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The term “women and development” was originally coined by a Washington-based network of female development professionals in the early 1970s<ref name="Tinker1990">{{cite book|author=Irene Tinker|title=Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=R6aCgdeafDAC|year=1990|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-506158-1|page=30}}</ref> who sought to put in question the trickle down theories of development by contesting that modernization had identical impact on men and women<ref name="Razavi1995">{{cite journal |last=Razavi |first=Shahrashoub |last2=Miller |first2=Carol |date=1995 |title=From WID to GAD: Conceptual shifts in the Women and Development discourse |url=www.http://unrisd.org/unrisd/website/document.nsf/ab82a6805797760f80256b4f005da1ab/d9c3fca78d3db32e80256b67005b6ab5/$FILE/opb1.pdf |journal=Occasional Paper |publisher=United Nations Research Institute for Social Development |volume=1 |pages=2 |accessdate=22 November 2013}}</ref>. The Women in Development movement (WID) gained momentum in the 1970s, driven by the resurgence of women's movement in northern countries, whereby liberal feminists were striving for equal rights and labour opportunities in the United States<ref>Ibid., 3.</ref>. Liberal feminism, postulating that women's disadvantages in society may be eliminated by breaking down stereotyped customary expectations of women by offering better education to women and introducting equal opportunity programmes<ref name="Connell1987">{{cite book|author=Robert Connell|title=Gender and power: society, the person, and sexual politics|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=qywNrBHAGxwC|year=1987|publisher=Stanford University Press|isbn=978-0-8047-1430-3}}</ref>, had a notable influence on the formulation of the WID approaches, whereby little attention was given to men and to power relations between genders5genders<ref name="Razavi1995">{{cite journal |last=Razavi |first=Shahrashoub |last2=Miller |first2=Carol |date=1995 |title=From WID to GAD: Conceptual shifts in the Women and Development discourse |url=www.http://unrisd.org/unrisd/website/document.nsf/ab82a6805797760f80256b4f005da1ab/d9c3fca78d3db32e80256b67005b6ab5/$FILE/opb1.pdf |journal=Occasional Paper |publisher=United Nations Research Institute for Social Development |volume=1 |pages=3 |accessdate=22 November 2013}}</ref>.

The translation of the 1970s feminist movements and their repeated calls for employment opportunities in the development agenda meant that particular attention was given to the productive labour of women, leaving aside reproductive concerns and social welfare6welfare<ref>Ibid., 3.</ref>. Yet this focus was part of the approach pushed forward by advocates of the WID movement, reacting to the general policy environment maintained by early colonial authorities and post-war development authorities, wherein inadequate reference to the work undertook by women as producers was made, as they were almost solely identified as their roles as wives and mothers7mothers<ref>Ibid., 3.</ref>. The WID's opposition to this “welfare approach” was in part motivated by the work of Danish economist Ester Boserup in the early 1970s, who challenged the assumptions of the said approach and highlighted the role women by women in the agricultural production and economy8economy<ref>Ibid., 4.</ref>.

A dominant strand of thinking within WID sought to link women’s issues with development, highlighting how such issues acted as impediments to economic growth; this “relevance” approach stemmed from the experience of WID advocates which illustrated that it was more effective if demands of equity and social justice for women were strategically linked to mainstream development concerns, in an attempt to have WID policy goals taken up by development agencies9agencies<ref>Ibid., 6.</ref>.

This led to the WID movement facing a number of criticisms.: such an approach had in some cases the unwanted consequence of depicting women as an unit whose claims are conditional on its productive value, associating increased female status with the value of cash income in women’s lives10lives<ref>Ibid., i.</ref>. Furthermore, the WID, although it advocated for greated gender equality, did not tackle the unequal gender relations and roles at the basis of women's exclusion and gender subordination rather than addressing the stereotyped expectations entertained by men11men<ref>[http://http://unsdsn.org/files/2013/05/130520-Women-Economic-Development-Paper-for-HLP.pdf Bradshaw, Sarah, ''Women’s role in economic development:
Overcoming the constraints '', May 2013]</ref>. Moreover, the underlying assumption behind the call for the integration of Third World women with their national economy was that women were not already participating in development, thus downplaying women's roles in household production and informal economic and political activities12. The WID was also criticized for its views on the fact that women's status will improve by moving into “productive employment”, implying that the move to the “modern sector” need to be made from the “traditional” sector to achieve self-advancement, further implying that “traditional” work roles often occupied by women in the developping world were inhibiting to self-development13. The Women in Development approach was the first contemporary movement to specifically integrate women in the broader development agenda and acted as the precursor to later movements such as the Women and Development (WAD), and ultimately, the Gender and Development approach, departing from some of the criticized aspects imputed to the WID.

===Women and Development===