If messages about equality are for all, gender and development practice should not be about elite meetings and confusing jargon.
When I think of gender and development practice, what immediately comes to mind are endless workshops, conferences, seminars, roundtables, policy briefings and media statements addressed to the converted, semi-converted and pretenders.
All these are helpful, of course. We need to challenge the structural sources of inequalities inherent in policies, laws, institutional mechanisms and thinking. However, there remains something very disconcerting about how the integration of gender into development has left it disconnected from the public.
Perhaps it is the language: mainstreaming, empowerment and gender analysis do not mean much to the average person. When translated into other languages, those terms often mean even less.
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