Beyond gender-transformative sentiments, social protection systems must be initiated with an outline of research foundations to address further complications.
Tara Patricia Cookson ’23, Assistant Professor of Gender, Development, and Global Public Policy @ University of British Columbia, Nina Ebner, Doctorate @ University of British Columbia, author, feminist geographer, Yardain Amron, University of Columbia, Canada, Graduate Degree in Human Geography, Kritika Kukreja, University of British Columbia, Canada, “Social protection systems and gender: A review of the evidence”, Global Social Policy, p. 3-4, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14680181231180507 // MZ
Yet even accepting gender-responsiveness – or more radically still, the transformation of gender relations – as the goal, many questions remain with regard to how such concepts are mobilized in practice, what facets of gender (in)equality are prioritized, and what theories of change are deployed. In the spirit of evidence-based policymaking, we suggest that better systems design should begin with an overview of the research landscape in order to clarify which ‘system focused’ questions, topics and (political) approaches have received relatively more robust treatment and which areas merit further elaboration. While there has been much-needed recent work to synthesize knowledge on social protection systems generally (Loewe and Schüring, 2021), to our knowledge, no such endeavour has been undertaken from a gender perspective. This article addresses this gap in the literature around gender and social protection systems through a phased scoping review of academic and grey (policy) publications. The review aimed to answer the following questions: (1) What evidence exists on gender and social protection systems? and (2) What does the existing evidence base tell us about gender and social protection systems? In addition to a scholarly contribution, this article seeks to provide policymakers, practitioners, donors and advocates with a practical map of what is already known and what has yet to be discovered and developed. The article begins by outlining our study design. Section ‘Study design’ describes the composition of the evidence base, including characteristics such as share of research that is academic or policy-oriented, type of research outputs and geographical focus. In section ‘Results’ we discuss the content of the evidence base in terms of conceptual frameworks utilized and components of social protection systems under inquiry (e.g. administration, financing, etc.). We conclude with a discussion of the results and implications for future research and practice.