GR Project
Students will be sorted into groups according to their country/regional and issue interests. Together, each group will each create a Power
Point Presentation depicting the Gender Regime of a single country There is no fixed requirement in terms
of length, but 5 slides per person for a total of 25 slides PLUS intro and conclusion slides is a good goal. See my example of the China’s Gender
Regime here.
The countries to choose from are: Romania, Ukraine, India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Somalia and Zambia.
As we will learn throughout the course, a gender regime consists of the gender repercussions of each region’s dominant religious beliefs, family life, and its economic and political systems. Click here to see the Gender Regime Table a tabular description of several kinds of political-economic regimes (listed in the first column). The first row describes a country with a liberal political-economic regime such as the US. The rest of the columns would be filled by you if the US was your country to research describing each element listed across the top: ideals, as an example, filling all of the columns across it.
The group will produce a Gender Regime Table for the country, i.e., each table will have the top row and then a second row naming the political-economic regime of the country, then filling in the rest of the row to describe each aspect of the regime.
Note that the table begins with descriptions of several different types of political and economic regimes such as Liberal-Individualist, Social Democratic and Marxist-Leninist, etc. You can invent your own name for the political-economic regime if you find none of those listed quite right. You may combine modifiers found in two or three of those listed here (e.g., state-building transitional regime) to best describe your country’s regime. Please feel free to solicit my input as you are working through what labels fit best. You will include your Gender Regime Table in the Power Point Presentation you post to the class discussion board.
Here’s a list of the bases you should be sure to cover:
1. The predominant religion(s) in your country and how its beliefs and authority structures have shaped the status of women.
2. Demographics and description of family life, women's power/status within the family. Data to include here include: average age of women and men at first marriage; fertility rate (births per woman); contraceptive accessibility, most commonly used methods and rates of usage; abortion rate/laws; sex ratio; other health concerns that disproportionately affect women (some may put information about violence against women here); life expectancy rates for women and men. You may not find all of these data for your country but make an effort to find them. Good sources are the Paxton and Hughes book, the World Values Survey; the World Health Organization, UN Women, UN, Gender Stats at the World Bank and WikiGender.
3. A description of and
statistics on women's participation in the economy. Look for data on GDP PER CAPITA, women’s
workforce participation (part-time, full-time, formal and informal; in what
sectors of the economy; women in entrepreneurship, gender pay gap, hours worked
per week by women vs. men (paid and unpaid). Data can be found at : CIA World Factbook, ILO, Gender Stats at
the World Bank. Be sure to seek out information on "women on the move," i.e., migrants, immigrants and women working (or being worked) in the informal, irregular or black market.
4. A description of and statistics on women's participation in politics. You MUST state the PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN SERVING IN YOUR COUNTRY’S LEGISLATIVE BRANCH (LOWER HOUSE OR SINGLE HOUSE) AND COMPARE IT TO OTHER COUNTRIES IN THE SAME REGION AS WELL AS THE US. See IPU site for the most current data. You should also determine if your country has PARTY-BASED QUOTAS or national QUOTAS for women in its national legislature. Rely on Paxton and Hughes for this section, as well. Finally, remember to do a slide or two on significant women politicians, current or former, from your country, describing their pathways to political power and what their participation in their countries’ politics reveals about the gender regime of that country and what difference their participation in politics made (nationally or internationally).
5. Regional context. It is helpful for the viewer/reader to put the data for your country into a world- regional context. How is mobility playing out in your region? What is the gendered side of this story? In addition to the narrative you develop to describe "women on the move" in your region, it is helpful to give data in a regional perspective. If regional averages are not easily found but individual country data is, you can compute regional averages by using the countries listed for each region in the Paxton and Hughes text, p. 111-113 (drawn from the World Values Survey) as your universe of countries. If data is missing for a country on a specific variable, simply indicate this in the endnotes for your project.data on the countries listed after the name of each region above. If data is missing for one or more of the countries listed on a particular indicator, simply omit it from the regional average.
6. Activism/Empowerment: present some information on NGOs and individual women activists agitating for women's empowerment in your country, especially those working for justice for "women on the move," i.e., women migrants, immigrants, refugees, and victims of trafficking.
7. A final slide showing your Gender Regime Table for your country (again – just top row and row describing your country.)
8. Aim to make your presentation both informative AND visually interesting, stream-lined and easy to interpret. Use photos, graphs, maps, etc. The occasional video may be helpful but these should be SHORT (e.g. a 2-3 minute clip).
9. DON’T FORGET to use COURSE TEXTS as sources – The Atlas of Women of the World has a wealth of data. Use the glossary, on-line dictionaries, Wikipedia, other encyclopedias to learn and reinforce your understanding of key terms, definitions and indices.
10. Your last few slides should be your Works Cited.