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The systematic gathering and examination of information on gender differences and social relations in order to identify, understand and redress inequities based on gender. Gender analysis is a valuable descriptive and diagnostic tool for development planners and crucial to gender mainstreaming efforts. The methodology and components of gender analysis are shaped by how gender issues are understood in the institution concerned. There are a number of different approaches to gender analysis, including the Gender Roles or Harvard framework, and Social Relations Analysis.
The Gender Roles framework focuses on describing women’s and men’s roles and their relative access to and control over resources. The analysis aims to anticipate the impacts of projects on both productive and reproductive roles. It takes the household, rather than the breadth of institutions, as the unit of analysis and tends to assume that women are a homogeneous category.
In contrast, the Social Relations approach seeks to expose the gendered power relations that perpetuate inequities. This analysis moves beyond the household to include the community, market, and state institutions and so involves collecting data at all these levels. It uncovers differences between women, divided by other aspects of social differentiation such as class, race and ethnicity. The aim is to understand the dynamics of gender relations in different institutional contexts and thereby to identify women’s bargaining position and formulate strategies to improve this. It has proved challenging to adopt this approach in operational work.