GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT APPROACH

Man and woman are peerless pair; being supplementary to one another; each helps the other, so that
without the one, the existence of the other cannot be conceived and therefore, it follows that anything
that impairs the status of either of them will involve the equal ruin of them both.

-Mahatma Gandhi
Men in many contexts, through their roles in the home, the community and at the national level, have
the potential to bring about change in attitudes, roles, relationships and access to resources and
decision-making which are critical for equality between women and men. In their relationships as
fathers, brothers, husbands and friends, the attitudes and values of men and boys impact directly on the
women and girls around them. Men should therefore be actively involved in developing and
implementing legislation and policies to foster gender equality and in providing role models to promote
gender equality in the family, the workplace and in society at large.

-Kofi Annan- Report of the UN Secretary General,

‘The Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality’

Facts on Women’s Status

 66% of the world illiterate people are women
 Women provide 70% of the unpaid time spent in caring for family members. This unpaid work
provided by women is estimated at US$ 11 trillion per year – one third of the global GDP
 Women own 1% of the land in the world
 Women’s participation in managerial and administrative posts is around 33% in the developed
world, 15% in Africa and 13% in Asia and the Pacific.
 There are only 5 female Chief Executives in the ‘Fortune 500’ corporations, the most valuable
publicly owned companies in the US
 Worldwide, only about 14% of members of parliament are women. 7% of the world’s cabinet
ministers are women
 In the UN System, women hold 9% of the top management jobs and 21% of senior management
positions, but 48% of the junior professional service slots.

-Source: UNIFEM Statistics on Women and Development; UN Statistics Division

Introduction

Despite many new local, national and international laws focusing on development, equality and
human rights, despite many reports of positive change in deed and attitude on the part of governments,
religious and other institutions, it is still necessary, when looking at the key development issues, to look
at these through gendered lens – looking at how development decisions and practices affect both men
and women.
 In addressing gender and development issues, it is usual to look at the relations between
women and men (social, political, economic) focusing on global inequalities, always keeping in mind,
however, that we all play a part in supporting inequality no matter where we live in the world. We look
at issues of power, which can prevent development and which can hinder participation in, and
opportunities for, involvement in one’s own community.

The Gender and Development (GAD) approach to development is aimed at ensuring an equal
distribution of opportunities, resources, and benefits to different population groups served by a
particular intervention. Applying this approach can help project planners to identify important
differences in female and male roles and responsibilities and use this information to plan more effective
policies, programs, and projects.

Gender and Development is an interdisciplinary field 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 emphasize 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.

In short, Gender and Development (GAD) – refers to the development perspective and process
that is participatory and empowering, equitable, sustainable, free from violence, respectful of human
rights, supportive of self-determination and actualization of human potentials. It seeks to achieve
gender equality as a fundamental value that should be reflected in development choices and contends
that women are active agents of development, not just passive recipients of development.

How Gender and Development started?

The history of this field back to the 1950s, when studies of economic development first brought
women into 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,
by 1962, the United Nations General Assembly called for the Commission of 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 consider that development affects men and women differently, the study of
gender’s relation to development has gathered major interest amongst scholars and international policy
makers. The field has undergone major 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 (IMF0 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 gathered 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.

Women in Development (WID)

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 women
and men. The Women in Development (WID) movement gain 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 labor 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 programs, had a
notable influence on the formulation of the WID approach.

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
labor 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 in the agricultural production and economy.

Reeves and Baden point out that the WID approach stresses the need for women to play a
greater role in the development process. According to this perspective, women’s alive involvement in
policymaking will lead to more successful policies overall. Thus, 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 (GAD), AND ULTIMATELY, THE
Gender and Development approach, departing from some of the criticized aspects imputed to the WID.

Women and Development (WAD)

Women and Development (WAD) is a theoretical and practical approach to development. It was
introduced into gender studies scholarship in the second half of the 1970s, following its origins, which
can be traced to the first World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975, organized by the United
Nations. It is a departure from the previously predominant theory. Women in Development (WID) and is
often mistaken for WID, but has many distinct characteristics.

Women and Development (WAD) arose out of a shift in thinking about women’s role in
development, and concerns about the explanatory limitations of modernization theory. While previous
thinking held that development was vehicle to advance women, new ideas suggested that development
was only made possible by the involvement of women, and rather than being simply passive recipients
of development aid, they should be actively involved in development projects. WAD took this thinking a
step further and suggested that women have always been an integral part of development, and did not
suddenly appear in the 1970s as a result of exogenous development efforts. The WAD approach
suggests that there be women-only development projects that were theorized to remove women from
the patriarchal hegemony that would exist if women participated in development alongside men in a
patriarchal culture, though this concept has been heavily debated by theorists in the field. In this sense,
WAD is differentiated from WID by way of the theoretical framework upon which it was built. Rather
than focus specifically on women’s relationship to development, WAD focuses on the relationship
between patriarchy and capitalism. This theory seeks to understand women’s issues from the
perspectives of neo-Marxism and dependency theory, though much of the theorizing about WAD
remains undocumented due to the persistent and pressing nature of development work in which many
WAD theories engage.

The WAD paradigm stresses the relationship between women, and the work that they perform
in their societies as economic agents in both the public and domestic spheres. It also emphasizes the
distinctive nature of the role women play in the maintenance and development of their societies, with
the understanding that purely the integration of women into development efforts would serve to
reinforce the existing structures of inequality present in societies overrun by patriarchal interests. In
general, WAD is thought to offer a more critical conceptualization of women’s position compared to
WID.

The WAD approach emphasizes the distinctive nature of women’s knowledge, work, goals, and
responsibilities, as well as advocating for the recognition of their distinctiveness. This fact, combined
with a recognized tendency for development agencies to be dominated by patriarchal interests, is at the
root of the women-only initiatives introduced by WAD advocates.
Gender and Development
The Gender and Development (GAD) approach focuses on the socially constructed differences
between women and men, the need to challenge existing gender roles and relations, and the creation
and effects of class differences in development. This approach was majorly influenced by the writings of
academic scholars such as Oakley (1972) and Rubin (1975), who argue the social relationship between
women and men have systematically subordinated women, along with economist scholars Lourdes
Beneria and Amartya Sen (1981), who assess the impact of colonialism on development and gender
inequality. They state that colonialism imposed more than a ‘value system’ upon developing nations, it
introduced a system of economics ‘designed to promote capital accumulation which caused class
differentiation’.

GAD departs from WID, which discussed women’s subordination and lack of inclusion in
discussions of international development without examining broader systems of gender relations.
Influenced by this work, by the late 1970s, some practitioners working in the development field
questioned focusing on women in isolation. GAD challenged the WID focus on women as an important
‘target group’ and ‘untapped resources’ for development. GAD marked a shift in thinking about the
need to understand how women and men are socially constructed and how ‘those constructions are
powerfully reinforced by the social activities that both define and are defined by them. GAD focuses
primarily on the gendered division of labor and gender as a relation of power embedded in institutions.
Consequently, two major frameworks, “Gender Roles” and “Social-Relation Analysis”, as used in this
approach. gender roles focus on the social construction of identities within the household; it also reveals
the expectations from ‘maleness and femaleness’ in their relative access to resources. ‘Social relations
analysis’ exposes the social dimensions of hierarchical power relations embedded in social institutions,
as well as its determining influence on ‘the relative position of men and women in society’. This relative
positioning tends to discriminate against women.

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. In the attempt to create gender equality (denoting women
having the same opportunities as men, including ability to participate in the public sphere). GAD policies
aim to redefine traditional gender role expectations. Women are expected to fulfill household
management tasks, home-based production as well as bearing and raising children and caring for family
members. The role of a wife is largely interpreted as ‘the responsibilities of motherhood. Men, however,
are expected to be breadwinners, associated with paid work and market production. In the labor
market, women tend to earn less than men. For instance, ‘a study by the Equality and Human Rights
Commission found massive pay inequities in some international top finance companies, women received
around 80 percent less performance-related pay than their male colleagues. In response to pervasive
gender inequalities, Beijing Platform for Action established gender mainstreaming in 1995 as a strategy
across all policy areas at all levels of governance for achieving gender equality.

Some Benefits from Focusing on Gender in Development

  Positive changes in gender relations and more respectful social attitudes towards women
 More decision-making and political participation by women in the community
 Women’s increased knowledge of their legal rights
 Greater likelihood that girls would stay in school
 Reduced violence against women
 Improved communication and mutual support between men and women on family planning,
HIV and other sexually transmitted infections
 Shifts in attention about shared roles and responsibilities between men and women in
childbearing, labor, and reproductive health issues.
-Source: UNFPA

Conclusion
It must be acknowledged from the outset that this lesson recognizes the importance of
men and women working together to improve their lives and the lives of their families. That
said, however, comparisons will be made between the men and the progression of women to
draw attention to just how successful gender equality and empowerment of women in
particular has been and currently is.