Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for gender and development

This paper focuses on the use of geographic information system (GIS) in gender research and argues for the possibility that the tool has inherent biases with regard to data collection and representation. Introduction Given the mandate by large agencies to address gender in all development projects and the „Mainstreaming of Gender‟ at the World Bank, we can expect that new opportunities will emerge for gender research. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) could play a growing part in this agenda. Though most use of GIS is still oriented towards land-use studies, geographers and others are beginning to use GIS to examine complex human variables including gender. Development practitioners should be aware both of the potential usefulness of GIS for gender analysis and of recent critiques of this powerful tool. The debate between those informed by traditional scientific methods based on the idea of objectivity and those looking to understand the complexity of human variables who accept subjectivity as part of the research agenda provides a foundation for exploring the use of GIS for gender and development. For example, almost ten years ago a group of feminist geographers asked the question: „Should women count?‟ (Mattingly and Falconer-Al-Hindi 1995), in order to address the possibility of doing feminist research using quantitative techniques. The authors argued that feminists should use whatever tools necessary to build understanding of the gendered nature of our society without forgetting that those tools themselves also have gendered biases. Powerful new technologies such as GIS have prompted people to consider their useful application to a host of complex problems, including issues of gender. We can expect that GIS will have increasing applications in gender and development. We argue in this paper that GIS has some inherent biases with regard to data collection and representation, and that if these biases are not addressed at a theoretical or epistemological level, the use of GIS for addressing gender issues in development will be severely limited. As a primary example we use our own research project funded by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) through the Participatory Research on Gender Analysis (PRGA) initiative. The goal of this project was to use a combination of GIS and qualitative methods (interviews and archival analysis) in order to determine „hot spots‟ of female poverty in Nepal, Bolivia, and Malawi. After providing a suitable definition for GIS, we examine the growing literature that provides a critique of GIS, including the new feminist discourse on the field. In particular we question the use of widely available data sources as inputs into a gendered GIS and the ability of GIS to represent women‟s issues. We conclude with a discussion of the possibilities for GIS to overcome these biases and be redefined as a feminist method. Within a development context, such a redefinition could provide agencies with a powerful tool with which to represent women‟s experiences to decision makers. Defining GIS for gender and development applications The acronym GIS is widely used without much attention to how it is defined. This has proved particularly problematic as we struggle to examine GIS and its usefulness for gendered research in a critical fashion. Probably the most practical way to define GIS is by its function. Most of the time, when someone refers to a GIS, s/he is referring to a database in which the variables have a locational attribute, allowing them to be mapped and manipulated. An example of this would be demographic data collected at the village level, with the location (x, y) of the village given as an attribute. Such data may be overlaid on land-use data to show the relationship between economics and environmental change. This database can then be used to model phenomena in such a way as to provide what many simply accept as an accurate representation of reality. The visual representations of these models are often used in support of decisions made by policy makers and researchers and are themselves referred to as a GIS. Recently, GIS has also been used to refer to a field. What we mean by this is that people who „do GIS work‟ have created a specific niche for themselves. Someone working for a GIS firm may work on many different projects from modeling land-use change to locating pockets of impoverished women farmers. Lo and Yeung (2002) define GIS as a computer-based system used to manipulate and represent spatially referenced data. We also acknowledge that GIS is practiced as a profession that uses this system as its primary tool for the production of spatial information. As such, GIS is practiced within a social context and is subject to the motivations of its practitioners. It is this part of the definition of GIS which provides an arena for addressing issues of gender and