Foreign Office advertising for Gender Advisers

[HavelockVetinari]

Has anyone seen the new job advert on Civil Service Jobs? It's advertising for 3 'gender advisers' and sounds distinctly ominous...

www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi?jcode=1602232&csource=csalerts

The successful candidate will work closely with cross-government Conflict Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) teams in British Diplomatic missions overseas and other government departments in London to provide technical leadership, practical advice and input across the range of CSSF programmes, ensuring that they are in line with UK legal obligations and Ministerial priorities on gender/social development, whilst delivering the UK’s strategic priorities. They will also play a key role in shaping the CSSF’s gender advisory offer to its network of programme managers to ensure that staff are ‘gender confident’ in their day-to-day operations.

You will commission relevant research and analysis to inform programming decisions; lead or participate in CSSF annual reviews; capture, analyse and share lessons and best practice across the region on integrating gender into programmes; identify skills/ knowledge gaps across the network on gender issues; and work with CSSF stakeholders to design and deliver gender-sensitive programme training in the region.

But @FermatsTheorem as @MuseumofInnocence and I have said, as people who work in this sector, the word is still used properly by the development sector. Has been since the Beijing conference about 30 years ago. Is in this job advert, and is in the work we both do.

It's really UK centric to say that because it's not used properly in the U.K. anymore it can't be used by a large global sector with a lot of active feminists from the global south who would not agree the term no longer has meaning.

Where does the money come from, for international development work?
It comes from governments who are removing SEX based protections and rights and replacing them with GENDER based ones.

What will this mean for the orgs and govt departments when they put their bids in? And are asked how they are ensuring GENDER equality, when that means not male / female but how you ID???

It will be signiificant. This will spread. It is not a niche thing for one corner of the world.

Culturally-determined sex role?

The word 'gender' itself is now rather ironically being used as a tool for removing resources from female people for reallocation to males. I'll eat my hat if it doesn't come to bite International Relations on the arse sooner or later.

UK
USA
Canada
Australia
Ireland

English speaking first.
The USA is quite a big country and economy >> non trivial.

I don't know how this is going in Europe > I believe there have been protests in France.

Different issues in other countries HOWEVER the theory is VERY appealing to men in power & anyone who wants to halt or reverse womens progress so it's naive to say it won't be picked up as a "progressive" cause all over the place.

• development

Argentina (just googling)

Good to see useful perspctives coming from people who have used the word 'gender' in its ? historical ? context, particularly in relations to different cultures. Thank you!

Can you think of ways that 'gender' can be restored to its true meaning?

"Can you think of ways that 'gender' can be restored to its true meaning?"

Good question.

Apologies for getting angry.

reddress I'm sure you do a great job and I'm sorry for shouting.

This just goes to show the awful consequences of changing words to mean something completely different. We end up fighting amongst ourselves about words and who lose: the most vulnerable in the world.

And no, with that I do not mean white middle class guys who like to play dress up.

So would you say FGM is sex-based or gender-based? I mean, obviously it's both

What the actual fuck? FGM is SEX-BASED. In no way shape or form is it gender-based FFS. Seriously get your definitions corrected. I don't see swathes of boys from Somalian communities being removed to have their clitorises removed. Maybe you do....

FGM is an atrocity carried out against girls (old school cunty ones) due to prevailing beliefs and social norms in the cultures it is carried out around girls, women, men, sex, marriage, duty, adultery, and so on. The latter part is gender, in the traditional sense. In the sense that feminists use it and the WHO still use it. Misogyny is the theory, gender is the practice, as someone much more clever and famous than me once said.

The problem is that:

1. FGM has already been idenitifed as a transphobic label, as it links the word female to vulvas / clitorises etc
2. Charities using these types of terms & more espeically around periods have been attacked on social media and many have capitulated
3. Gender in many countries that donate to / run a lot of international dev efforts (and there are many conversations around that!) are putting internal gender iD into law and down the line removing sex, this WILL impact funding bids and ability to spend money on cunty people

The erosion of language is non trivial.

OP would (presumably) not support a charity using the wording in teh job ad as she would understand it to mean it helps people under the stonewall trans umbrella, not women and girls (original cunty style ones)

And so on.

This is a red herring. reddressblueshoes and museumofinnocence are correct - the word "gender" has a different history in international development organisations than in the current UK debate. Both words, sex and gender, are used, depending on which is the right word. It's in no way denying that it is girls, not boys, who are victims of FGM, quite the reverse. I understand why people react strongly to the word because we are getting collectively traumatised by the loss of female words/safe spaces etc in the UK. But it is different, and there is no more reason to change the word 'gender' than there is to to change the word 'sex' in the context of this sort of role. And yes, the UK etc are major donors to aid - but to say that other countries will automatically adopt a UK-centric approach to the transgender debate just doesn't reflect the fact that countries are (a) sovereign (b) are complex and (c) have vocal human rights and women's groups whom we should be empowering to speak. Currently it wouldn't be a priority for the UK's global engagement - a long way after things like tackling violence against women, increasing access to family planning, girls education, which are already in the UK's global strategies. Which isn't to say it might not appear in the future and I am keeping a little eye on that in my non-existent lunchbreak. Whether or not that was a negative would depend on the content of the policy. A human rights approach which respected both trans people's rights to safety and dignity and the rights of women to single sex spaces, all-women shortlists, the right to describe their own experience, sexual autonomy etc would be fine - wouldn't it? But right now the struggle to avoid the erosion of those rights of women is in the UK.

*REdshoes the problem is that we have had the word "gender", as a useful theoretical tool in the social sciences, used to describe the way in which different cultures use stereotypes to oppress people of the female sex, stolen from us by a group of men who want to use it to describe some amorphous internal feeling of pink fluffy femininity.

It's not the fault of feminists that this useful word has been stolen and bastardised to mean something else, to the point where it becomes meaningless.

I totally agree that it is vital that we have some sort of word to describe what the social sciences used to mean by gender. And personally, I don't think it's any accident that a group of incredibly, toxically misogynistic men have chosen this word, of all words, to steal, thus robbing us of the theoretical and explanatory framework in which to make sense of the means by which men (biological category) oppress women (biological category) using culturally and socially constructed ideologies about how women are "supposed" to be.*

This 100%

In the early days the UN used sex more often as per the UK, then I think as the USA etc and social sciences got involved it moved to the word gender talking about sex-based issues.

But gender should never have been uncoupled from sex or given legitimacy as a feeling or identity. It tries to drive a fucking sledge hammer through everything women have been working towards.

First they came for gender, then they came for woman, now they have come for female