D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 3, May/June 2000, p. 13-16)

At the beginning of the 1970s Ester Boserup pointed out that development theory had so far underestimated the role of women in production. That launched a debate on the topic, and development policy also picked up on it. The first International Women’s Conference took place in 1975, declaring the next 10 years the International Decade of Women. In the mid-1980s the «empowerment approach» came to the fore, and was integrated in some of the «gender approaches» in the 1990s. Marianne Braig relates the history of the subject of women and gender in development theory and policy.

Whoever deals with issues of women or gender in development theory and practice comes across a remarkable phenomenon. On the one hand, for some time now there has been fresh thinking about development theories. This includes a search for new approaches which in the main do not refer to theoretical discussions of women and gender research. On the other hand, development policy is regarded as one of the few policy fields in international relations in which women or gender issues have become pertinent to theory and policy. So is it merely a matter of yet another fashionable topic which for a while everyone talks about but which can confidently be expected to fade into insignificance? Or is the debate on issues of gender difference in the context of development processes and international relations a gain in knowledge for working out new approaches in development theories and policies?

From the new women’s movement to
transnational actors

Problems specific to women were no subject for discussion when the Pearson Report was published in 1969, at the end of the first development decade, and took a critical look at the development strategies of the day. But in its context there was a favorable environment for reception of the book by Ester Boserup «Women’s Role in Economic Development» which appeared a year later. In the light of the Pearson Report’s sobering balance, as well as due to their own experiences, many development experts were compelled to question the optimistic view then prevailing that economic growth meant automatic development. Endogenous obstacles to development, such as inequality in distribution of land and income, patronage and corruption, to mention only a few, were well known. But they were still scarcely seen in connection with patriarchal gender relations. Boserup’s global overview of the disadvantaging of women, which often was reinforced or created by development projects, made a difference. Together with the debate on population growth, which increasingly was being seen as a threat, her book strengthened a readiness to rethink developmental practice in terms of women. In particular, the fading out or overlooking of the productive role of women appeared to be a key to understanding the failure of development processes. After all, the classic modernisation theory, with its dichotomising of private and public, or modern and traditional, construed the public sector dominated by men (Scott 1995).

The modernisation and dependence theories, and equally development policy, sought to measure the success of their efforts by the extent to which they had achieved the emergence of a modern industrial society, had established a family-based social security system in line with their respective models, and thus had overcome poverty and ignorance. Both theory and policy were now faced with the failure of these goals. Often, that was caused by the blindness towards the prevailing gender-specific division of labour, towards family structures other than those of nuclear family relations, and the existence of diverse exchange processes in which most social goods and services are produced along specific gender lines. These are not oriented on systems based on income and monetary redistribution, but on access to land, assets, descendants, and village and neighbourhood solidarity or hierarchy and group loyalty. They are tied into reciprocal relations which regulate mutual obligations and entitlements - mostly restrictively gender-specific.

Besides practical mistakes (such as allocating funds via agricultural development projects to men who had nothing to do with farming as in many African societies), which resulted in a change in gender relationships to the disadvantage of women, the economic success of some threshold countries was also a reason to rethink the connection between gender and development. This was expressed in a debate on paid women’s work in the export-oriented industries of Southeast Asia and Latin America, or the increase in female qualified employment as a result of the growth of services. That showed that women were not only losers in development and modernisation processes, but could - as Boserup emphasised - definitely benefit from changes, such as in the education and public health sectors. That was especially recognisable in the 1990s, when these successes for women were lost due to neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes (UNDP 1995). Without the integration of women and girls in modernisation processes in general and in education and training in particular, which could be seen worldwide up to the 1980s, the emergence of diverse new social actors could hardly be explained.

Resurgence of feminism

The growing realisation of the importance of the role of women in development and the inability of development policy to do justice to it coincided at the beginning of the 1970s with the re-emergence of women’s movements and a much more articulate feminism in western Europe and the USA. That opened up new perspectives. Besides the old demand for equal rights, including in education, legal matters and suffrage, which the first women’s movements formulated in about 1900, they now focussed on the deep-seated psychological, social, sexual and cultural roots of discrimination.

These issues were also debated by urban middle and upper class women’s groups in other parts of the world. What is striking about developing societies, however, is that social or political problems were often the reason for the emergence of groups, which were then sustained mainly by women and characterised by their living conditions. The problems included access to land and housing, water supply and waste water disposal. In Latin America, they were struggles against dictatorships and in defence of human rights. In the 1970s, these women’s groups, movements or merely initiatives with varying social, ethnic and cultural characteristics attracted growing support for their conflicts and confrontations.

The UN’s Year of Women in 1975 and the subsequent Decade of Women (1976-1985) can be seen as fundamental for the newly articulate transnational women’s movements. More and more governments felt obliged to recognise these movements in one way or another. Inclusion of the women’s movements under the protective umbrella of the UN was especially important. As a loose coalition of women academics and professionals which tended to work on the sidelines of national and international institutions, but also included women’s groups in trade unions, farmers’ organisations and urban districts, in the UN context the transnational movements had opportunities to influence international relations and interstate regulations. That is clear above all in the dual structure of the international women’s conferences and later also at other international conferences, which featured free fora as well as the meetings of government delegations.

Despite the then East-West political conflict lines, which in particular marked the first two international women’s conferences, the representatives of the transnational movements were able to gain influence on international development agencies. The agencies supported the movements’ pragmatic concepts, reflected especially in the Women in Development (WID) approaches, which resulted in an institutionalisation of policy on women.

The USAID set up a WID office as early as 1973, and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) was founded in 1976 under the auspices of the UN. The Ford and Rockefeller foundations, both active in the international relations, built up women’s programmes from the end of the 1970s. In 1977, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation (BMZ) developed its first cross-sectoral concept for the promotion of women, although initially it remained a piece of paper and only very much later had impacts at the implementation level.

Transnational involvement
of women and gender research

The influence of feminist research on development strategies is made most clear by the differentiation of women’s interests and gender interests developed by Maxine Molyneux in the context of her analysis of the policy on women of the Sandinista government in. She says gender interests are interests based on the gender relationship, which were developed by both women and men on the basis of their social positioning due to the gender-specific status ascribed to them. Molyneux adds that they can be sub-divided into practical gender interests and strategic gender interests. Practical gender interests are determined inductively, are a direct reaction to problems and interests which are perceived as being immediate, and based on social conventions such as the gender-specific division of labour and the roles it allocates to women. By contrast, strategic gender interests are developed deductively from an analysis of the suppression of women and aim at overcoming the “gender hierarchy” as Claudia von Braunmühl mentioned in 1997. Molyneux says both types of interests arise because of hierarchical gender relationships. Satisfying the former, such as providing better public health services for women, improve their living conditions but do not question gender inequality. In contrast, the latter aim at changing the power relationships between the sexes, such as women’s right of self-determination over their bodies.

In the developmental debate, it is especially Caroline Moser’s differentiation of practical and strategic gender needs (which picks up on Molyneux) and her pointing out of the triple role or burden of women due to their productive, reproductive and community-related activities (Moser, Peake 1987) that have been integrated in some development planning process. Moser herself differentiates clearly between gender planning, which focuses on the power relationships, and gender-conscious planning, which primarily takes account of women’s problems and leaves the existing planning methods relatively untouched. Against the background of her theoretical and conceptual reflections, Moser differentiates various approaches to promoting women, or developing Women in Development to Gender and Development.

From the institutionalising of
the issue of women ...

Women were affected by development processes long before national and international development agencies established approaches to the promotion of women in order to integrate them in development. It was not only the social and welfare state modernisation approach, which dominated up to the 1970s, that addressed women as mothers. The socio-political practices of colonial administrations or populist politicians of post-colonial governments did the same in earlier times. As such, the women were a clearly identifiable target group for assistance measures for mothers and children. At the same time, it should be emphasised that women in almost all countries were able to use the opportunities for education offered them by the modernisation processes of the 1960s and 1970s, mostly without being promoted directly as a target group. However, the gradual adjustment of educational performances show the limits of liberal ideas of male and female equality. The different worlds of work and ways of life remain structured by gender relations or use existing gender differences to legitimise social inequalities.

The ILO’s policy for protection of women workers existed long before the promotion of women was institutionalised. Where it focuses on special protection for women as possible mothers (a ban on night and shift work, legal protection for expectant mothers, etc.) it is proof of the ambivalence or - as Molyneux would put it - the limits of practical gender interests. Where there is pressure for equality in education, training and pay, it also makes clear the limits of formal equality. This also characterises the equity approach, which in the 1970s, and particularly in the context of the first international women’s conference in Mexico in 1975, resulted in a long overdue revision of women specific discrimination within the framework of modern law. In line with liberal tradition, this approach sees women as female citizens whose equal access to formal law and the exclusion of formal discrimination is guaranteed.

The beginning of the 1970s was marked by several milestones on the way to a better deal for women. The then World Bank president Robert McNamara found that development policy had failed. The ILO identified the working poor in the so-called informal sector. Ester Boserup spotlighted the diverse economic activities of women, and there was a demand for a better statistical base for information on their situation. This was flanked by a growing demand that women’s productive role should be made visible and strengthened. Also, in the wake of the strategy of satisfying basic needs, combating female poverty was seen as an anti-poverty approach, thus not as a problem of the inequality of the sexes but as one of underdevelopment. However, in making women’s productive role visible, their reproductive and community roles fell by the wayside. Frequently, promotion measures mean a greater workload for working women, particularly if the decisive problems of saving work or even redistribution of work can scarcely be tackled.

While developmental approaches in the 1970s were still linked with the demand for redistribution of the fruits of growth, the efficiency approach that has dominated since the 1980s abandons this demand and its connection with social rights. The approach incorporated in the neo-liberal economic policy strategies is also no longer about overcoming the unequal treatment of women in women’s interests, but about the more efficient and more effective designing of development by means of their economic input. In the context of debt crises and structural adjustment programmes, the emphasis is on cutting social costs, especially by skillful balancing out of various work sectors so that women’s work is better exploited.

... to mainstreaming gender

In contrast to the classic WID approaches, which came into being either directly in the international agencies or indirectly by borrowing from Western models, the empowerment approach emerged from the women’s movements and groups of the South. It expressed itself at the end of the Decade of Women in 1985 in the founding of international women’s networks, particularly that of DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women in a New Era).

The approach arose out of criticism of current development approaches and Western feminism. Both were accused mainly of “homogenising” the women of the South, thus creating a “Third World Woman”, and of the victimising and functionalising of them that went with it. But at the same time the new approach also recalled - without falling back explicitly on dependence theories - the causes of repression of women, which were rooted not only in patriarchy but also in colonial and neo-colonial dependencies. The theoretical reflections on the relationship between development and power and the criticism of popular conceptions, such as that development benefited everyone, or that women wanted to be integrated in the mainstream of Western-oriented development, found little response in the institutions, although they readily adopted the terminology. Empowerment was not solely an element of a post-modern and post-colonial feminism, but was taken up in various discussions on development as a means of bolstering self-confidence.

The approaches of the 1990s, labelled “mainstreaming gender”, can be summarised as taking the differences between the sexes into account in general. They contrasted with individual projects and components for women at the project level, seeking their playing field more at the macro or intermediate level. In reaction to the gender-specific impacts of “structural adjustment” on job markets and on the production and distribution of social goods and services, feminist economists in particular demanded consideration of gender in macroeconomy. Under the heading “gender and macroeconomic development”, macroeconomic processes were being examined for gender-specific mechanisms of exclusion in order to achieve on the one hand a better understanding of economic processes, and on the other hand greater efficiency of economic policy. Overcoming male bias in the various economic theories was to be achieved by both gender-specific disaggregation and examining the correlation between market-oriented and non-market-oriented production of goods and services in the context of the prevailing gender system.

The legitimisation of the macro-political approach “democracy and gender” was based on the democratisation processes in various development regions and the significance of their varying women’s groups. Initial institutional approaches, however, were linked closely with recalling state inputs and regulations, as in the debate triggered by the World Bank’s World Development Report for 1997 under the motto “Bringing the state back in”, which also related it to approachesbased on good governance. The starting point was that transformation processes not only change the economic status of women, but also their formal participation in national parliaments and town halls. The regulations and institutions which come into being with democratisation and decentralisation often do not do justice to the diverse forms of the involvement of women as civil society actors.

Perspectives of gender interests
in international relations

Besides development policy, other policy fields established themselves for political intervention by women in international relations and the constituting of international regimes. The widening of the horizon is expressed clearly in the inclusion of the international women’s debate in the discussion on human rights, which at the beginning of the 1990s marked the run-up to the UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993. This had far-reaching consequences for the perception and criticism of discrimination against women, and thus changed both the self-image of women and the awareness of the injustices they suffered at the hands of others. “They now came on as champions of a claim to general rights, as individuals under law, no longer primarily petitioners and the needy,” as German author Christa Wichterich put it in 1998. That spotlighted the unjust treatment of women and at the same time enabled them to be seen as political and legal individuals that were seeking to overcome their role as victims. After a long time in which the issue of women was seen in the international context as a problem of development rather than of human rights, this meant for social human rights a change from a developmental approach based on satisfying basic needs to one oriented on basic rights. This meant a clear articulation of gender interests, like that formulated by the first international women’s movement.

The political intervention by women in the 1990s took place in a changing political and theoretical context of international relations in which not only development, but also the classic concepts of state, power, sovereignty and interdependence were discussed anew. This opened up new opportunities for taking on board feminist theories that analyse the division of the public and private sector in various contexts (Grant, Newland, 1991). This was linked to diverse empirical knowledge which first of all had to be developed in order to illustrate the marginalising of women, and also make clear their ability to form intricate networks. Empiricism focused on women was largely overcome and linked with an inductive forming of theory. Building on that, a critical analysis of classic theoretical approaches questioned both the diverse interdependencies and institutional changes in terms of their characterisation by the gender system and their gender-specific impacts, and thus intervened in the fresh debates on development and international relations.

Ester Boserup (1970): Women’s Role in Economic Development. New York
Rebecca Grant, Kathleen Newland (1991): Gender in International Relations. Bloomingtonn (In.) GTZ (1997): Gender and Macro-Policy. Gender in Macro-Economic and Legal Policy Advice in Technical Cooperation. Social Policy Working Paper. Eschborn
Maxine Molyneux (1985): Mobilization without Emancipation? Women’s Interests, the State, and Revolution in Nicaragua, in:Feminist Studies 11 (2), pp.227-254
Caroline Moser (1993): Gender Planning and Development. Theory, Practice and Training, London
Caroline Moser, Linda Peak (eds., 1987): Women, Human Settlements and Housing, London
Kathleen Newland (1991): From Transnational Relationships to International Relations. Women in Development and the International Decade of Women, in: Rebecca Grant, Kathleen Newland (eds.), pp. 122-132
Catherine V. Scott (1995): Gender and Development. Rethinking Modernization and Dependency Theory, London
Gita Sen, Caren Grown (1987): Development, Crisis, and Alternative Visions. Third World Women’s Perspectives, New York
UNDP (1995): Human Development Report