IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2013 - 55

Kelkar and Nathan's case study
of the Luoshui village in Yunnan,
China, includes reference to the
historical background of the area
when "people began to seize political power" and the "gendered division of labor tended to be equal"
[25, p. 29]. Kelkar and Nathan point
out: "It is not energy itself that has
certain inevitable consequences, but
the economic and social situation in
which technologies are introduced
and the balance of forces at any
time" [25, p. 17].

Renewable Energy
and Gender Equity
These findings point to a degree
of causality between clean and
renewable energy development and
gender equity and show that this
causality is context driven. They
concur with feminist theories that
renewable energy technologies are
"social products" and need to be
designed and developed as such to
optimize social and gender benefits.
There is no "technological fix"
to the socio-economic problems
and gender challenges facing the
rural poor and women in South
Asia. The relationship between
technology and social and gender
relations has to be understood as an
interactive one. In rural South Asia,
where clean and renewable energy
technology is emerging as an
essential infrastructure to improve
modern energy access of poor communities, there is an opportunity
to use these "social products" in a
way that helps to improve gender
equity and reconfigure gender relations. This necessitates drawing
women into the process of designing and developing these energy
systems and projects, i.e., to go
"beyond the meter" and the narrow
confining of the social product to

its purely technological functions
and features.

Author Information
The author is an international development specialist consultant with the
Asian Development Bank, currently
undertaking a PhD on renewable
energy and its gender implications in
Asia, at the University of Melbourne
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Grattan Street,
Parkville, Melbourne, Victoria
2010, Australia. Email: reihana.m@
student.unimelb.edu.au.

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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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