The evaporation of gender policies in the patriarchal cooking pot

This article suggests that gender-oriented policies tend to evaporate within the bureaucracy of the typical international development agency. An agency is here represented as a `patriarchal cooking pot', in which gender policies are likely to evaporate because they threaten the internal patriarchal tradition of the agency, and also because such policies would upset the cosy and `brotherly' relationship with recipient governments of developing countries. The article aims to illuminate this process of policy evaporation. The reader is invited to peer into the patriarchal cooking pot.