Linking from the IDinsight blog.
[…] IDinsight’s team interviewed about 20 female surveyors, supervisors, and field managers across four of our global hubs to get a sense of their experiences and challenges.
In this post we’ll share challenges female surveyors, supervisors, and field managers have faced and their advice for mitigating risks. In the first piece, we shared what a typical day in the life of a female field manager or surveyor in Nigeria looks like. In the third piece, we’ll focus on the experiences of surveyors on an all-female team in Delhi.
In case you missed it, take a look at our last post in which our female surveyors in Northern Nigeria discuss challenges and opportunities presented by this work. But IDinsight survey experiences can be quite varied, for example: traveling in the Philippines to an unfamiliar state while riding a motorbike to remote flooded areas to observe handwashing in schools; living at home in a rural village in India and surveying mothers in five nearby villages with a male colleague; or taking public transport in a major city in Zambia to ask about sanitation in a peri-urban settlement. As you might guess, the cultural expectations, safety challenges, and team dynamics surveyors experience differ significantly across countries and projects.
In this post, we share our female surveyors’ advice for organizations that are recruiting or considering hiring female surveyors. We also detail what we’ve learned as an organization through our work as project supervisors in India, the Philippines, Zambia, Nigeria, and other countries.