Has the move from WID to GAD approaches significantly altered project and policy tools for the empowerment of women? Discuss.

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Iona Miller         Theory, Policy and Practice of Development – essay 1         December 2002

Has the move from WID to GAD approaches significantly altered project and policy tools for the empowerment of women?  Discuss.

Formal policy approaches aiming to incorporate women into development activities began in the early 1970s.  Over the past 30 years they have evolved on the basis of experience, review, and reformulation of objectives and strategies.  By the 1980s the WID or ‘women-in-development’ approach was accepted and adopted internationally with an aim of “integrating women into global processes of economic, political and social growth and change” (Rathberger, 1990, p489).  Development agencies and recipients of international development assistance adopted WID programs and projects with the hope of delivering development to women.  Unfortunately WID failed to significantly narrow the gender gap.  This led to a rethinking of WID and its approach to women and development.  The ‘gender-and-development’ (GAD) approach emerged in the 1980s as an alternative to WID.   Since gender is a relational concept GAD shifts attention away from ‘women’ towards the whole ensemble of relations that exist between the sexes.   In this essay I shall attempt to elucidate whether this conceptual shift from WID to GAD has significantly altered project and policy tools for the empowerment of women.    

Origins of WID

WID was one of the first critiques of modernization theory which was part and parcel of thinking on international development from the 1950s to the 1970s.  Liberalists believed that modernization would improve the standard of living of peoples in the Third World.  They argued that the benefits of modernization would “trickle down” to all sectors of society following growth in a country’s economy (Rathberger, 1990, p490).  This “trickle down” theory of development was challenged by a group of Washington based female development professionals who first coined the term WID. They propounded that modernization was in fact doing quite the opposite and was causing a deterioration of women’s position within society.

During the Colonial period women were viewed as “backward” and as “inferior beings bound by tradition” (Parpart, 1993, p447).  Liberalist development planners in the post war period adopted these assumptions without looking to reality.  Women were regarded as a block to development, and men as the agents.  Boserup and others have shown that from the beginning of colonialism, “new private property rights, wage labour, technology, credit and education have been handed to men” (Bandarage, 1984, p498).  Men had the better paid, more prestigious jobs in the formal sector of the economy.  Likewise in agriculture, as new technologies were introduced they were channelled towards men rather than women.  Women became subordinate to men, in terms of income, status, and power.  Other feminists like Betty Friedan argued that “the separation of the domestic and public spheres and the confinement of women within the home, are the roots of their economic marginalization and social subordination” (Bandarage, 1984, p497).  Modernization did appear to be widening the gender gap.  WID, within its liberalist framework, aimed to even out the benefits of modernization through integrating women into the formal sectors of the Third World economies.

WID policy approaches : from welfare to efficiency

Before the publication of Ester Boserup’s landmark study (1970) the consideration of women in planning and practice was guided by a model of female domesticity and male responsibility (Goetz, 1991, p).  Policies were therefore welfare orientated which meant that economic intervention for women was limited to activities centred on their function as child bearers, rearers and homemakers.  Boserup was one of the first to highlight women’s importance to the agricultural economy, and hence the role of women as producers.  Boserup, along with other academics, proved that women constituted 60 to 80 per cent of the agricultural workers in Africa and Asia and more than 40 per cent in Latin America (Bandarage, 1884, p497). Women’s contribution to agricultural production is therefore incredibly important in the development process.  As a result of Boserups’s research, WID advocates rejected the view of women as “passive recipients of welfare programmes” and instead championed them as “active contributors to economic development” (Ravazi & Miller, p 4).   Tinker describes women as an “undervalued economic resource” in the development process. Development policy shifted away from welfare and towards economic efficiency.  WID believed that incorporating women into the productive sphere would improve their status relative to men, as well as aiding the development process itself.  

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Criticisms of WID

Development agencies and recipients of international development assistance initially found the gender equity argument threatening.  This is because they didn’t want to risk “tamper(ing) with unknown and unfamiliar social variables” (Buvinic, 1983, p26, in Ravazi & Miller, 1995, p7).  To encourage these agencies to adopt and institutionalise their policies, WID advocators found that they had to link their policy goals to mainstream development concerns.  As Goetz points out “demonstrating the efficiency dividends of investing in women” meant that WID advocates shifted the emphasis away from “women’s needs and interests in development, to calculating what development needs from women”.  The ...

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