Moving from politics of presence to gender transformation

March 8, 2024, was International Women’s Day. It was a good day to ask; what kind of inclusion did institutions inspire? Were women included to conform to existing gendered power structures that legitimised policies that went against the interest of their groups, or were they included to reform gendered power structures?

Over the years, efforts have been made to include women in leadership and decision-making across different fields of endeavours, including medicine, science and technology, politics etc.

This had been made possible because gender equality was emphasised as a development imperative in every global goal, for example, the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Three emphasised gender equality and empowerment of women, and the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Five also spotlighted gender equality as integral to all dimensions of inclusive and sustainable development.

Proportionate representation

While making gender equality a development imperative that had forced us to think about inclusion in terms of more proportionate representation along axes such as gender, and to challenge the underrepresentation of women in all spheres of institutional structures, normative concerns, and other institutional processes, the focus had been on quantitative inclusion (descriptive) rather than qualitative inclusion (substantive).

We recognise progress, for example, actions and inclusions that emphasise gender quotas. Institutions have also created equality and diversity monitoring forms as part of job applications and other recruitment processes to ensure the inclusion of minority groups. Sometimes, leaders were encouraged to adopt other affirmative actions in the appointment of people into political positions.

For instance, heads of state or governments were encouraged to use their prerogative powers to appoint more women into cabinet and other ministerial positions.
Progress had been made on several scores, with some countries ahead of others, and some institutions faring obviously better than others.

For example, the University of Ghana, Legon is an institution that has almost achieved gender parity in enrolment with 51.3 per cent men to 48.7 per cent women, an increase from 15 per cent
women in 1971, and with “an all-female top-tier administrators: Chancellor, Chair of Governing Council, Vice Chancellor, Registrar, Director of Finance, Director of Internal Audit, Dean of Students, Director of Public Affairs” (Yankah, 2023).

The University of Ghana’s gender inclusion progress was the exception rather than the norm as compared to other universities in Africa.

Politics of presence

Whilst the progress made was profoundly revealing in different spheres, selective inclusion existed where women were included not necessarily to reform structures but to ensure descriptive representation.

Lemi (2022) posits that descriptive representation occurs where representatives’ demographic characteristics mirror the population from which they were drawn. This had been described as “the politics of presence” (Phillips, 1998).

Whilst descriptive representation was meant to ensure that the included was typical of the population (Lovenduski and Norris, 2003), leading to the promotion of policies with equitable outcomes for minority groups (Arnesen and Peters, 2018), the quality of policies regarding women and other minority groups with less institutional and political power were rarely improved by such inclusion.

To mitigate this, Phillips advocated considering both politics of presence and politics of ideas in inclusion or representation practices (Phillips, 1998).

Without this, their inclusion could legitimise decision-making processes and confer institutional trust and acceptance for policies that recomposed unequal gender structures.

Inclusive policies

So, I ask, what level of inclusion was appropriate? Was it quantitative or qualitative inclusion? Inclusion policies that targeted quantitative equality in numbers could ensure women’s numerical presence in decision-making spaces.

Nevertheless, an emphasis on this type of inclusion did not reform structures in and of themselves. It could renew subordination or even engender exclusion from power without a commensurate effort to ensure qualitative inclusion.