Why Gender Analysis?

Several different Gender Analysis Frameworks exist today. They are step-by-step tools for carrying out gender analysis, which help to raise questions, analyze information, and develop strategies to increase women's and men's participation in and benefits from forestry programmes.

Gender Analysis Frameworks are concerned with:
1. The development context or patters in an area, answering the questions What is getting better? What is getting worse?
2. Women's and men's activities and roles in the forestry sectors, answering the questions Who does what?
3. Women's and men's access to and control over resources, answering the questions. Who has what? Who needs what?, and
4. The forestry programme actions needed, answering the questions What should be done to close the gaps between what women, and men need? What does development deliver?

Gender Analysis can be used for example in the following situations:

• development of village level forest management plans to ensure that the contributions of both women and men are adequately recognized in determining access to and control over resources
• development, or review, of forestry policy to ensure sustainable forestry through equitable participation of all stakeholders
• profiling of stakeholders to develop an understanding of who the stakeholders in the forestry sector are beyond gender to other socially determined characteristics.
• restructuring of the forestry sector to ensure equitable participation at all levels and in a diversity of functions by both women and men.
• development of criteria for training selection or recruitment to ensure that women and men have equal opportunities to progress in their career and that there are both women and men working in diversity of capacities in the sector to work with the women and men of the other stakeholder groups.

Source: FAO, "Gender issues in the Zambia Forestry Action Programme" (1997) in http://www.gdrc.org/gender/framework/why.html