Working with Men in workshop setting

It can be difficult to help some men participants see the logic of gender issues for obvious reasons. It is like stepping outside yourself and viewing the world with a different set of eyes. Sometimes, it is women participants, who can not find sympathy with the new perceptions proposed in a gender workshop. Following guidelines and thoughts have helped us:

1. Having a woman-man team as facilitators often helps by demonstrating to participants what it means to rise above ‘biological sex’ and work in a gender equitable fashion.
2. Treating participants with consideration and gentleness, instead of coming down on them like a truck load of bricks! Instead of silencing an interlocutor from a higher intellectual, academic or ethical stance, it is better to let participants mull and think over an issue and come to some conclusions on their own.
3. Small groups should always be mixed groups. Men in senior administrative positions or in senior age bracket should be judiciously counterbalanced with other participants who could help them explore their beliefs gently.
4. It is important to emphasize that GPIH is essentially neither pro-women nor pro-men. But it brings out vulnerabilities of both, in the matters of sickness and recovery. Therefore using case studies taking up both women and men’s health issues is important.
5. Sometime a senior male participant would be participating so actively as to leave little scope for women participants; talking to him on the side, explaining importance of everyone’s joining in discussion helps. This works with any participant, women or men.
6. Men sometime find it daunting that they are supposed to be ignorant about women’s issues! On the other hand, women too may be less well informed about men’s issues (Why men suffer from heart ailments disproportionately? Why is it so difficult for men to discuss sexual problems with their wives or regular doctors?). Raising such discussions purposely and bringing up these dark spots in their awareness brings everyone, women and men, on to the same democratic plane.
7. Sharing (self disclosure): When a male facilitator shares part of his own journey ( Ten years ago, it never struck me..) it helps men participants realize that all of us, being the product of our times and culture, could be gender biased to varying extents and that there is nothing shameful in accepting this fact.
8. Asking men to play the role of women in a role play or take up women’s stand point in a discussion, often initiates a helpful internal dialogue in the participant.
9. Participants often look up to facilitator as some kind of role model. This brings a tremendous responsibility on facilitators to constantly review their behavior from the gender point of view and always behave in a gender sensitive manner. Even if one asks for a glass of water from a field supervisor, who just happens to be a woman, it could strengthen gender stereotypes in participants’ minds!
10. One should always be aware of one’s role as a facilitator, as a helper in a process of questioning of deeply held beliefs, without taking strong moral postures. In GPIH, by and large, we start from observed data (who gets TB more often? who gets sterilized more often?) and therefore it should be possible to emphasize objectivity in such discussions. But often, this discussion would lead to deeper values / biases: When the data says that men suffer more from TB why should I believe that it is the other way around and that women are being under reported in state statistics?
    
    

It might be possible to remain objective while handling questions as above and offer data from a different source. But there may be rare occasions when facilitator may have to directly address the hidden biases. On such rare occasions, we found that ‘Caste’ in our Indian context could be used as a good parallel to help people understand:

 

A hundred years ago, an alien from Mars visited a village in India. It found everyone happy and content. It spoke to villagers at length and even the villagers said that they were happy and content. Everything was fine.

 

Was everything really fine in that village a hundred years ago?
Today we know that, Dalits have lived a life of misery and oppression in our villages for long. How is it that the alien never found out anything about the ticking caste bomb in our villages, the rampant caste oppression?

 

Alien knew nothing about caste. So it didn’t see anything like caste oppression. We know about it because we have talked about it, we have listened to Ambedkar and Gandhi on this issue with an open mind. Eyes see what mind knows.

So when we say, everything is fine between men and women in the Indian family, Indian society, our organization etc. could it be that we too are like that alien? Could it be that the next hundred years will show us something different?

Certainly, we end by asking questions and don’t force conclusions.

 

11. Trainer authority: Striking a balance in our role as a non-authoritarian partner in the process of enquiry & learning and a trainer with certain authority (and responsibility) to discipline the learning process will always be difficult. How much is too much - of authority being exercised even unconsciously? It would be helpful to check whether[1]:

·      Learners are constantly looking at the facilitator and talking to her/him during a general discussion.

·      Learners expect the facilitator to make choices for them.

·      Learners expect all their questions to be answered by her/him.

·      Learners appear eager to win her/his approval.

·      Learners seem hesitant to critique and display low initiative.

Workshops around Gender, can sometimes slip into clash of values. Ensuring that we as facilitators are not seen to be forcing anything, can be important for the learning process to continue both with women and men.