions and 26.5 percent of single or lower house legislative seats. In only three countries have women reached 50 percent of their local deliberative bodies. Given these numbers, what barriers hold women back from positions of political power? Some promising approaches outlined in the USAID 2023 Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment Policy to advance gender equality include addressing the power structures that limit, deter, and/or exclude women’s full political participation as well as addressing the barriers across the entire political ecosystem, including those at the individual, institutional, and societal levels.
This month’s DRG Learning Digest focuses specifically on how social norms regarding gender shape a woman’s ability to participate in politics and public life. In many countries around the world, women are encouraged toward, and often restricted to, a private life focused on household work, childcare, cleaning, and caring for the family. In these societies, when women attempt to engage in politics and public life, they face various challenges accessing political processes and exercising agency and power within those systems. These challenges exist within a society’s “ecosystem” of individual, institutional, and socio-cultural barriers and openings that either support or undermine women’s political leadership.
This edition of the DRG Learning Digest examines the following topics:
- How gender norms shape women's role in society
- How gender norms create barriers to gender-inclusive politics and public life
- Challenging patriarchal norms and putting norms to work for us
And, as always, please make use of DRG Evidence and Learning Team resources for better and evidence-informed programming! (See text box at the end.)
How Gender Norms Shape Women’s Role in Society
First of all, let’s define our terms: What are social norms? Social norms are the informal rules that people in a society or group share and that define normal and acceptable thought and behavior. Gender norms refer to the social norms that reinforce gender roles, gender socialization, and gendered power relations to perpetuate the gender system that creates different expectations and opportunities for boys and girls and men and women. In almost all instances, these norms assume the gender binary (i.e., that there are only two distinct, opposite genders). Alongside the expectations that social norms create, a social norm is usually also accompanied by an implied measure of enforcement: society often punishes violators to prevent further transgressions. Socially-defined gender norms are deeply entrenched across all societies, directly impact the degree of power men and women have, and are often codified into legal and structural systems; this means deviating from these norms can result in some of the most extreme sanctions for members of society. This not only affects women but any person deviating from a binary understanding of gender and sexuality, including LGBTQIA+.
The development of norms and their enforcement are deeply ingrained in people. Research has found that even young children identify and punish norm violations, for example when someone breaks the unstated rules of a game. And while norms can be used in harmful ways, they can also help us solve the complex problem of living and cooperating in large and complex societies. Whether a norm is harmful or helpful comes down to the question of the content of the norm: what does it enable or prevent people from doing? Does it enable one group to do something that leads to harm for another group? Efforts to increase women’s participation have often focused on changing laws preventing women from having access to politics and public life (more than 100 countries have adopted some form of a gender quota, such as in India or Rwanda, for example). While these approaches have helped to advance women’s political participation and removed some barriers, legal and policy changes alone have not been able to solve the underlying patriarchal norms at the root of women’s inequality. Gendered social norms play a harmful role in restricting women’s access to public life and political power, as well as causing restrictions for men’s behavior more generally. The impact of many of these norms stretches far beyond the individual, impacting the economy, politics, and other development indicators in a country. For example, in the Kyrgyz Republic, gender norms about women’s role in the household contribute to more than a third fewer women employed than men and a 25 percent gender pay gap for those who are employed, which weakens the country’s overall economy. In Kenya, where women are expected to tend to the home, women have less money from the formal economy and are more vulnerable to poverty than men. Gaps in educational attainment and control over benefits from land ownership have also resulted in Kenyan women being less literate than their male counterparts and having fewer resources to help them engage in the local economy. These gender norms restrict women at best and significantly harm them at worst while also causing harm to a country’s democracy and economy.
 Lack of political participation by women is a missed opportunity for all society. This figure from Dahlum, Knutsen, and Mechkova’s “Women’s political empowerment and economic growth” suggests some mechanisms by which WPPL should benefit a country’s economy.
Studies have found that people tend to continue these practices because they believe it is expected of them or because the norms benefit them by maintaining their power and prioritizing their agendas. Gender norms are reinforced by the formal and informal rules within which society operates. Deviating from a society’s gender norms often results in harsh backlash such as isolation and even violence from other members of society. Gender-based violence, for example, is often a tool used to maintain patriarchal gender norms. Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen write about this in The First Political Order, outlining how interlocking patterns of institutions, processes, and norms enforce a “Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome” which subordinates women. And although some members of these societies believe maintaining these norms are beneficial in some ways, the authors found that nations that strongly encode the Syndrome actually experience more instability, violence, and corruption.
 In the Kyrgyz Republic, USAID’s Future Growth Initiative supports the craftswomen of Kyrgyz Handmade who here create shyrdak, which are traditional felt carpets. The Kyrgyz Handmade combines ancient manufacturing traditions, which have been handed down from mother to daughter for centuries, with modern design. Photo: USAID Future Growth Initiative.
How Gender Norms Create Barriers To Gender-Inclusive Politics And Public Life
The gender norms discussed above affect women’s ability to participate in politics and public life in very specific ways. For example, girls and young women may not receive the education or skills they need to compete in the public sphere, and prevalent norms that devalue girls’ education or encourage child marriage create further barriers against women’s engagement in politics. The same norms that view a woman’s role in the home also govern behavior toward women who deviate from that role (for example women in public life or politics), often resulting in hostility and punishment of those women, including harassment and violence. This further inhibits women’s ability or willingness to seek positions of influence outside the home.
Importantly, gender norms don’t only directly impact women themselves and their ability to enter and participate in politics; they also affect perceptions of and attitudes toward women in public life by other members of society. For example, constituents may vote for a male candidate over a female candidate because gender norms create a perception of women as nurturing and passive, which is often incongruent with the stereotype characteristics associated with leadership. Even if laws are created to advance women’s ability to participate in politics, such as legislated gender quotas, and women are elected in higher numbers, women still struggle against discriminatory attitudes and behavior, as well as threats and intimidation, aimed at preserving male-dominated power structure. This prevents women from accessing political spaces or contributes to the early exit of women from their positions. Violence and harassment can be viewed as a “survival tactic” for men seeking to maintain unequal gendered power dynamics in a situation where the number of women is increasing (men often view politics as a zero sum game).
An example of these challenges can be seen in the Kyrgyz Republic, which has seen significant political turmoil since its independence in 1991. The most recent protest movement erupted in October 2020 after parliamentary elections and a new president came to power. Although political turmoil can result in greater representation of women in politics, this has not been the case in the Kyrgyz Republic, where women’s representation has fallen since a peak in 2007. Currently, out of 16 ministries, only one is woman-led; just 19 of 90 national-level deputies are female. The situation at the regional level is better due to a quota introduced in the Election Code, which increased women’s representation from 11 percent to 38 percent. However, despite the attempt to advance women’s political participation through a legal measure, social norms continue to restrict women’s ability to play a more significant role in public life. Persistent widespread patriarchal values inhibit women’s development of skills, perceived capability to exercise authority, and ability to advance in the public sphere in the Kyrgyz Republic. Societal failures to shift these norms and address their negative effects means that even when women enter into elected office, the environment is not hospitable to them. Women officials are held to a higher standard than their male peers, do not receive the attention and resources from political parties and the media that their male peers do – especially in rural areas – and experience backlash in the form of violence against women in politics, which can include physical, psychological, sexual, and economic manifestations.
 This infographic is taken from the Office of the Permanent Observer of the IPU to the United Nations (UN), Women in Politics: 2023. The IPU-UN Women map, presents global rankings for women in executive and government positions as of 1 January 2023.
Challenging Patriarchal Norms And Putting Norms To Work For Us
While we outlined how norms can limit women’s access and participation, understanding them can also enable us to address their negative influences or find ways to replace them with norms that allow women to succeed in politics and public life. While there are many approaches to shift norms, we can approach norm change as trying to accomplish one or more of three goals: 1) Create a new norm that empowers and creates a hospitable environment for women in politics and public life, 2) Adjust beliefs around an existing social norm to encourage support for women’s participation, or 3) Change or weaken an existing norm to reduce or eliminate its harmful effects on gender-inclusive politics.
 USAID’s Africa Bureau outlines these stages in the creation of a new norm, adapted from “Norms in the Wild,” by Cristina Bicchieri.
One approach to changing existing norms and creating new norms is the Men, Power & Politics approach (MPP), which aims to transform the gender norms that presently underpin the gap in political empowerment between women and men by engaging male political leaders as transformative agents of change for gender equality. Politics and political institutions were created by and for men and it is most often male power holders who act as gatekeepers to public life. Historically, approaches focused on increasing women’s political participation did not address power and men’s attitudes and practices that limit, deter, and/or exclude women’s full political participation. However, the MPP approach recognizes that specific work must be done with individual men to encourage and build their support for women’s political empowerment and gender equality. The work must address the patriarchal gender norms that are held by political leaders, who can provide the necessary leadership to change the attitudes of their peers and the political organizations they lead. In a political environment like the Kyrgyz Republic, where men continue to use violence against women to maintain unequal gendered power dynamics within politics, it is critical to work with male gatekeepers to shift their commitments to gender equality in a way that is accountable to women and their stated priorities.
In addition to directly challenging harmful norms to create a more hospitable environment, programming can also promote norms that challenge women’s internalization of patriarchy. In patriarchal societies, women themselves internalize patriarchal norms, so much so that they can believe men have a right to abuse them. In these instances, women and girls may have internalized patriarchal ideas regarding their ability and right to participate in political life. Where women are elected as political leaders, programming can focus on mentorship, providing women and girls with the opportunity to engage with elected female leaders, giving them an opportunity to see the possibility for women to be involved in politics and public life and to shift their attitudes regarding their own role in society.
USAID and other development agencies have created tools and resources for programs aiming to understand and change social norms. The DRG Bureau has been exploring how practitioners can apply a social and behavior change (SBC) lens to consider how norms and attitudes affect the behaviors that impact women’s participation in politics. As part of this effort, we are developing a forthcoming SBC to Advance Gender Inclusive Democracy Toolkit (SBC Toolkit) that will be focused on identifying SBC interventions to address barriers to women’s participation in politics and public life, including those most suitable for shifting patriarchal norms and attitudes that systematically undermine gender equality and women’s empowerment in politics. Georgetown University’s Institute for Reproductive Health (IRH), with support from USAID’s Passages Project and the Social Norms Learning Collaborative (funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), has also developed a tool to help development practitioners learn about social norms within their own contexts. The Social Norms Exploration Tool (SNET) was designed to help program implementers understand social norms, engage the local community in learning about how social norms influences behavior, and use the findings to design norm-shifting activities. Additionally, UNICEF’s practical Everybody Wants to Belong guide also offers helpful guidance on leveraging social norms to encourage meaningful change.
 Depicted here is the Social Norms Exploration Tool (SNET), a participatory guide and set of tools to translate theory into practical guidance to inform a social norms exploration developed by IRH, with support from the USAID-funded Passages Project and members from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Social Norms Learning Collaborative.
Further Assistance
Make sure to look out for the upcoming SBC Toolkit to help translate the learning and technical guidance from this digest into SBC interventions to address barriers to women’s participation in politics and public life or reach out to the DRG Bureau’s Gender Team at drg.gender@usaid.gov and Levi Adelman (ladelman@usaid.gov).
Recent DRG Learning Events
Social and Behavior Change (SBC) Community of Practice – Most proven approaches to preventing intimate partner violence (IPV) are delivered in-person, making them costly and harder to scale. On November 16, USAID’s SBC Community of Practice welcomed Alexandra De Filippo, Abbey Hatcher, and Paloma Bellatin Nieto to discuss discuss their promising research on how chatbots may be an affordable, scalable option to help young women, navigate safer relationships and develop healthier gender beliefs and skills. Drawing on best practice in intimate partner violence prevention techniques and behavioral theory, the researchers conducted randomized controlled trials of women aged 18-24 to test the efficacy of interactive chatbots delivering content. The chatbot reduced self-reports of IPV, improved gender beliefs, and improved skills of identifying harmful relationship behaviors. Participants were given the option to link directly to text-based counseling and 600 young women opted into this additional safety response.
Use Our Resources!
Welcome to the DRG Learning Digest, a newsletter to keep you informed of the latest learning, evaluation, and research in the Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) sector. Views expressed in the external (non-USAID) publications linked in this Digest do not necessarily represent the views of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government.
Want the latest DRG evidence, technical guidance, events and more? Check out the new https://www.drglinks.org/.
Don't forget to check out our DRG Learning Menu of Services! (Link only accessible to USAID personnel.) The Menu provides information on the learning products and services the Evidence and Learning Team offers to help you fulfill your DRG learning needs. We want to help you adopt learning approaches that emphasize best fit and quality.
The Evidence and Learning Team is also excited to share our DRG Learning, Evidence, and Analysis Platform (LEAP) with you. This Platform contains an inventory of programmatic approaches, evidence gap maps, the DRG Learning Harvest, and inventories of indicators and country data portraits - all of which can be very useful in DRG activity design, implementation, evaluation, and adaptation. Some of these resources are still being built, so check back frequently to see what has been newly added.
The DRG Learning Harvest on LEAP is a searchable database of DRG learning products, including summaries of key findings and recommendations, drop-down menus to easily find documents related to a particular country or program area, and links to the full reports on the DEC.
Our friends at the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute are also seeking to expand their research partnership with USAID on the complex nature of democracy by inviting research questions from you for V-Dem to work on. If there's a DRG technical question you've been wondering about, please email the Evidence and Learning Team at drg.el@usaid.gov.
We welcome your feedback on this newsletter and on our efforts to promote the accessibility, dissemination, and utilization of DRG evidence and research. Please visit the DRG Bureau's website for additional information or contact us at DRG.EL@usaid.gov.
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