Bea Quintos is a research analyst and writer enrolled in the MSc Urban Management and Development at IHS. She has worked in infrastructure policy for five years at the Public-Private Partnership Centre of Philippines, with four of those years focused on gender mainstreaming efforts within her office.
With a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of the Philippines, she has been an advocacy writer for women’s sports since 2014. Her work has appeared on CNN Philippines Life, Tiebreaker Times, The Female Coaching Network, and Rappler. In November 2018, her essay ‘Becoming Dangerous Women’ was published in an anthology of essays on women and violence by Gantala Press, an independent feminist press based in the Philippines.
‘Gender mainstreaming has opened my eyes to the fact that individuals are a key scale when we talk about development’.
She explains how people have different needs depending on their sex, gender and position in society, and that development interventions must be able to account for those differences and their intersections.
Exploring her personal determination to implement gender mainstreaming in her work and in urban development, she notes how it informed her approach to her career in the public sector:
‘It is not just about having the right policy, but also the right mechanisms and people to make policy responsible to people’s needs. Through it all, there must be a willingness to do things differently.’
At IHS, she is looking to deepen her understanding of gender as it relates to the urban, participating in the Gender in Urban Theory, Practice and Research two-week elective class run by Carolina Lunetta, Bahar Sakizlioglu and Maartje van Eerd. She plans to continue to focus on gender mainstreaming when she returns to the Philippines.
‘Whatever I learn here, I will apply back home.’