Bombo. UNU-GCM. All rights reserved.There is a curious tendency to conflate gender with women. In the context of migration, a field where gender considerations and clarifications have yet to make serious incursions, ‘migration and gender’ almost always means ‘migration and women.’
In policy circles, efforts to ‘mainstream gender’ refer, in fact, not to considerations of gender as a set of social constructs that apply in different ways to all sexes, but to the inclusion of women and women’s needs in policy formation. ‘Gender equality,’ even for some women’s groups, refers primarily to the inclusion of women rather than to the accordance of equal relevance to the great diversity and possibility that exists within the panorama of gender. This is a misuse of language symptomatic of the historical disregard of women. It reflects the tendencies of patriarchal and hetero-normative paradigms in language and ways of thought, whereby considerations of gender amount, in fact, to a mere gesture of unclear acknowledgement to that 49.6 percent of the global population that, strangely, is born to marginality on account of sex.
