Gender Transformative training: Face to face, online or blended?

Author: Ranjani K Murthy* - March 5 2020 - Raising awareness on gender and strengthening capacities to institutionalise gender into policy formulation, programming, implementation, monitoring and evaluation is central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
Yet just any kind of gender training is not enough. The training has to be gender transformative. By gender transformative training, one means a training that exposes the power relations between men and women, how they permeate every institution and sector of society, and shows pathways to change. Further, a gender transformative training unravels intersections of gender with power relations based on race, caste, class, ethnicity, age, abilities, minority status, migrant status, sexual orientation and gender identity etc.

Gender transformative training is distinct from gender blind, gender instrumental and gender ameliorative training. Gender blind training does not refer to men and women, for example, training agricultural 'communities' (mainly men) on how to increase agriculture production. Gender instrumental training on the other hand may unpack what tasks men and women do in agriculture and train farming women/women staff on seed preservation and men/men staff on agriculture marketing that is in line with their present role. The purpose is to use knowledge on gender roles for increasing agriculture production. Gender ameliorative training may address specific needs of women like training farming women/women staff on drudgery reduction technologies related to transplanting and sowing. A gender transformative training on the other hand may sensitise women and men farmers and staff on land rights of women, and ways of realising the same. In the context of a development organisation: training men and women staff on legislation on sexual harassment in the workplace may be transformative; providing management training for middle-level women staff to move up the hierarchy may be ameliorative; training women staff on maternal and child programmes may be gender neutral; and keeping women staff out of training on climate change adaptation may be gender blind.
On another front, gender transformative training also involves a participatory methodology and a methodology that promotes critical thinking. Other types of training may or may not adopt such methodologies.

Face to face, online and blended (combination of face to face and online) training types offer different opportunities and constraints with regard to gender transformative training, and are suitable/not suitable for some audiences. Two decades ago, online gender transformative training was not common, but now there are a few (click here for one example). The advantages and disadvantages are discussed in Table 1 below.

On the whole, face to face gender transformative training continues to be the best for training marginalised women in developing countries, as internet access and literacy is still a constraint. This is particularly true as gender transformative training is not about imparting messages, but changing deep-rooted attitudes and relations. This situation of limited internet access may change in a decade or less. Ironically, face to face gender transformative training is also suited to those at senior levels of development organisations, who work after office hours and travel considerably. In cultures where patriarchal attitudes are deeply rooted amongst men in development organisations (and some women as well), again face to face gender transformative training may be ideal, as it creates more opportunities for participants and resource persons to confront such attitudes. Large parts of South Asia and Middle East, for example, come under this category. However, there is an emerging trend even in these sub regions of young women in the junior/middle level of development professionals who have begun to challenge patriarchal and other hierarchical values for whom online transformative training may be suitable. This is also true of a few young men at these levels. If budgets permit, blended courses may be ideal for the less sensitive young and middle level men, as they combine the advantages of both face to face and online training!

Image credit: Visthar
*The author would like to acknowledge her experience gained in face to face gender transformative training with Visthar and in online and blended gender transformative training with Institute of Social Studies Trust. They however do not bear any responsibility for shortcomings of this article.
 

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