Is social capital analysis gender blind? It may be a popular method for understanding how individuals can improve or maintain their positions in society, but has it ignored gendered intrahousehold issues of power and hierarchy? Do we need to focus on social capital’s downside – the ‘costs’ of the processes through which it is generated?

A paper from the universities of Colorado and Brighton reveals the shifting and dynamic nature of female migrant networks in Indonesia. Highlighting the analytical shortcomings of a gender-neutral conception of social capital, the report analyses the power dynamics of the women’s social networks to reveal how they are sites of gendered and intergenerational struggle and negotiation.

The two rural-urban networks examined link rural communities with faraway industrial workplaces. In response to the 1998 economic meltdown, currency collapse and labour market turmoil, women became more reliant on these networks. Many low-income, single women migrants returned to their home villages – either out of necessity or in response to social pressure. Where a more formal support organisation existed, women stayed in the city as their parents’ fears about their moral and material wellbeing were allayed by the strength of the network.

• Conventional understandings of social capital would suggest that these women were helped to negotiate the urban jungle by supportive networks offering security and reliable job information. However, this is an over-simplification. Instead, evidence is presented that:
• Women were pressured through gender norms as daughters to provide for their families during the crisis.
• Their linkages with kin networks were characterised by gender-specific tensions around sexual morality – fears that misdemeanours would lead to gossip getting back home led to self-policing.
• Those who returned to their rural origins were expected to shoulder heavy domestic labour loads and supported male relatives through their cleaning, caring and wage-earning work.
• Parents faced with declining agricultural incomes forced daughters to remit their earnings – previously considered not part of the household economic equation.
• Claims on women’s labour and their remittances were rationalised through gender-specific normative constraints that reflect and contribute to the persistent inequalities in women’s and men’s positions within household divisions of labour and resources.

The report urges those who naïvely believe social networks are a cohesive grassroots cushion protecting from economic shocks to read more recent, gender-nuanced studies. Policy analysts need to:

• ensure that studies of social capital look within social networks to understand the ways that gendered power relations shape women’s and men’s differential capacity to turn social capital into other forms of capital
• be open to the likelihood that what may be positive social capital for men can be experienced as a social constraint or a burden by women in the same network
• realise that social capital that provides particular gender-specific advantages to women themselves may also simultaneously include disbenefits specific to those very women
• focus on locally-specific, gender-differentiated network roles, desires, workloads, relationships and interpretations of resources and scarcity
• be aware that women can be in a network yet excluded from the more powerful bonds of trust and reciprocity that exist among men.

Source(s):
‘Engendering social capital: women workers and rural-urban networks in Indonesia’s crisis’, World Development, Volume 31, Issue 5, pp 865-879, by Rachel Silvey and Rebecca Elmhirst, May 2003 Full document.

Funded by: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

id21 Research Highlight: 16 October 2003

Further Information:
Rachel Silvey
Department of Geography
CB 260
University of Colorado
Boulder
CO 80309
USA

Tel: +1 303 492 2860
Fax: +1 303 492 7501
Contact the contributor: silvey@spot.colorado.edu

The University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

Rebecca Elmhirst
School of the Environment
University of Brighton
Cockcroft Building
Lewes Road
Brighton
BN2 4GJ
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1273 642387  
Fax: +44 (0)1273 642285
Contact the contributor: r.j.elmhirst@brighton.ac.uk

The University of Brighton, UK

Other related links:
'Capitalising on connections: improving understanding of urban social capital'

'Place matters: the challenges of survival in remote rural areas'

'It's not what you know- it's who you know! Economic analysis of social capital' Insights #34

See id21's online links on social capital