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Gender and development

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The Gender and Development (GAD) approach is a way of determining how best to structure development projects and programs based on analysis of gender relationships. It was developed in the 1980s as an alternative to the Women in Development (WID) approach that was in common use until then.[1]

Theory

Women in Development

The term “women and development” was originally coined by a Washington-based network of female development professionals in the early 1970s[2] who sought to put in question the trickle down theories of development by contesting that modernization had identical impact on men and women.[3] 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.[4] 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,[5] had a notable influence on the formulation of the WID approaches, whereby little attention was given to men and to power relations between genders.[3]

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 welfare.[6] 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 mothers.[7] 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 economy.[8]

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 agencies.[9]

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 lives.[10] 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 men.[11] 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 activities.[12] 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-development.[13] 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.

Gender and Development

Unlike WID, the GAD approach is not concerned specifically with women, but with the way in which a society assigns roles, responsibilities and expectations to both women and men. GAD applies gender analysis to uncover the ways in which men and women work together, presenting results in neutral terms of economics and efficiency.[1]

Caroline Moser developed the Moser Gender Planning Framework for GAD-oriented development planning in the 1980s while working at the Development Planning Unit of the University of London. Working with Caren Levy, she expanded it into a methodology for gender policy and planning.[14] The Moser framework follows the Gender and Development approach in emphasizing the importance of gender relations. As with the WID-based Harvard Analytical Framework, it includes collection of quantitative empirical facts. Going further, it investigates the reasons and processes that lead to conventions of access and control. The Moser Framework includes gender roles identification, gender needs assessment, disaggregating control of resources and decision making withn the household, planning for balancing the triple role, distinguishing between different aims in interventions and involving women and gender-aware organizations in planning.[15]

Neoliberal approaches

Neoliberal approaches and ideology have influenced gender in various forms. On the one hand, institutions using neoliberal economic policy have started taking gender into account when designing economic policies. On the other hand, there are discussions on how neoliberalism affects gender, hence how a neoliberal environment with its distinctive economic policies have influenced and affected gender and women in particular.

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.[16] 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.[16] 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.[17] The idea is to use microfinance as a market-oriented tool to ensure access to financial services for disadvantaged and low-income people and therefore fostering economic development through financial inclusion.

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[18]). Therefore, the critique is that the assumption of economic development through microfinance does not take into account all possible outcomes, especially the ones affecting women.

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.[19]

There are different views among feminists on whether neoliberal economic policies have more positive or negative impacts on women. In the post-war era, feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Wilson[20] criticized state capitalism and the welfare state as a tool to oppress women. Therefore, neoliberal economic policies featuring privatization and deregulation, hence a reduction of the influence of the state and more individual freedom was argued to improve conditions for women. This anti-welfare state thinking arguably led to feminist support for neoliberal ideas embarking on a macroeconomic policy level deregulation and a reduced role of the state. Therefore, some scholars in the field argue that feminism, especially during its second wave, has contributed key ideas to Neoliberalism that, according to these authors, creates new forms of inequality and exploitation.[21]

As a reaction to the phenomenon that some forms of feminism are increasingly interwoven with capitalism, many suggestions on how to name these movements have emerged in the feminist literature. Examples are ‘free market feminism’ [22] or even ‘faux-feminism’.[23]

Usage

The World Bank[note 1] was one of the first international organizations to recognise the need for Women in Development, appointing a WID Adviser in 1977. In 1984 the bank mandated that its programs consider women's issues. In 1994 the bank issued a policy paper on Gender and Development, reflecting current thinking on the subject. This policy aims to address policy and institutional constraints that maintain disparities between the genders and thus limit the effectiveness of development programs.[25]

Criticism

GAD has been criticized for emphasizing the social differences between men and women while neglecting the bonds between them and also the potential for changes in roles. Another criticism is that GAD does not dig deep enough into social relations and so may not explain how these relations can undermine programs directed at women. It also does not uncover the types of trade-off that women are prepared to make for the sake of achieving their ideals of marriage or motherhood.[1]

Notes

  1. ^ The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes. According to their website: "Our mission is to fight poverty with passion and professionalism for lasting results and to help people help themselves and their environment by providing resources, sharing knowledge, building capacity and forging partnerships in the public and private sectors".[24]

References

  1. ^ a b c Shifting views...
  2. ^ Irene Tinker (1990). Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development. Oxford University Press. p. 30. ISBN 978-0-19-506158-1.
  3. ^ a b Razavi, Shahrashoub; Miller, Carol (1995). "From WID to GAD: Conceptual shifts in the Women and Development discourse" (PDF). Occasional Paper. 1. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development: 2. Retrieved 22 November 2013. Cite error: The named reference "Razavi1995" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  4. ^ Ibid., 3.
  5. ^ Robert Connell (1987). Gender and power: society, the person, and sexual politics. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-1430-3.
  6. ^ Ibid., 3.
  7. ^ Ibid., 3.
  8. ^ Ibid., 4.
  9. ^ Ibid., 6.
  10. ^ Ibid., i.
  11. ^ Bradshaw, Sarah (May 2013). "Women's role in economic development: Overcoming the constraints" (PDF). UNSDSN. UNSDSN. Retrieved 22 November 2013.
  12. ^ Koczberski, Sarah (1998). "Women In Development: A Critical Analysis". Third World Quarterly. 19 (3). Taylor & Francis, Ltd.: 399. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
  13. ^ Ibid., 400.
  14. ^ March, Smyth & Mukhopadhyay 1999, pp. 55.
  15. ^ Van Marle 2006, pp. 126.
  16. ^ a b "World Bank Gender Overview". World Bank. World Bank. 3 May 2013. Retrieved 5 November 2013.
  17. ^ "WDB about page". Women’s Development Business. WDB. 2013. Retrieved 28 November 2013.
  18. ^ Rankin, Katharine N. (2001). "Governing Development: Neoliberalism, Microcredit, and Rational Economic Woman" (PDF). Economy and Society. 30. Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme: 20. Retrieved 2 November 2013.
  19. ^ Elson, Diane; Pearson, Ruth (27 September 2013). "Keynote of Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson at the Gender, Neoliberalism and Financial Crisis Conference at the University of York". Soundcloud. Retrieved 27 November 2013.
  20. ^ Elizabeth Wilson. Women and the Welfare State. Routledge.
  21. ^ Fraser, Nancy (2012). "Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History" (PDF). Working paper. Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme. p. 14. Retrieved 2 November 2013.
  22. ^ Eisenstein, Hester (2009). Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. ISBN 1594516596. Retrieved 25 November 2013.
  23. ^ McRobbie, Angela (2009). The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. ISBN 0761970622. Retrieved 25 November 2013.
  24. ^ About World Bank.
  25. ^ World Bank 2010.

Sources

Further reading

  • Janet Henshall Momsen (2009). Gender and Development. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0-415-77562-0.
  • Lise Østergaard (1992). Gender and development: a practical guide. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-07132-1.
  • Raana Haider (1996). Gender and development. American University in Cairo Press.
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