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Samuele Ro (talk | contribs) m →Neoliberal approaches: minor grammatical correction |
Samuele Ro (talk | contribs) m →Gender and neoliberal development institutions: minor correction |
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===Gender and neoliberal development institutions===
Among development institutions, gender issues have increasingly become part of economic development agendas, as the examples of the [[World Bank]] shows. The World Bank started focusing on gender in 1977 with the appointment of a first Women in Development Advisor<ref name="WB Gender">{{cite web |url= http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/gender/overview |title=World Bank Gender Overview |author= |date=03 May 2013 |website=World Bank |publisher=World Bank |accessdate=05 November 2013}}</ref>. Thirty years later, a [[Gender Action Plan]] was launched to underline the importance of the topic within development strategies. In 2012, the [[World Development Report]] was the first report of the series examining Gender Equality and Development<ref name="WB Gender">{{cite web |url= http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/gender/overview |title=World Bank Gender Overview |author= |date=03 May 2013 |website=World Bank |publisher=World Bank |accessdate=05 November 2013}}</ref>.
Women have been identified by some development institutions as a key to successful development, for example through financial inclusion. One example is the [[Women’s Development Business]] (WDB) in South Africa, a [[Grameen Bank]] microfinance replicator. According to WDB, the goal is to ensure “[…] that rural women are given the tools to free themselves from the chains of poverty […]” through allocation of financial resources directly to women including enterprise development programs<ref name="WDB">{{cite web |url= http://wdb.co.za/about/#.UpUPR-KmZRc |title=WDB about page |author= |date= 2013 |website=Women’s Development Business |publisher=WDB |accessdate=28 November 2013}}</ref>. The idea is to use microfinance as a market-oriented tool to ensure access to financial services for
As a reaction, a current topic in the feminist literature on economic development is the ‘gendering’ of [[microfinance]], as women have increasingly become the target borrowers for rural [[microcredit]] lending. This, in turn, creates the assumption of a “rational economic woman” which can exacerbate existing social hierarchies<ref name="Rankin2001">{{cite journal |last=Rankin |first=Katharine N. |date=2001 |title= Governing Development: Neoliberalism, Microcredit, and Rational Economic Woman |url= http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan011685.pdf |journal= Economy and Society |publisher=Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme |volume=30 |pages=20 |accessdate=02 November 2013}}</ref>).
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The impact of programs of the [[Bretton Woods Institutions]] and other similar organizations on gender are being monitored by [[Gender Action]], a watchdog group founded in 2002 by [[Eliane Zuckerman]] who is a former World Bank economist.
===Response to neoliberal approaches in gender and feminist literature===
The [[global financial crisis]] and the following politics of austerity have opened up a wide range of gender and feminist debates on neoliberalism and the impact of the crisis on women. One view is that the crisis has affected women disproportionately and that there is a need for alternative economic structures in which investment is social reproduction needs to be given more weight<ref>{{cite web |url= https://soundcloud.com/genderconfyork/elson-and-pearson-keynote |title=Keynote of Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson at the Gender, Neoliberalism and Financial Crisis Conference at the University of York |last1=Elson |first1=Diane |last2=Pearson |first2=Ruth |date=27 September 2013 |website=Soundcloud |accessdate=27 November 2013}}</ref>.
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