Why study women, address their issues separately?

Women are poorer than men, some of this is likely result of gender-biased development.

Gender bias—how is it manifested?

• ‘Gendered institutions’
• Everyday social life: division of labor along gender lines, and household-level differences–in other words, households may be poor, but that doesn’t mean everyone in the household is equally poor (so projects or statistics focusing on the household may have a gender bias).
• Attitudes and stereotypes (patriarchal culture …)
• Research, statistics (‘statistical invisibility’)
• Policy (gendered institutions)
• History (colonial and post-colonial)

Types of poverty

• Time poverty
• Human poverty
• Income poverty
• Poverty as historical process–the ‘feminization’ of poverty (Chant’s chapter)
  • poverty reduction vs gender equity (can you have the former without the latter?)
  • capacity to contribute to household economy–what are the trends, and do they vary by gender?
  • remember–women are not some monolithic group
• Poverty as a household or individual process (not who is poor, but how do people or households become poor?)
  • Sickness, death, divorce, calamity)
  • Life course differences (dependency, generational changes)
  • Household poverty as insufficient measure
  • Women’s poverty is increasing over time

Gender-biased development: some driving forces

• Patriarchal culture, system of privilege
• Human capital deficit (education, job skills)
• Differential access to production factors (land, labor, capital)
• Differential access to institutions (‘gendered’ institutions)
• Time poverty–limits opportunities to participate
• Health care (a woman’s most productive years are often her most fertile years … )
• Access to technology (widening ‘technology gap’)

The professional response to gender bias, feminization of poverty:     Social and political movements

WID (Women in development)

• Scholars, advocates, practitioners (sounds neater than it is . . .)
• Addressed economic efficiency arguments
• Welfare of women-recipients of assistance
• Didn’t challenge structures, status quo-addressed symptoms, economic concepts of development
• Microenterprise, income generation
• Marginalized women?

GAD (gender and development)

• Response to perceived shortcomings of WID
• Gender relations is the key, structural issues key barriers
• More complex understanding of issues
• Women as participants, not merely recipients
• Equity, justice (think of various levels, ‘spheres’)
• Political organization, ‘mainstreaming’ of development

Difficult to implement? Why?

What do women do to address these gender biases that limit (at a minimum) their economic potential?

• Social capital–they often organize around scarce resources (rotating labor associations, savings clubs, etc.)–they work together much more effectively than men, largely because they have had to compensate for a lack of productive resources by organizing labor and capital differently.
• Social movements–often resource-based (e.g., the Chipko Movement)

What does ‘development’ do to address this?

• Grassroots participation (even data collection … )
• More robust information  on which to base policy
  • Mohanty and the ‘third world women’ as monolithic group with identical interests, in contrast to ‘Western women’
    • Class, race, ethnicity, history, geography, all lead to different circumstances and a need to avoid generalizing, or treating ‘women’ as generic victims.
    • This can lead to ethnocentric generalizations about what’s ‘best’ for women (those Western ideals about autonomy, education, etc.).
• Appropriate technology (scale, benefit, use, sustainability, dependence all issues)
• Address reproductive burdens on women (health-related)
• Address women’s poor access to ‘natural’ (the land, resources), human (their skill sets), institutional (access to government, education, microfinance, etc.) capital