Gender and evidence-based planning: the CIET methods

Epidemiological combined with experiential evidence from communities can produce important and sometimes surprising insights into gender relations, to inform policies that address changing needs. CIET has standardised a community-based cross-design for the gender-sensitive collection and analysis of three types of evidence: impact, coverage, and costs. Five steps help to ensure that women's voices are heard in planning. Gender-stratified analysis of existing data is a starting point. Stratification of all responses by sex of the respondent prevents a numerical bias in favour of men translating into a gender bias in the analysis. Female focus groups inform survey design, interpretation, and appropriate strategies for change. Gender is a factor in risk and resilience analysis. Finally, gender-sensitive logistics ensure women's equal participation. First-order outputs include actionable gender data to advocate in favour of women. Second-order outputs include an enabling environment for equitable development, challenging the gendered patterns of economic marginalisation.     

Lesbian writing

Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow (eds) Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, (New York University Press), New York and London, 1990.     

A Hard Culture? Religion and Politics in Turn-of-the-Century Australian History

The idea that Australia developed a uniquely "hard" political culture after 1788 — a culture that prized the rational and made short shift of religion — has had plenty of currency over the years. This idea has been challenged in recent scholarship, along with the broader notion that Western society became secularised during the twentieth century. Set against the backdrop of a wider challenge to the "secularisation narrative", this article explores the work of several historians dealing with the relationship between religion and Australian politics at the turn of the twentieth century. These historians, who include Al Gabay, Frank Bongiorno, Bruce Scates, and Judith Brett, are creating "softer" understandings of Australian political history. As a consequence, I suggest, their work has implications for the way we think about the relationship between the religious and secular Left, as well as for the way we think about Australian masculinities and culture more generally.     

Substantive Symbols: The Attitudinal Dimension of Black Political Incorporation in Local Government

Traditional studies of minority incorporation focus on the redistribution of public resources that purportedly follows black gains in representation. The present study departs from this approach by focusing on the attitudinal effects of black leadership. Two research questions guide this study: To what extent do blacks' assessments of neighborhood services and conditions stem from black representation in local executive and legislative offices? Are these attitudinal effects rooted in policy and service delivery outcomes? Employing survey data from 3,000 blacks embedded in 52 cities and 53 school districts, this study reveals that blacks report higher levels of satisfaction with their neighborhood conditions, police services, and public schools when represented by blacks in city hall and on school boards and that these evaluations are most positive when improvements in local services are conspicuous. Overall, these findings extend conventional conceptualizations of substantive benefits and challenge more pessimistic accounts regarding the effects of black representation in local politics.     

Male Marriage Squeeze and Inter-provincial Marriage in Central China: evidence from Anhui

Since the 1990s, inter-provincial female migration for marriage has become important in central and eastern rural China. Using survey data from X County in rural Anhui Province, we explore the arrangement of inter-provincial marriages, as well as the characteristics of husbands and wives, marital satisfaction and marital stability for these marriages. We find that inter-provincial marriage is an important option for local men to respond to the marriage squeeze and the increasing expense of marriage. It helps to relieve the shortage of marriageable women in the local marriage market. Because this kind of marriage is based on economic exchange, but not affection, it is often subject to a higher risk of marriage instability, and can lead to such illegal behaviors as marriage fraud and mercenary marriage.