Gender and security: mainstreaming gender in security risk management
A record of the guidance on mainstreaming gender through the security risk management cycle, and of why an assessment that does not ask about it produces a figure that describes nobody.
The starting observation is simple. A risk assessment that produces one level of risk for a location has averaged the exposure of everyone working there. The average is convenient for planning and it is wrong for every individual, because the risk a person carries depends on how the environment reads them.
Where the difference appears
- Movement. Women on a team report constraints that men do not: the routes they are advised to avoid, the hours they are told not to travel, and the escorts they are told to take. Those constraints are frequently imposed by the community rather than by the employer, and the employer then treats them as a fact of the environment rather than a risk to be managed.
- Accommodation. Shared housing and the way residential arrangements are set determine exposure, and the decisions are usually taken by people who do not live with the consequence.
- Checkpoints and public space. How a person is treated at a checkpoint, on public transport and in a market varies by gender, and the variation is documented across the sector.
- Sexual violence and harassment. Recorded at rates far below what surveys report, which indicates a reporting gap rather than an absence of incidents.
- Raising a concern. Staff who raise a profile-specific concern report being told that the risk applies to everyone or that the posting may not suit them. Each response moves the problem onto the individual.
- Men, and the other half of the question. Male staff are less likely to report sexual violence, more likely to be assigned the most physically dangerous tasks, and less likely to seek psychological support afterwards. A framework that treats gender as a synonym for women addresses part of the problem.
What mainstreaming requires
At each step of the cycle, a specific change. Context analysis that describes how the environment treats different people differently. Risk assessment that records exposure at the level of the individual rather than producing a single score. Risk treatment that reviews the measures creating unequal exposure instead of accepting them. Training built from the situations participants actually meet. Incident response that permits reporting without going through the line manager. And monitoring that disaggregates data, so a difference between groups is visible rather than averaged away.
Practical guidance and research on the security of humanitarian staff, for the organisations that send them.