How Do Understandings of Gender and Youth Translate into Practice? Examining EngenderHealth’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program ‘Gender Matters’

Gender has come to be understood as a key consideration in most development interventions. However, the concept of gender has largely become equat-ed with women only. This has significant effects for how programs are designed and on associated outcomes. In order to promote more comprehensive and nuanced conceptualizations of gender, it is key to understand the process by which an organization translates its understanding of gender from an idea to actual practice, including how this interacts with understandings of other key concepts, such as youth, that are utilized and addressed in an intervention. This paper examines how these two concepts play out in a gender-transformative teen pregnancy prevention program called Gender Matters, implemented in Austin, Texas, United States, by the large international women’s health organization, EngenderHealth. The concepts were explored and compared through three main sets of data: organizational documents and the Gender Matters curriculum, interviews with staff, and workshop observations. Findings were then framed within the broader literature on gender, masculinities, and youth in development. Additional areas explored include consideration of the gender-transformative nature of the program, the new concept of gender synchronization, and the influence of donors on understandings of the key concepts. The overarching purpose of the study was to examine the case of one organization that utilizes a comprehensive understanding of gender in its programming and to learn what implications this may have for the broader field of gender and development practice.