Bekana, D. M. (2020). Policies of gender equality in Ethiopia: the transformative perspective. International Journal of Public Administration, 43(4), 312-325.
Overview: This article analyzes Ethiopia’s transformative gender equality policies, examining factors that led to the shift, Ethiopia’s achievements, and the limitations of these policies. It highlights the extent to which Ethiopia’s policies successfully altered the male-dominated hegemonic status quo.
Methodology: This study analyzed both primary and secondary data using an embedded and integrated analytical approach. 26 key informants, including representatives from NGOs, parliamentarians, and government ministries, were interviewed in two rounds of unstructured interviews. Literature, official government policy documents, and global organizations were used as secondary information. To better understand the gender equality policy in Ethiopian society, the embedded qualitative research method is used to analyze the key messages. This method combines qualitative content analysis and embedded qualitative analysis.Ā
Findings: Ethiopia has been working to strengthen national structures for gender equality, with strong political commitments and revisions to existing laws. However, progress towards gender equality has been limited due to various social and economic dynamics. The government’s emphasis on poverty reduction, growth, and employment initiatives has led to the integration of gender equality policies into education, health, and employment policies. However, this approach is contradictory to the transformative paradigm, which conceptualizes gender equality as an end in itself. The macro-level conceptualization of gender issues has led to neglect of certain occupations, such as rural subsistence agriculture, urban informal sector, and household chores, where women are overrepresented.
This neglect of women’s representation indicates that gender parity objectives are not prioritized equally. Additionally, the macro-level implementation of gender parity has led to formal and quantitative blind implementation of results-oriented policies that fail to capture entrenched societal norms, practices, and power structures within which gender inequalities are embedded. Civil society advocacy and participation through bottom-up feedback structures is limited, with government-affiliated associations providing some form of ad hoc participation but no opportunity for non-hegemonic actors to defy the form and content of gender equality policies.
Conclusion:Ā Despite constitutional patronages for women’s rights and roles, the government has failed to live up to its rhetoric due to structural and institutional constraints. Achieving gender parity requires transformational gender policy, rather than a simple integrationist approach. Legal and policy-based actions have improved the position of women in Ethiopia over the last two decades, but gaps in protecting basic rights persist due to the century-long social structure attributing low status to women.Ā