Gender and Development

The pre-World War II period saw flourishing movements of various forms of feminism; however, the nexus between (economic) development and women was not clearly articulated until the second half of the 20th century. Women first came into focus in development as objects of welfare policies, including those focused on birth control, nutrition, and pregnancy. "In 1962 the UN General Assembly asked the Commission on the Status of Women to prepare a report on the role of women in development. Ester Boserup's path breaking study on Women's Role in Economic Development was published in 1970. These events marked monumental moments in developing the liberal paradigm of women in development, and the welfarist approach still remains dominant in development practice today. This article reviews the dominant liberal approaches, including women in development (WID), women and development (WAD), gender and development (GAD) and neoliberal frameworks (Singh, 2007). There is significant overlap among these approaches (for example, WID can be seen as an early version of the neoliberal framework).

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.

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