FROM WID TO GAD
WID, WAD, GAD & other animals.
The debate on gender inequalities in so-called ‘developing’ countries - & one might indeed ask which countries are not ‘developing’ in some direction – has largely been pursued independent of the discussion on gender inequalities in the West.
This is probably a consequence of the fact that this debate is driven by donors and supported by Western academics who often assume that problems found in the ‘Third World’ are different in kind as well as in degree from those experienced in the so-called developed world.
Not surprisingly gender inequalities though they may differ in degree from country to country and within countries are the same in essence the world over.
They concern relative access to society’s material and non-material benefits…education, health care, justice, voting, driving licenses, inheritance, nationality…. and critically who takes care of the children (& the aged and the sick). This key activity of social reproduction has traditionally been allocated according to biological inheritance with women taking the lion’s share of usually unpaid & therefore statistically unrecognized work in the private and domestic sphere whilst men dominate the public stage.
In fact the core of the debate on women’s empowerment can be seen to relate to precisely this question…how far are women & men able to innovate beyond their biological destiny. Women everywhere are now encouraged and enabled to claim more public space but has the balance of power in the domestic and private sphere changed significantly or indeed at all to balance their larger role on the public stage?
Being a gender expert can be a thankless task. Most men do not want to hear that they have more than their fair share of society’s goodies, and that that must change immediately. And many women think that everything is just about right and/or that rocking the gender boat can only make things worse. In this situation it is probably not surprising that Western experts in order to justify their existence have often overstated the case for the ‘plasticity’ of gender. The following sentence crops up repeatedly in slightly different forms: ‘Clearly, the roles of men and women in different places show great variation: most clerks in Martinique are women but this is not so in Madras, just as women make up the vast majority of domestic servants in Lima but not in Lagos etc etc’.
Whilst there obviously are differences in gendered division of labour…. a male midwife here and woman priest there…. the unimaginative similarity across cultures is actually more striking than the diversity of gender models. This is not an argument for biological determination but for better and more courageous analysis and advocacy. It would be hard to argue that Saudi women are biologically unable to drive cars; or that women can be regarded as equal citizens in the constitution but unable to pass that citizenship to their children. The list goes on.
As title of this page indicates there have been different approaches to freeing women from their chains as part of the wider development process.
The approach known as WID - Women in Development - is usually traced back to the 70’s and in particular to the 1975 UN International Year for Women and the International Women’s Decade. WID policies and programmes aimed to integrate women into economic development (this was pre-social) by focusing on income-generating projects for women often in areas of their ‘traditional’ capacity such as sewing and simple crafts.
WAD or Women in Development has roughly the same birth date but was driven by Southern women who saw the fight against poverty and colonialism as being more important than striving for equality.
The Gender and Development (GAD) group focus on the social construction of gender differences and seeks to change the situation by ‘mainstreaming’ women’s as well as men’s concerns into the development process in recognition of their complementarity.
In practice relatively little attention has been paid to modifying men’s roles.
However it is true to say that debate on gender issues in development has in most countries and in the majority of development agencies achieved respectability and indeed entered the mainstream
The UNDP/Human Development Index (HDI) established in 1990 ranks countries according to three dimensions; life expectancy, education as measured by adult literacy, and primary, secondary and tertiary enrolment rates, and standard of living as measured by income and purchasing power parity. The Gender Development Index (GDI) reflects the inequalities between women and men in different countries along the same dimensions as the HDI. This means that a country’s achievements towards gender equality as reflected on the GDI may be higher or lower than its overall development status.
The UN Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) tracks representation of women and men in parliament, the numbers of female legislators, senior officials and managers; the numbers of professional and technical workers, and gender disparities in earned income.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation in Development (OECD) (www.oecd.org) has just launched a new composite measure of gender discrimination - the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) based as its name suggests on social institutions. It measures gender inequality in five areas: Family Code, Physical Integrity, Son Preference, Civil Liberties and Ownership Rights in 102 non-OECD countries recognizing (not before time) that in many countries, tradition and culture pose obstacles to women’s economic development, so that understanding their impact is a key to effective development policies.
‘The SIGI shows the important influence of social institutions on the economic role of women. The more discriminatory social institutions are, the lower the rate of female participation in the labour force, for example. Women’s access to paid jobs is crucial not only for their personal well-being but also for economic development’.
Perhaps the launch of SIGI is most noteworthy for marking the acknowledgement by economists of the influence of ‘social’ factors on ‘economic’ behaviour and we should all be grateful for that.
Whilst these Indices are useful for global comparisons and do indeed seem to be read by governments who often object to their placement on the rankings, the real progress is taking place from practical responses to common sense analysis by women and men of the facts on the ground… which do not need any particular WID/WAD/GED/GAD label.