The Harvard Analytical Framework (Gender Roles Framework)

The Harvard Analytical Framework was developed in the 1980s in the Harvard Institute for International Relations to facilitate the integration of women into development project analysis. It aims to make an economic case for allocating resources to women as well as men, and to assist planners to design more efficient projects. Most fundamentally, the Harvard Framework is a guide to data collection. The framework is composed of three basic elements:

Activity profile: Based on gender divisions of labor, it lists tasks of women and men, allowing for disaggregation by age, ethnicity or class, as well as where and when tasks are performed. Activities are grouped under three headings: productive activities, reproductive or household activities and social/political/religious activities.

Access and control profile: Lists the resources needed to carry out tasks and benefits derived from them. The resources may be material or economic, political or social, and include time, access to these resources and benefits, and control over them is disaggregated by gender.

Influencing factors profile: Outlines factors that affect the division of labor and the access and control profile of the community.

The Harvard Analytical Framework was developed in the 1980s in the Harvard Institute for International Relations to facilitate the integration of women into development project analysis.

It aims to make an economic case for allocating resources to women as well as men, and to assist planners to design more efficient projects. Most fundamentally, the Harvard Framework is a guide to data collection.

The framework is composed of three basic elements:

Activity profile: Based on gender divisions of labor, it lists tasks of women and men, allowing for disaggregation by age, ethnicity or class, as well as where and when tasks are performed. Activities are grouped under three headings: productive activities, reproductive or household activities and social/political/religious activities.

Access and control profile: Lists the resources needed to carry out tasks and benefits derived from them. The resources may be material or economic, political or social, and include time, access to these resources and benefits, and control over them is disaggregated by gender.

Influencing factors profile: Outlines factors that affect the division of labor and the access and control profile of the community.

Influencing factors profile: Outlines factors that affect the division of labor and the access and control profile of the community.

Strengths

• Useful tool for gathering data, understanding women's and men's roles in a society, and taking account of external forces which affect development planning.

• Flexible instrument that may be used at many different levels of planning and analysis and can be expanded to disaggregate data according to cultural, ethic and economic factors as well as sex and age.

Weaknesses

• Takes an efficiency focus, not an equity focus, on allocating new resources, in order to make a response more efficient without addressing inequalities in gender relations.

• Focuses on material resources rather than social relationships, emphasizing activities and resources of different categories of people, rather than on relationships between different groups, leading to over-simplified understanding of the issue.

• Tools may be implemented in a non-participative way without involvement of women and men from a community. The matrices do not require that planners ensure that the community members themselves analyze the situation andt heir particular context.

• Matrices can encourage people to take a fairly superficial, tick-the-box approach to data collection that fails to capture the power dynamics present in the lives of men and women, which play a key role in shaping their evolving experiences.

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