Jaleh Shaditalab on how to effect public policy on women's issues
Regional, Culture, 9/29/2004

In her impressive presentation which cites a life- span commitment to gender issues, delivered at the annual meeting of the Arab network for Gender and Development (ANGED) held in Tunis on September 27 and 28 under the title "From studies to policies: Best practices and strategies," Jaleh Shaditalab director of Center for Women's Studies, University of Tehran, said her presentation was how in Iran "we have tried to bring policy makers to the table with scientists." She said she concentrated in particular on what " We have established in our center -- for women's studies -- university of Tehran."

In a statement to Arabic News (ArabicNews.com), on the sideline of the meeting, Prof. Shaditalab said that the University of Tehran is public but still acts as an independent organization since 50 years.

Highlighting the experience of the Iranian Center for Women Studies (CWS), she said that the CWS is a very new organization, less than 3 years old, noting that from the very beginning of the center, she presented how the center's members have taken steps towards cooperation with policy makers.

Prof. Shaditalab's paper to the meeting has three sections. The first was the establishment of the CWS. Section two is the cooperation between the central ministries and section three is the research project and publication.

She outlined that for the establishment of the center " we took two ways: top-down and bottom-up," noting that she asked for the center from university as a faculty members and at the same time from president's office, as the President's consultant on women affairs also pushed and encouraged and put force from top to make this project a reality. And this is how we got the center established.

For the second point on what they did with all their workshops and conferences similar to the organization of ANGED, she said "We have the Persian Speaking Gender and Development Networking (PGN).

She said that after PGN was established at the center, members are invited from the President's office, NGOs, research centers, Women entrepreneurs at the local level, and then went international with members from Persian speaking societies. " We invited 24 policy makers directly to attend and they had attended in July, 2004 in a four- day conference marking PGN foundation and then discussing the common issues among Persian speaking societies. The guests from different countries decided that the most important issues are economic independence and entrepreneurship.

On the third issue, she explained that "for each research project, researchers were invited from ministries and planning organizations." They came and joined the research team and they took part in conducting the research and when the research is finished, we asked them to write an article and their articles were published in the center's publications," adding that since the journal is an academic journal, then they get credit in their promotion. She explained that the published articles were sent to 280 parliamentarians, the cabinet ministers and to libraries, in addition to an abstract on the author so this feedback is a kind of further encouragement.

On similarities of experiences concerning gender issues between Iran and MENA states. She said "I think, we can learn from each other not only as researchers but how we can lobby with governments. To me this is not a luxury but a must. We have to learn from each other. And the reason for that is there is changes happening in the young generations in our countries. Changes that are very fast, so researches can not live without governments and policy makers."

There are two different approaches. One is science for science's sake and the other is science for practice. She detailed that on the gender issue, we can not live with the first approach and we have to live with the second approach.

On her assessment on CAWTER's experience, she said that she knows CAWTER for the last three years. " It has achieved a great deal of success to me in getting Arab women researches together. I think, we should not wait for just conferences but make small working groups, and the reason is that these groups should follow up the decisions of the conference, so for the next conference, there will be many things to report." On the meeting's deliberations, she said that the discussions on debated issues did not get to the main points very objectively and very clearly," commenting that "if we stay at the level of general discussions, we will get nowhere. And thereby we have to establish working groups and then for the next conference we bring reports and very specific findings." On her recommendation to this end, she said that the networks like PGN and ANGED to be successful, need to have tangible results, otherwise, all efforts will be null and void.

Previous Stories:
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  UN report highlights Arab women achievements   (7/19/2004)
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