Shifting Social Norms in the Economy for Women's Economic Empowerment: Insights from a Practitioner Learning Group

"Interventions for women to be economically empowered must be complemented by broader, integrated strategies to address problematic social norms in the economy."

Social norms related to gender inequality influence gendered roles in the economy. In 2017, The SEEP Network and Oxfam's Women's Economic Empowerment in Agriculture Knowledge Hub partnered to facilitate a Practitioner Learning Group (PLG) on 'Shifting Social Norms in the Economy to Create Change at Scale.' This document summarises the process, discussion, and insights of the participants. It provides an overview of social norms and their relationship to women's economic empowerment (WEE). It also highlights practical tools, approaches, and frameworks that practitioners and researchers can use to diagnose, measure, and change social norms. Finally, it calls for more systematic collaboration and learning in the area of addressing social norms change as part of WEE.

The SEEP PLG process is a method that brings together market development practitioners to help each other overcome practical and urgent challenges. This initiative focused on gathering practitioner insights on shifting social norms in the economy to create change at scale for women's economic empowerment (WEE). The PLG brought together 13 representatives from six different organisations over a period of five months to share challenges and strategies to shift social norms.

After defining social norms and examining social norms and WEE in market systems development, the paper looks at the critical first step in shifting social norms in the economy: understanding and diagnosing the underlying norms. To do so, the organisation needs to assess if a given behaviour is under the influence of social norms and, if so, under which norm. The second step is to investigate the norm. After these two steps, the organisation should have a clearer understanding of which norms are at play and how organisations can measure any shifts in the norms. Based on the PLG's discussions and a review of the wider literature, some promising practices include: adopting qualitative or mixed-methods approaches, using vignettes, investigating meta norms, simplifying the measurement of norms, adopting an action research approach, and understanding how social norms interact with other contextual factors. These approaches are described in the report.

The discussion next focused on specific norms shared by each of the PLG participants, the strategies they used to shift these norms, and what they learned in the process. The report outlines several strategies and provides specific examples, such as working with role models and champions to challenge prevailing norms in the communities and begin to build a social movement: Oxfam's WE-Care programme engages WE-Care Champions and role model families as a way of challenging the descriptive norm that men don't do care work by showing that men can and do in fact do care work. They also address the belief that care work is not skilled or valuable by communicating its benefits and the benefits of sharing it to the family and larger society.

Like the process of diagnosing social norms, the approach to assessing change in social norms among the PLG participant organisations varies from ad hoc to the use of a set of different qualitative and quantitative tools. The group examined three different organisational approaches to measuring changes in social norms: CARE's Social Norms Analysis Plot (SNAP) tool, the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES) used by Promundo, and WE-Care's approach to measuring change in norms over time. A few of the lessons to emerge from these examples are that: Integrating indicators on norms into baseline and endline surveys for the overall project/intervention can help organisations learn from their own experience and build an evidence base; and, when there is good evidence of a link between social norms and specific practices or behaviours, surveys can be used to quantify and statistically confirm the relationship in question.

Some of the challenges that still need to be addressed, per the PLG, centre on the following questions (among others): How do we engage private/market systems actors to shift social norms around women's and men's work in supply chains? How do we diagnose multiple factors (including social norms) sustaining a behaviour and assess how the interaction of these factors leads to desired behaviours and norms changes? What are the ways in which we can design interventions so that they are replicable, multiply easily, and have uptake by other organisations/institutions? How do we link smaller groups to wider social/feminist movements and promote market systems-wide changes? How do we identify new threats/unintended consequences (e.g., engaging men in a way that gives them too much power, reinforcing existing harmful behaviours)?

To shift social norms in the economy and create change at scale, PLG participants suggest that market systems development programmes need to:

• Start by systematically diagnosing social norms and developing multi-sectoral, multi-level interventions. This work requires deliberate and thoughtful collaboration and partnerships between different stakeholders.
• Develop programme strategies that understand the viral nature of change. Strategies should focus on nudging people towards new ways of thinking or behaving and acting as change agents who can influence other actors they meet. In addition to shifting norms, where possible, focus on creating new norms to support changes in behaviours or strengthening positive norms (e.g., a woman who has marketable skills and contributes to the household finances is a desirable trait for a wife).
• Collaborate with other industry actors to bring insights from intervention research to scale by identifying key strategies to reframe and negotiate social norms.