Water Forums - where have all the women gone? A view from Sri Lanka

Athukorala, Kusum (1997)
In: NewsFlow, no. 1/97

The "water world" is almost solidly male. The gender distribution of participants at world wide water symposiums and forums shows a marked discrepancy between the number of women and the number of men participating. Only 20-30 women out of 503 participants were involved in the Marrakesh forum (1997), and 10 women out of 115 persons attended the Consultative Group meeting of the GWP (Global water Partnership). These statistics are representative of the gender breakdown of decision makers in most leading organizations in the "water world". The World Water Council has 32 board members, of whom 3 are women; the International Water quality association has no women on the board; and the Steering Committee of the GWP includes only 2 women to 17 men.

Reasons suggested for this include that women are not interested or involved, and that they lack opportunities at the point of entry and have a poor enabling environment. Questions concerning the means of encouraging gender staffing at agency level since so many of the stakeholders are women, the gender participation in water related forums at the global level, and the importance of gender analyses are being raised. Since the GWP is committed to acknowledging the critical role of women in sustainable water management, it needs to devise a gender sensitive approach as well as ensuring that its interactions with other organizations from the water world are an extension of this same approach. Gender policy programmes need to rise above the level of politically correct platitudes to a real recognition of women as stakeholders, and a real attempt to harness women as a resource group.