Rethinking gender equity: Engaging boys and men and the role of philanthropy | Unusual Suspects

In this episode of the Moneycontrol Podcast, Natasha Joshi, Associate Director at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies (RNP), explores how philanthropy is evolving to promote gender equity through a more intersectional and inclusive lens. She emphasizes the importance of involving men and boys—an often overlooked aspect—in addition to empowering women and girls. Natasha shares insights from RNP’s work, discusses the challenges in funding gender-focused initiatives, and highlights the need to shift social norms and dismantle systemic barriers to create lasting, meaningful change.

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0:00:02 Natasha Joshi: Our foundation, I think, is trying to understand what are some of the other areas where we can contribute with private capital. Not necessarily just trying to kind of plug the gap for where government should be, but really kind of trying to find radical ways to unlock energies and unlock the resources of human beings that are there in the system. And is there an interesting way to do that? And that also takes its own approach, which is slightly different from saying that we’re going to essentially just close the last mile because the government finds it hard to go there.

0:00:42 Gaurav Choudhury: Hello, and a warm welcome to a very special podcast series, Unusual Suspects. I’m your host Gaurav Choudhury. This is a series about unraveling stories of entrepreneurs, investors and businesses, professionals and philanthropists who are disruptors, yet not in your face. Their disruptions have consistently delivered on the purpose and the mission they’ve embarked on. The values are as strong as the mission. Unusual suspect streams on earshot.in, spotify.com, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, moneycontrol.com and a host of other podcast streaming platforms. Welcome to the third season of Catalyzing Change: The Power of Family Philanthropy, a podcast series by Unusual Suspects, a money control podcast in collaboration with GivingPi, India’s first family focused philanthropy network. As philanthropy in India evolves, a new wave of giving is emerging, one that prioritizes collaboration, trust based models and long term systemic change. This season we turn our focus to gender and philanthropy, exploring how strategic giving can advance equity and empowerment of all genders. Through conversations with leading philanthropists, change makers and sector experts, we uncover what it takes to drive meaningful impact, where philanthropy can step in to bridge critical gaps and how collaboration can accelerate progress. Each episode will spotlight a different facet of gender focused giving.

0:02:06 Gaurav Choudhury: In this episode we are going to explore why intersectionality is crucial in advancing gender equity, ensuring solutions are more inclusive and responsive to the diverse challenges faced by different groups. It highlights the need to move beyond the one size fits all approach, emphasizing tailored interventions that address systemic barriers. Through real world experiences we will try and unpack how philanthropy can drive meaningful change by integrating intersectional perspectives, fostering equity and creating lasting impact. I am delighted to have Natasha Joshi, a development sector professional with extensive experience in program delivery, team building and public policy design and research. Her work spans diverse geographies including India, Singapore, the USA and Mexico. She currently serves as an Associate Director at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and is a keen writer who strongly advocates for decentralizing decision making and empowering stakeholders at every level. Welcome to Unusual Suspects, Natasha, delighted to have you on the show.

0:03:18 Natasha Joshi: Thank you, Gaurav. Thanks for that.

0:03:19.7 Gaurav Choudhury: You know, Natasha, let’s try and go back a bit. You have worked extensively across the social impact space, from Teach for India, to UNICEF, NITI Aayog, and now RNP, the Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. How has this journey shaped your understanding of philanthropy? Because you have got a ringside view from different perspectives in different contexts. And how are you bringing in your understanding of your own experience working in different organizations, trying to solve different kind of problems and, you know, how is it helping you drive systemic change?

0:04:00 Natasha Joshi: So, if I reflect back on my own background over the last 15 years, my academic grounding is in economics and psychology. And, I think as an undergraduate student of economics, I had the very markets lens on all things, the power of the markets, even when it came to economic development. But then I got interested in psychology and human development as a field and went and did my master’s in education and policy. I moved back to India with this idea that large scale change requires partnerships with government and very strong policymaking, because that was sort of where my policy education was coming into play. And coming to India, first, of course, I was at Teach for India, which was a very exciting time back then. No one had heard of it. This idea of promising young students from St. Stephen’s taking two years out of their lives to go teach in government schools was very radical and nobody thought it would work. And I had a great time doing that. But, you know, there was a part of me that still really wanted to dig my teeth into ed and policy.

0:05:00 Natasha Joshi: And so I kind of started, I would say, my actual development sector career with UNICEF. And I think that was very rigorous as a training ground for really understanding the field realities. I probably visited every single district in Maharashtra, worked very closely with all levels of government, Panchayati Raj institutions as well, and really, really sort of understood the extreme challenges within which governments operate. So I think that was my first kind of aha in education for myself, in terms of really understanding how difficult it is to take all provisions to the last mile, especially something quality education for children. And I continued that journey with NITI Aayog, then going from state to center, really looking at center policy making. And by then, I think I had a really strong lens on Sarkar, the importance of government, governance, etcetera. So going from markets, bazaar, to government, Sarkar, that was my second transition, really believing that strong policymaking leads to systemic change. But then I had a third transition, where I started working with Tata Trusts and came into the world of grant making, which was different from the kind of multilateral grant making that UNICEF does.

0:06:19 Natasha Joshi And being with something like Tata Trusts, that has had this interesting nation building legacy, I got this whole lens on what philanthropy does and where philanthropy comes in for society. And of course, now at RNP, this is the forefront lens for us. Our main view is the Samaj view, looking at civil society and looking at the power of the nonprofit sector and really average citizens to make a change. So even when you say, what has my journey been like, it’s really sort of been a continuum from kind of markets to government to society now. So that’s sort of been my arc.

0:07:00 Gaurav Choudhury: You know, Natasha, it’s very interesting that you talk about the Sarkar and also the role that the government plays. But I just want to pick on one point, given your background in economics. Incidentally, I also have an economics background and I recently finished a book called Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns. And it’s a book which makes a case against extreme wealth. But that’s besides the point. One of the chapters talks about why philanthropy is not really the answer. Because there is this whole argument that philanthropy actually is designed in a manner that necessarily only ensures that benefits go to only a certain class of people, or is at best suboptimal. What’s your view? Because you both have a ringside view as well as a 30,000ft view, both at the policy level as well as the implementation stage.

0:07:56 Natasha Joshi: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I think this is a discussion that’s quite established in the philanthropy space, which is that philanthropy is ironic. The very inequalities within a system that allow you to generate that kind of wealth is the inequality then you’re trying to stem using that wealth. So I think that is fairly well established. But that said, you’re also very right in that philanthropy is not the answer, because actually there is no one answer. Everything is a coalition and alliance of efforts and intentions. So, you cannot get very ahead without the market. You cannot get anywhere without government. But I think the question is, especially at RNP, what are we trying to platform? And our sense is that supporting civil society through philanthropy, empowering sort of field actors and allowing the people on the ground to find their own solutions. So creating the conditions that allow them to discover their own solutions, building that resilience, is the role of philanthropy and that philanthropy can do. Of course, government has a huge part to play in that and as do markets. But I think where philanthropy really comes in is two places. I think one is when one is naturally empowering and really looking at the spaces that are marginalized, but two is in actually being imaginative.

Because philanthropy has the appetite to take some risk, it has the ability to do so. And it can also look at what is emerging in the horizon rather than only focusing on what is difficult and urgent right now. Because that is what governments have to do. Governments don’t necessarily have the luxury for too much future planning. Many of the good governments try that. But it’s hard, because there’s so much firefighting to do on a day to day basis and markets are very responsive to the now. But I think that philanthropy does have some amount of ability to look at what we call forecasting, and trying to understand what’s coming up. And that is where I think the whole systemic idea of change also comes from.

0:10:04.9 Gaurav: Absolutely. Also Natasha, just a very brief observation from you, if you can make. Do you think, in your view, that philanthropy, particularly in geographies like India, is actually stepping in because the government policymaking hasn’t been able to deal with market failure problems? Because to a large extent most of the programs that philanthropic organizations are doing are results of market failure and also policy failure. What’s your view on that?

0:10:34.1 Natasha Joshi: If I really had to say, I think that modern market failures, we’re still dealing with 200 years of colonization and plunder. So I think that even philanthropy, old philanthropy that came in a lot of the Indian wealth and older, even princes, like the kind of patronage and work that has happened when it has come to empowering people on the margins, it is the result of the fact that we do have a very large population that is still impoverished. It is very difficult for only government to sort of take that on. You are right, in the sense that because the challenges are large, and state capacity is an issue, for sure, so philanthropy is trying to sort of step in. And you’re also right in observing that a lot of philanthropies trying to do this bit, which is making up for state failure in some sense. Our foundation, I think is trying to understand what are some of the other areas where we can contribute with private capital, not necessarily just trying to kind of plug the gap for where government should be, but really kind of trying to find radical ways to unlock energies and unlock the resources of human beings that are there in the system.

And is there an interesting way to do that? And that also takes its own approach, which is slightly different from saying that we’re going to essentially just close the last mile because the government finds it hard to go there.

0:12:00.7 Gaurav: Absolutely. Coming back to RNP, and RNP’s gender equity work recognizes that different groups experience challenges differently. And that is where the role and the significance of policy and program design becomes extremely important. Because there’s clearly no one size fits all solution. Because every category, every targeted group here, every community that you are targeting, the program is targeting, is seeking a very different kind of a solution because the problems are different. So how do you, RNP apply an intersectional lens? Because it’s very multidisciplinary and also you cannot have a binary approach to solve this. If you adopt a binary approach, you’re kind of risking falling into a zero sum game kind of a trap. How do you ensure that the work is inclusive and responsive to a completely diverse set of needs that require very different solutions?

0:13:00.8 Natasha: Right. So I think there are two parts to your question. I mean, one is just how do you take a horizontal sort of lens on all of the work that you do? And we do that for all of our various areas of work. We work in justice, we work in climate, we work in citizenship. We work in many different spaces, mental health as well. And for everything we take what you’re calling, this intersectional lens. To say that everything is impacted by everything else, and you can’t look at any problem in its isolation, you have to look at it within its context and where it sits at the intersection of all of the pressures it’s under. But in particular, I think this conversation becomes very relevant for gender equity. Now, the funny thing is when I say that I lead the work in gender, the default understanding is that we work to support girls and women empowerment. And at some point, I have also wondered, how gender has become shorthand for women and girls. Whereas gender is, as we all know, an enormous spectrum, and that spectrum, of course, also includes men.

So for us, when we started this work on engaging boys and men in gender equity work, it was very clear to us that all of us are working for the same thing. The entire gender ecosystem is ultimately working for gender equity. Some people are doing it, or rather many people are doing it by empowering girls and women, and we felt that not enough people were actually looking at the other side, which was, what’s happening with the boys? And yes, sometime back, I think even UNICEF had a campaign, a HeForShe campaign, saying that we do need allies. And this work has had some legacy over the last two decades, trying to get men and boys to step up for the rights of women. But I think that movement hasn’t been as successful. And when we started examining as to how we would like to engage boys and men, we came up with many challenges and many insights on how to do this work better. But even before I get to the challenges and the insights, I think the biggest question remained, why should you work with boys and men? And I think that question still remains today, even though it’s becoming easier to answer and I think people are having a much more intuitive understanding now of why it’s important to work with boys and men, six years back or seven years back, it wasn’t so obvious.

And that’s where I think this idea of intersectionality first really started showing up in our conversations. And I’m happy to sort of expand on that, but I do want to pause here to see if even the first framing kind of makes sense.

0:15:35.5 Natasha: Absolutely. You know, very well said actually. A large part of the gender imbalance that we see in our society has also got to do with, it’s not about how you’re bringing up the girls, it’s essentially about how you’re bringing up the boys. And that’s where the core problem is, which I’m glad to know that RNP is addressing right front and center. Now, as you said, your work challenges traditional gender roles, you’re engaging men and boys not just as allies but also as individuals, and they’re also navigating their own gender identities. What are the biggest learnings here? First, what led you to prioritizing this space and this approach, and what are the biggest learnings? If you can just give me three of the biggest learnings from this, because I’m sure there would be several things that we have learned and come to know only when you have started work and adopting this approach.

Yeah, absolutely. And for that, just you’ll have to bear with me for a minute or two, because I’d have to set some context.

0:16:33.1 Gaurav: Sure.

0:16:35.1 Natasha: So, how we came to this work, it was something, it came from a place of intuition. So Rohini has talked about this also in several interviews, of a personal experience she had. She encountered a boy, crying on the side of a road. And then she asked him why he’s crying, and he said that he’d done really well on his exams. And then she said, but why are you crying? And he said, because I have to quit school and I have to go work and I don’t want to. And I think that was this human experience that sort of sparked this kind of conviction, that you actually have to look at the lives of boys for whatever that’s worth. And that was just this kind of 30,000ft sort of spark. But then how do you operationalize that, right? How do you actually start exploring that space as a field? And for that, we’ve had this journey of over the last six years.

And I will come to the sort of insights at the end of this. But when we started out saying that, okay, let’s really look at organizations and let’s fund NGOs that are working with boys and men. There were very few. Most nonprofits were working with girls, were working with women. They were working on gender based violence. They were working on many themes. But there weren’t as many that were really including boys and men. So we started out with a very few, with a small clutch of nonprofits. We supported them. Then we got a few more. We got a few more. And now in the last seven years, we have supported over 35 nonprofits that have worked with boys and men and continue to do this work. Our learnings have been enormous. I mean, so the first learning really has been that if you want to engage boys, like any other sort of stakeholder, you have to understand what is it that they want. What are their anxieties, what are their challenges, what is their life, you know, how do they view the world? And we have done this through many creative ways.

So not just kind of some sort of academic approach, but we have done focus group discussions, we have used pop culture and media, we have scanned the Internet and tried to see how boys talk and what they do and where they hang out. And a few things start to emerge fairly quickly, when you spend that time really examining the lives of boys. And that is that boys have tremendous anxiety about this idea of being the breadwinner. From a very young age, they are told that that’s what they have to do. I always share this anecdote because I thought it was powerful. In one of the focus group discussions we were doing with boys from sort of low income backgrounds. So this idea that I am being instrumentalised, really ultimately I better earn and I better take care of the family. This is a pressure that really, really shows up for boys.

Of course, this idea of masculinity, traditional masculinity, power, strength, dominance, it’s sort of fed into them at a very early age. The suppression of emotion is very deep and it’s fed in very early. So all of these things, when we have started unpacking, we have realized that when you start talking to boys about their problems and their anxieties, they are far more receptive to the overall concept of gender equity. Because even they start to see that they would actually like a gender equal world, it would relieve them also of some of their burdens. So that’s one, that if you want to engage with boys and men, you have to kind of meet them where they are and try to understand what they’re going through. And then, yes, you must eventually get them to recognize their privilege and get them to see the difference between all of the affordances they have. But you can’t start with that. The sort of ally movement I think gets that wrong in some sense. When you start, which is allyship, the boys lose interest. The second thing of course is that this is long work.

It doesn’t happen in two years. It doesn’t happen. You can’t just go into one workshop with boys and move on. Like with girls, there is a whole life cycle approach. You have to follow a life cycle approach with boys as well. Eight year old boys are completely different from 13 year old boys, who are completely different from 20 year old men. Their milestones in their own lives also make a huge difference. So I think that’s one thing we’ve also learned. This is long term work and you have to do it. And the last thing we’ve of course learned is that doing the boys and men work is most fruitful in all of the areas where very strong women and girls empowerment work has happened. Because one, is it’s nearly impossible to break into completely ossified patriarchal spaces. It’s nearly impossible. So we owe a huge debt to all of the sort of feminist movements that have gone and loosened up those spaces, brought in a lot of discourse and created women’s empowerment in those geographies because that is where the boys and men work is layering on very, very well. So these are the three sort of learnings we’ve had.

0:21:29.8 Gaurav: You know, Natasha, it’s very interesting that you talk about ROI and I think it’s an approach issue. It’s also a mindset issue because development sector work and also work that philanthropists like you are carrying out can never be output driven because ROI essentially it’s guided by output, whereas the work in the development sector has to be necessarily outcome driven. Which is why I think it’s essential to have the right attitude and approach to that work. My next question is about, taking on from what you just said, on funding for gender equity. Because you’re moving away from a traditional approach and you’re engaging men and boys, and also essentially you are challenging deep seated norms that currently exist in our social structures. What barriers have you encountered in funding such work and how have you navigated them?

0:22:25.3 Natasha: When it comes to funding gender equity work, whether or not it is funding programs for engaging males or anything else, I think gender funding is generally quite low. And the OECD did this report of gender financing in India, which showed that of all the areas that are funded from education to health to livelihoods, etcetera, agriculture, so on and so forth, gender is actually one of the smallest categories.

So funding for gender overall is difficult. And there’s a lot of, again, there’s a lot of debate as to why that is the case. But I think that’s the first barrier, which is that overall funding for gender is low. And then the second challenge, when it comes to engaging males and finding money for those programs is that it is seen as being in competition with programs that are targeted towards empowering girls and women. And that’s not entirely false. Because, like I said, if the pie is really that small and the funding lens is very ROI or instrumental, then naturally the programs do start to compete with one another. But if you take a much more generative lens on funding and start to say that this is not about funding boys or funding girls, it’s about funding gender equity, one, we need to expand the pie overall for funding in gender, and then two, we have to fund very integrated approaches to gender equity and empowerment. Then I think the outcomes will be stronger. But you’re right, in that these twofold challenge exists. The overall funding for gender is low, and then within that, naturally, the legacy for programs with boys is much less than it is for girls.

0:24:05.2 Gaurav: Natasha, final question is about India@2047. And we are rapidly marching towards that. Lots of milestones will be achieved as we reach that year, by the hundredth year of independence. A lot many milestones of the primary principal markers that we follow from growth and attendant markers will probably be achieved. But what about gender equity? Achieving gender equity requires a very long term strategic approach. What role does in your view, philanthropy need to do differently to accelerate this progress? Because it’ll be a travesty if by the hundredth year of India’s independence, that is by 2047, we achieve most of the economic markers, but kind of remain a bit of a laggard on gender equity. What do you think that philanthropy needs to do things a little differently here?

0:24:56.6 Natasha: I think when I think of philanthropy and what value it can really add, especially even in terms of redefining the economic models that we take for granted, I think this idea of caregiving and centering caregiving in all the work that we do, not just as a foundation, the development sector, not just as a sector, but overall as society, I think that has to become a vital conversation. The reason I say this is because, we did this. Even in the gender space, many different things interact with each other from a foresight point of view, because I was talking about how do you see what’s emerging in the future, and one of the things that you will hear whispers of in the policy corridors is also the declining birth rate. You have fertility rates declining across India. There are certain states that are in particular worried that people are not having children. And when we zoom out and we take the gender lens on this, to us, we decided to do a report on the state of India’s fathers. Because we said that, you can talk a lot about female labor force participation, but how are the women to go work if the men aren’t at home taking care of the children? So what is the state of India’s fathers? And it’s an interesting report. It’s on our website, you could look at it.

But I think our approach to trying to solve these really hairy problems from a long term lens is that let’s look at the root causes of the problems. And when you start looking at the root causes, you will arrive at ways in which gender equity can be achieved, health can be achieved, well being can be achieved, environmental sustainability can be achieved. Because all of these things are quite paramount, and there is really no evidence that economic development in and of itself kind of leads to positive outcomes on all of these other aspects, which are very important for life. So I think that’s sort of my sense of where I think philanthropy needs to continue to advocate. It has to advocate for very strong lens on centering caregiving, not just between children and parents, but really as a society. Are we able to express care for one another? Are we able to take all of the weaker sections along, vulnerable people along? Are we able to bring in the margins and be far more inclusive? So if philanthropy can advocate for that and drive funding with that spirit, then I believe that some of our difficult problems have some resolution down the line.

0:27:17 Gaurav: Absolutely, very well said Natasha. Thank you so much for sharing your deep insights and perspective on a range of issues. Thank you so much for taking the time out and dropping by to have this conversation with us. Thank you.

0:27:28. Natasha: It was a pleasure, Gaurav. Thanks.

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