We’re puzzled that you conclude our definition and focus is on women’s formal leadership and national decision-making processes. This rapid review is an output from a 2-year DFID-funded ODI project on Women’s Voice and Leadership in Decision-Making (http://www.odi.org/projects/2773-womens-voice-leadership-decision-making). We’re looking at how women gain power and influence over public decision-making process through their political, social and economic activities. This of course involves very different forms of leadership and influence – and our definition encompasses all types, including formal and informal, within and outside the state, in different sectors, and from micro to macro level.

This particular report looks specifically at donor/NGO support to women/girls’ leadership and the content of the studies reviewed informed the types of leadership and findings we report. We discuss women’s leadership of community organisations, rightly a preoccupation in development programmes, alongside support to women politicians, and note the lack of attention to women’s business leadership. You’re right that women’s engagement in faith groups is critical and a blind spot here (as it is often in women’s leadership programmes).

But there’s a much larger and richer academic and grey literature on what enables women’s leadership and decision-making power – and this is what the ODI team reviews (over 400 academic studies) in our main report from the first phase of this project. What marks this report out is that we look at different forms of leadership and decision-making power, and the linkages between them. This includes women’s participation in formal politics (through quotas, political parties, peace processes, constitutional reform), their social activism (through social mobilisation and social accountability processes) and their economic empowerment (through access to assets and the labour market). The report also looks at the relationship between the public and private sphere. These linkages between women’s economic, social and political power are underexplored and usually treated in siloes – but we think they are critical to women’s leadership and influence.

For those that can’t stomach reading 130 pages, there’s a short Executive Summary and thematic summaries at the start of each chapter. We’re also writing a 4 page briefing (yep, that’s a challenge!). And the team is about to embark on case studies in Afghanistan (on EVAW), Bangladesh (grassroots women’s leadership), Gaza (political representation), Kenya (constitutional reform) and Malawi (MPs). So more to come – and please do get in touch if your have a programme on any of these themes/countries!

Alice – time/resourcing issues meant we were mostly limited to looking at studies on low/middle income countries, but agree whole-heartedly agree with the need to study/learn from gendered and other constraints on women’s political power across all countries. This includes the UK learning from developing countries on the need for quotas to reduce the gender representation gap in a serious way, as I argued in a recent blog (http://www.odi.org/comment/9534-women-mps-uk-election-quotas-gender-parity).

Best,Tam and Pilar

Another possibly problematic issue is the empirical focus on women’s leadership in developing countries. (Look at the references of the report to see this).

This reflects wider silos around development studies: not drawing parallels with high-income countries, both now and historically (a point you made, Duncan, in an earlier blog post).

I’m not suggesting that American theories on gender and political leadership should be revered or uncritically implanted onto other contexts. But much of that work is really useful, in helping us consider different hypotheses, e.g.the relative importance of political/electoral systems, socio-economic factors and also gender beliefs (differentiating here between gendered self-perceptions, stereotypes and beliefs about cultural expectations).

Also, by focusing on gender and leadership in developing country context we imply that the problem is out ‘there’, that ‘we’ don’t have similar inequalities. I find this kind of ‘othering’ problematic – both representationally and also intellectually. More comparative work could shed light on drivers of change, similarities and differences across countries.

Further, by creating these silos around development we also implicitly tell those theorising gender issues in high income countries that they cant learn from what’s happening elsewhere. Again, problematic both representationally and intellectually.