Challenging Indonesian Gender Norms
During the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence which runs from November 25th, (the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women) to December 10th, (Human Rights Day), UN agencies in Jakarta, Indonesia hosted a vast number of activities and events to raise awareness and advocacy. This project was part of a UNDP initiative.
My Role
I was the lead on this project and was responsible for the human-centred research and design aspect. The other members of the core team were a logistics officer to coordinate between UN agencies, and three members of the communications department (graphic designer, media/campaign officer, and communication head) to assist in the campaign strategy and execution. In the final stage, there were two additional team members: a videographer and an editor to produce the video.
The Challenge
The senior management at UNDP Indonesia wanted to run a communications campaign to be showcased at UN and UN-affiliated events around Jakarta during the 16 days of activism period and approached me with this task. Our team was under pressure to move fast and produce a campaign within 3 weeks. We started framing the challenge by asking, “How can we raise awareness about male on female violence in an effective manner?”
We posed questions regarding gendered violence and gender equality in general on UNDP Indonesia social media sites. We chose this medium for two reasons: the existing social engagement of the community resulting in a fast response rate and because this was the targeted demographic. The answers were overwhelming similar: violence was bad. Quickly on, we realized the issue was not a lack of awareness. We went back to our impact, outcomes, context, and constraints assessment, and we realized that the impact we wanted to achieve was to offer people another perspective, one that would influence behaviour change and that our design solution had to reflect that. We conducted secondary research about gendered violence and the results showed that traditional masculine gender norms were in part responsible for male on female violence. Gender norms, ideas about how women and men should be and act, were an underlying motivation for social behaviour. Tackling gender norms, then seemed to be the answer.
We reframe our question to “How can we challenge gender norms among young, urban, Indonesian women and men?” As we identified our target audience earlier, we
then created a strategy for research participants, best approach, and medium for the campaign.
The Approach
First we had to document and understand what the gender norms in Indonesia were. We wrote screeners and sent out a call for participants that matched our target demographic in age, gender, and locale. In addition, we were aware of the need for inclusion of diversity in social identity markers (eg. marital status, social and economic class, religious background, ethnicity, etc.). We conducted group interviews comprising of the same gender because we wanted people to feel comfortable and at ease, ensuring everyone’s voice was heard. We asked general questions such as:
What are the social expectations of women and men in Indonesia?
What purpose did these social expectations serve?
Who was benefiting from these social expectations?
Afterwards, the team regrouped and shared interesting stories and thoughts about the interviews. We separate the data based on the men’s and women’s answers and thoughts and clustered similar ideas. Synthesizing allowed us to come up with broad themes: the domestic sphere, romantic relations, social etiquette, street behaviour, personal appearance, and social status were the primary arenas where gender norms were enacted. We drew a relational map, linking the ideas of the men and women. Oftentimes, we discovered the men and women were saying opposing statements, but there was consensus as well. For example, on the domestic sphere:
The majority of men and women considered the domestic sphere a woman’s domain
The majority of men and women believed men should be the breadwinner in family
After synthesis, we started the analysis process. What was interesting was while some women felt stifled by this limitation; they still participated in this role. Even more surprising was to discover that women did not want their husbands to take over the domestic role. When we probed deeper to figure out the underlying motivation, we came to the insight that women who were not adhering to traditional gender norms were not considered being desirable candidates for marriage. We turn this statement into a question to allow us to think of interesting solutions. We asked, “How might we challenge this connection between desirability and traditional feminine gender norms?” We also wanted our solution to be adhering to our design principles.
The Solution
We created 4 principles, which would frame our solution:
1. Content must be in their own words
Put people in each other’s shoes (empathy)
Create some anonymity so people could be completely honest
Be culturally sensitive to all
We decided on creating a short film in Bahasa Indonesia (with English subtitles) as it would offer an audiovisual experience and would allow a greater reach comprising of an online and offline audience. Some thoughts from the brainstorming session on the content were a skit or commercial with reverse gender roles. We finally decided on filming people anonymously writing down answers to questions regarding gender norms. Then we would get people from the opposite gender read out the answers, and allowed them to spontaneously react and offer their thoughts on the answers. In this way, we could fulfill our first 3 design principles. For the last design principle, we held a co- creation session with the participants to come up with the questions. We selected 4 women and 4 men out of the original groups because they provided a well-balanced cohort in regards to their representation and diversity of answers.
We storyboarded how we envisioned the film with the director and editor, then shot the film. Afterwards, the participants offered their feedback and we delivered the final product to the communication department.
The Impact
The video was posted on UNDP Indonesia’s Facebook page and it generated a lot of interest. In fact, it was the second most viewed video overall. Despite that, engagement was low, resulting in only 26 comments. A better approach would have been to have a wider dissemination across more social media channels to make it more successful in reach. In order to increase engagement, perhaps using it as a talking point to start discussion both online and offline with a moderator would be a better idea. However, these were issues beyond the team’s control.
A lesson learnt from the design and production of the video was that the content was overwhelming. In hindsight, perhaps a better approach was to have several short videos, each video with its own topic.