Gender and development

Gender and development is an interdisciplinary field of research and applied study that implements a feminist approach to understanding and addressing the disparate impact that economic development and globalization have on people based upon their location, gender, class background, and other socio-political identities. A strictly economic approach to development views a country’s development in quantitative terms such as job creation, inflation control, and high employment – all of which aim to improve the ‘economic wellbeing’ of a country and the subsequent quality of life for its people. In terms of economic development, quality of life is defined as access to necessary rights and resources including but not limited to quality education, medical facilities, affordable housing, clean environments, and low crime rate. Gender and development considers many of these same factors, however, gender and development emphasizes efforts towards understanding how multifaceted these issues are in the entangled context of culture, government, and globalization. Accounting for this need, gender and development implements ethnographic research, research that studies a specific culture or group of people by physically immersing the researcher into the environment and daily routine of those being studied, in order to comprehensively understand how development policy and practices affect the everyday life of targeted groups or areas. Gender and development is an interdisciplinary field of research and applied study that implements a feminist approach to understanding and addressing the disparate impact that economic development and globalization have on people based upon their location, gender, class background, and other socio-political identities. A strictly economic approach to development views a country’s development in quantitative terms such as job creation, inflation control, and high employment – all of which aim to improve the ‘economic wellbeing’ of a country and the subsequent quality of life for its people. In terms of economic development, quality of life is defined as access to necessary rights and resources including but not limited to quality education, medical facilities, affordable housing, clean environments, and low crime rate. Gender and development considers many of these same factors, however, gender and development emphasizes efforts towards understanding how multifaceted these issues are in the entangled context of culture, government, and globalization. Accounting for this need, gender and development implements ethnographic research, research that studies a specific culture or group of people by physically immersing the researcher into the environment and daily routine of those being studied, in order to comprehensively understand how development policy and practices affect the everyday life of targeted groups or areas. The history of this field dates back to the 1950s, when studies of economic development first brought women into its discourse, focusing on women only as subjects of welfare policies – notably those centered on food aid and family planning. The focus of women in development increased throughout the decade, and by 1962, the United Nations General Assembly called for the Commission on the Status of Women to collaborate with the Secretary General and a number of other UN sectors to develop a longstanding program dedicated to women’s advancement in developing countries. A decade later, feminist economist Ester Boserup’s pioneering book Women’s Role in Economic Development (1970) was published, radically shifting perspectives of development and contributing to the birth of what eventually became the gender and development field. Since Boserup’s assertion that development affects men and women differently, the study of gender’s relation to development has gathered major interest amongst scholars and international policymakers. The field has undergone major theoretical shifts, beginning with Women in Development (WID), shifting to Women and Development (WAD), and finally becoming the contemporary Gender and Development (GAD). Each of these frameworks emerged as an evolution of its predecessor, aiming to encompass a broader range of topics and social science perspectives. In addition to these frameworks, international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have implemented policies, programs, and research regarding gender and development, contributing a neoliberal and smart economics approach to the study. Examples of these policies and programs include Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), microfinance, outsourcing, and privatizing public enterprises, all of which direct focus towards economic growth and suggest that advancement towards gender equality will follow. These approaches have been challenged by alternative perspectives such as Marxism and ecofeminism, which respectively reject international capitalism and the gendered exploitation of the environment via science, technology, and capitalist production. Marxist perspectives of development advocate for the redistribution of wealth and power in efforts to reduce global labor exploitation and class inequalities, while ecofeminist perspectives confront industrial practices that accompany development, including deforestation, pollution, environmental degradation, and ecosystem destruction. Theoretical approach The term “women in development” was originally coined by a Washington-based network of female development professionals in the early 1970s who sought to question trickle down existing theories of development by contesting that economic development had identical impacts on men and women. The Women in Development movement (WID) gained momentum in the 1970s, driven by the resurgence of women's movements in developed countries, and particularly through liberal feminists striving for equal rights and labour opportunities in the United States. Liberal feminism, postulating that women's disadvantages in society may be eliminated by breaking down customary expectations of women by offering better education to women and introducing equal opportunity programmes, had a notable influence on the formulation of the WID approaches. The focus 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. This approach was pushed forward by WID advocates, 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. 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. 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. 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. Criticism The WID movement faced a number of criticisms; such an approach had in some cases the unwanted consequence of depicting women as a unit whose claims are conditional on its productive value, associating increased female status with the value of cash income in women's lives. The WID view and similar classifications based on Western feminism, applied a general definition to the status, experiences and contributions of women and the solutions for women in Third World countries. Furthermore, the WID, although it advocated for greater 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. Moreover, the underlying assumption behind the call for the integration of the 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. 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 developing world were inhibiting to self-development.