Gender and Development: WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT (WID)

Key Concepts in Gender and Development

• The term "Women in Development" (WID) emerged in the early 1970s, highlighting the need to integrate women into global processes of economic, political, and social growth.
• Ester Boserup's work (1970) systematically demonstrated the sexual division of labor in agrarian economies, leading to the development of WID.

Women in Development (WID)

• Focuses on integrating women into global processes of economic, political, and social growth.
• Aims to improve women's access to resources and their participation in development.
• Emphasizes income-generating projects for women as a means of integration.
• Criticized for concentrating narrowly on inequalities between men and women, ignoring social, cultural, legal, and economic factors.

Women and Development (WAD)

• Emerged in the second half of the 1970s, focusing on the relationship between women and the development process.
• Sees women's positions as primarily within the structure of international and class inequalities.
• Criticized for not adequately addressing social relations between men and women and their impact on development.

Gender and Development (GAD)

• Emerged in the 1980s as an alternative to WID, with roots in socialist feminism.
• Looks at the impact of development on both women and men.
• Seeks to ensure equal participation and benefit for both women and men.
• Emphasizes equality of benefit and control, and seeks deep and important changes to relations dealing with gender inequality.
• Focuses on social or gender relations (i.e., the division of labor) between men and women in society.

Development

• Defined as a process that creates growth, progress, positive change, or the addition of physical, economic, environmental, social, and demographic components.
• Aims to raise the level and quality of life of the population, and create or expand local regional income and employment opportunities, without damaging the environment.

Development Projects

• Aim to improve people's lives through skills training and other livelihood programs.
• Moving away from traditional projects that rely on delivering direct services.
• Different approaches include WID, WAD, and GAD.

Test your knowledge on key concepts related to Women in Development (WID) from Chapter 1.1 of REVIEWER IN GADGRC. Explore the origin, significance, and evolution of WID in the context of global development processes.