Gender & Development

NOA NOA, Islamabad

 Colonialism
• Colonialism refers in general to the extension of the power of a state through the
acquisition, usually by conquest, of other territories; the subjugation of the inhabitants
to a rule imposed by force; and the financial and economic exploitation of the
inhabitants to the advantage of the colonial power
• Characteristic of this form was the maintenance of a sharp and fundamental distinction
(often expressed in law as well as in fact) between the ruling nation and the
subordinate (colonial) populations

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• This led to entrenched forms of racism
• The modern period, that is, since 1492, colonial powers initially included the Dutch,
English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish
• Later, other European states also became involved, such as the Belgians and Germans
• In the 20th century, the United States, too, became a colonial power.
• Although other forms of domination and hegemony have existed in human history, our
concern is to understand impact of European colonization and colonial domination on
women, gender, sex, sexual orientation etc.
 Colonialism – Some Concepts
• The Third World, underdeveloped countries, developing countries, and, more recently, the
Global South or the economic South.
• Although it would be helpful to have one term to designate all of these countries, none of
the above terms is really adequate
• All are based on assumptions that we should be aware of when we use them

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• It is important to note that before European colonial domination, many societies had already
felt the impact of other dominating forces
• For example, in North Africa the spread of the Islamic influence wrought great changes in
the lifestyle of the native people — to the extent that people hardly have any memory of a
pre-Islamic past
• In India, the spread of Hinduism over the continent had a similar, although more varied,
impact
• In some instances, the colonizers entered countries already controlled by well-established,
stratified, patriarchal structures and introduced yet another controlling force into women's
lives
Colonialism & Capitalism And Women
• Colonial power and the capitalist economic system that came with it
have had a huge impact on indigenous / native women’s lives
• In pre-colonial times, indigenous / native men and women often had
different, but valuable roles in their societies
• In European culture, men were seen as superior to women

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• This was not the case in the indigenous world / native societies in
India, Australia, Canada, Americas, Africa etc.
• Colonial policies and practices tried to end / change indigenous
beliefs, customs, language and culture
• These attempts had dramatic and mostly negative effects on
indigenous / native women’s role in society
 Colonialism & Capitalism And Women
• Colonizer imposed rules and requirements about the way / native “Indians”
should live that were based on European thinking and British laws
• These Eurocentric & Androcentric laws dramatically transformed the roles,
rights and privileges of women in India

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• They had a more severe impact on Indian women than men by introducing
patriarchy—the belief that men are better than women and should have
more power
• An example was that men should be in charge of the household
• Patriarchy lessened the traditional, honored and respected roles women had
as leaders
• It treated them as less equal than men and gave them fewer rights
Colonialism & Capitalism And Women – A testimony
• “We’ve gone from sacred, to scared, to scarred.”
• “Before contact (coming of colonial power), women were respected as sacred
beings
• Contact with settlers introduced a new way of life where people were scared by the
changes imposed on them and that they had to adapt to
• Today we are scarred by the legacy of colonialism, the residential schools,

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{gendered books, histories, narratives} the Sixties Scoop
• The Sixties Scoop refers to a practice that occurred in Canada of taking, or "scooping up,"
Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes or
adoption
• Those scars will always be there but they don’t define us
• It’s a scar, it’s not an open wound. We’re in transition. Now we want to learn and
relearn, accept the traditions and ceremonies, feel the beauty of the culture again
• And be ready to welcome people back, be ready to help them connect back with
being sacred again.” –Nina Cordell , Canada
 Colonialism & Capitalism And Women
• Among diverse women in India, colonialism and capitalism delegated a lower
status to all women
• They ignore the important contributions native women make because they:

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• failed to recognize the value of all the unpaid, domestic work women do
• undervalued women’s paid work
• created levels of power based on differences to justify unequal rights
• emphasized racial and other differences among women, which create false divisions
among women
 Colonial and Capitalistic Perspectives of Gender
• Colonial gender history has largely engaged questions of economy and
polity, especially women’s marginalization by the colonial state in
alliance with male native elites
• The colonial ambition of civilizing the barbaric native Indian male
underlay many of the legal reforms attempted in the nearly hundred
years between 1858 and India's independence in 1947

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• Colonial authority was largely premised on an ideology of the civilizing
mission
• After 1858, there were two competing groups vying for political and
legal legitimacy within India: the British colonial authorities and the
native male elite
• Gender reform in colonialism was, and continues to be, motivated by a
desire to strengthen elite, patriarchal, and upper-caste political power
at the expanse of women
Colonial and Capitalistic Perspectives of Gender
• Barbaric Indian male--- A fictitious creation of the colonizers
• Middle-class British feminists invoked images of Indian women as victims
awaiting redress at the hands of imperial saviors
• The Indian Woman,' represented almost invariably as a helpless, degraded

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victim of religious custom and uncivilized cultural practices
• British feminists identified themselves with the cause of Indian women and
the civilizing mission of the empire, deploying nationalist and imperialist
rhetoric
• The essence of the white feminist burden was that votes for women would
enable British women to "relieve Indian women's suffering and 'uplift' their
condition
 Colonial and Capitalistic Perspectives of Gender
• As British feminists acted in paternalistic and protectionist ways, they
sought to impose on Indian women precisely the constraints of Victorian
femininity that they were fighting at home

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• Women should not be sex slaves locked up in harems, nor should they be
child-brides at ten and widows at fourteen expected to throw themselves
on their husbands' funeral pyre
• They should instead be respectable middle-class English wives, dedicated
to their families, running their homes, and guarding their chastity at all
costs
Colonial and Capitalistic Perspectives of Gender
• Part of the legacy of colonialism in the Global South is one of
representation: women became understood monolithically as oppressed
and therefore as the target of development
• As Mohanty argues in Under Western Eyes, a “Third World Woman” has

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been created through colonial ideas:
• “a homogeneous notion of the oppression of women as a group is assumed, which,
in turn, produces the image of an ‘average third world woman.’ This average third
world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read:
sexually constrained) and being ‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated,
tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in
contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated,
modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to
make their own decisions”.
Colonial and Capitalistic Perspectives of Gender
• Central role of colonialism in capitalist development, and how these
two processes have used race, nation and gender to produce specific
class structures

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• Think of colonial theft of natural resources, or the transatlantic slave
trade: these both show the ways in which enrichment of the West
was predicated on the enslavement and expropriation of the rest of
the world
• Colonialism is not peripheral to capitalism but constitutive of it
• Capitalism is what it is today because of these brutal histories
Colonial and Capitalistic Perspectives of Gender
• Colonialism created forms of economic exchange that were very much
based on exploitation, extraction and dependency
• European empires needed colonialism in order to become core capitalist
nations

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• Take Egypt, for instance, where cotton became the basis of the Egyptian
economy under British colonial rule, thereby weakening all other industries
and the ability of Egyptians to grow their own food
• Or Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries that became oil exporters for
global markets
• Or the Congo, where cobalt and other minerals have become the basis of
the economy at the expense of other forms of economic development, and
at the cost of a war that has led to the deaths of many Congolese people
Colonial and Capitalistic Perspectives of Gender
• Work that is exploitative does not automatically liberate women, nor
does it reduce the burden of work women face in the home
• women across the Global South are portrayed and targeted through

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development
• They are often understood monolithically, rather than as divided by
class, race, religion and so on
• They are often understood through a Western framing in which it is
assumed they want the same things Western women want
• Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, the assumption was that
work was good for women, no matter what the work was
Colonial and Capitalistic Perspectives of Gender
• As many postcolonial feminist economists have noted, women in the Global
South often end up doing the worst paid and most precarious and dangerous
jobs in the world
• The reality is that white Western women—particularly those from the middle
classes and the elite—are able to live in ways that are dependent on women

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in the Global South doing this type of work
• This is because the global economy is still made up of countries that exploit
and countries that are exploited—and this is a gendered reality
Gender & Development
• Development (a noun derived from the verb develop) implies
movement from one level to another, usually with some increase in
size, number, or quality of some sort. In the Penguin English
Dictionary, the verb develop means "to unfold, bring out latent

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powers of; expand; strengthen; spread; grow; evolve; become more
mature; show by degrees; explain more fully; elaborate; exploit the
potentialities (of a site) by building, mining, etc." (Penguin 1977).
Gender & Development
• For our purposes, these meanings of development apply to human
societies
• The usage of the word in this context was popularized in the post-

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World War period to describe the process through which countries
and societies outside North America and Europe (many of them
former colonial territories) were to be transformed into modern,
developed nations from what their colonizers saw as backward,
primitive, underdeveloped societies
Modernization Theory
• Stages of development that societies had to pass through to become
"developed," or "modern - 1950s & 1960s
• These concepts sought to encompass all of the countries and areas ignoring the
vast differences among them

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• The history of Western industrialized countries was used as a broad model for the
process through which all societies were to pass
• These development economists coined the following triad:
• Underdeveloped ⇒ Developing ⇒ Developed
• Not much later, a school of mainly sociologists and political scientists emerged
• They were eventually referred to as modernization theorists because they
described this process as one of becoming modem. They, too, developed a triad:
• Traditional⇒ Transitional⇒ Modern
Modernization Theory
• Modernity may be understood as the common behaviourial system
historically associated with the urban, industrial, literate, and participant
societies of Western Europe and North America
• The system is characterized by a rational and scientific world view, growth
and ever-increasing application of science and technology, together with

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continuous adaptation of the institutions of society to the imperatives of
the new world view and the emerging technological ethos (Shyama Charan
Dube, 1988)
• Modernzation equated development (or modernity) with industrialization
• Industrialization and its companion, urbanization (the emergence of towns
and cities), were considered the only ways for backward societies to
become modern, or developed
• Progress and advancement were also seen in this light
Modernization
• The theory of modernization has its roots in the ideas of linear progress
• The linear theory of social change and progress claims that the natural
course of society is to move from simplicity to complexity, from
homogeneity to heterogeneity, and from “tradition” to “modernity,” etc.

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• That the Western European and the North American societies are the
“civilized” and “ideal” ones, towards which all the other should opt for, is
the underlying assumption behind it
 Gender Critique of Modernization Theory
• The way the West sees the Third World tacitly reflects its colonial and presumptive
superiority
• It is the same lens the West employs to look at the women in general and Third World
women in particular
• liberal philosophy whose inherent deficiency has been to highlight the dualist existence of
reality: modern and tradition, public and private, rational and conservative, etc.
• The whole series of gendered dichotomies in which masculine traits are valued and

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feminine ones devalued is what modernization is characterized by
• modernization has never been genderneutral. It is therefore precisely political
• masculine discourse
• Geeta Chowdhry argues that Western feminism reproduced the image of the Third World
women by a distorted image of homogenous identity
• It did so basically in three ways: a) one is through the zenana representation of Third World
women: “typical housewife, always veiled, cloistered within the confines of a masculine
sphere.” b) Secondly, through the representation of them as sex objects: “erotic, unclothed,
native women.” c) Thirdly, through portrayal of them as victim of tradition, and that of
patriarchy
• Each of these three representations displays elements of the modernist discourse: modern
Gender Critique of Modernization Theory
• Modernity also reproduces and glamorizes masculinity
• To take one example, the sector of war has been exclusively a male
sphere

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• Masculinity of soldering and historic exclusion of women form
combat has played a large part in defining “what war means to a
man” rather than to a woman
• As a result, international relations symbolically form a wholly
masculine (rather say, hyper-masculine) sphere of war and diplomacy
Gender Critique of Modernization Theory
• Modernization theory uncritically accepted the notion that progress in the
Third World is identical to a progressive emulation of the social, political and economic
institutions in the Western countries
• This assertion has been proved to be untenable in the context of growing problems and
crises, such as environmental crisis, cultural violence, continental disparities, alienation

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and anxiety, loss of meaning in people’s lives, etc.
• The crux of the problem lies on the assumptions which modernization inherits
• modernization tries to “modernize” (thereby homogenize, all other social systems and
knowledge systems that do not conform the so-called “modernity”
• In the context of women, gender and progress, the empowerment approach is drawn
less from the research of First World women and more from feminist writings and
grassroots organization of Third World women
Gender Critique of Modernization Theory
• Modernization – Modernity, rationality, technological progress and good
governance are achieved in a public realm inhabited by autonomous men –
women are absent
• Dominance over nature and implicitly, over women

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• Men create and transform the social and political environment
• Women are left behind confined to households
• Masculine modernity – women are invisible, treated paternalistically or
used to determine the degree of backwardness of a third word country
• Modernization – Language – traditional women are content with the role &
status assigned to them – guardians of customs and traditions
World System Theory
• World-system theory is a macrosociological perspective that seeks to explain the dynamics of the
“capitalist world economy”
• a world-system is a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of
legitimation, and coherence
• World is divied in core and periphery states

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• Advanced or developed countries are the core, and the less developed are in the periphery
• Among the most important structures of the current world-system is a power hierarchy between
core and periphery, in which powerful and wealthy "core" societies dominate and exploit weak
and poor peripheral societies. Technology is a central factor in the positioning of a region in the
core or the periphery
• These are geographically and culturally different, one focusing on labor-intensive, and the other
on capital-intensive production
• Semi-peripheral states acts as a buffer zone between core and periphery, and has a mix of the
kinds of activities and institutions that exist on them
 Gender Critiques of World System Theory
• “Behind every successful man is a woman” depicts the core- periphery relation
• The development of the core (men) depends on the periphery (women) and the
development of men (core) has caused the underdevelopment of women (periphery)
• gender inequality has received little systematic attention in world-system theory
• The intrusion of the world capitalist economy affects the level of economic growth,
income inequality, and over-urbanization and it influence women's disadvantaged status

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in the labor market
• Development is not a neutral process, but is shaped by the hierarchical and exploitative
structure of capitalist production
• critical need to incorporate the "gender dimension" into the WST
• The distortion of the peripheral economy brought by dependent development affects all
workers
• But women are more affected than men e.g. female labour force participation
• This theory emphasizes the social structure of global inequality. So the inequality that is
present on a global level will inevitably be replicated at a societal level with women being
on the periphery and men or the patriarchal system being at the core.
 Dependency Theory
• former colonies and non-industrialized nations were structurally different from
industrialized countries and, therefore, needed different recipes for
modernization
• colonization restructured former colonies’ economies so that they specialized
in producing raw materials, cash crops, and foodstuff for export at low prices
to the colonizers’ home countries
• These structures created a dynamic that was continuing to impoverish former

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colonies and to thwart their modernization
• Its main tenet is that the periphery of the international economy is being
economically exploited (drained) by the centre
• colonialism recast economies in the Third World in a highly specialized export-
producing mold, creating fundamental and interrelated structural distortions
that have continued to thwart development
• They support a state of dependence of poor nations on wealthy ones by
controlling economics, media, politics, banking, finance, education, culture,
sports and all aspects of human resource development including the
recruitment and training of workers
Gender Critiques of Dependency Theory
• Also, the fact that men who are often in leadership roles have little or
no political will to promote gender equality agenda
• men view women’s ‘development’ as a threat to theirs

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• how men use the patriarchal system to keep women in a state of
dependency towards men. They are purposefully kept out of the
gendered workforce and their cheap labor is exploited by men and
the patriarchal world systems.
 WID, WAD & GAD
• Women In Development (WID) – Integration of women into the process of
Development
• second waves of feminism and the publication of Ester Boserup’s book “Women’s
Role in Economic Development” in 1970 - neglect of women and the value of their
work especially in developing countries
• The WID approach helped to ensure, the integration of women into the workforce

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and increase their level of productivity in order to improve their lives
• Skills and Training – traditional areas – revenue generation - empowerment
• Critique –
• It fails to acknowledge the collective and cultural concerns of women in the
developing world
• It fails to understand the dynamics of the private sphere and focus on the public
sphere
Critique - WID
• Although the WID approach made demands for women’s inclusion in
development, it did not call for changes in the overall social structure
or economic system in which women were to be included

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• As such, WID concentrated narrowly on the inequalities between men
and women and ignored the social, cultural, legal and economic
factors that give rise to those inequalities in society
• WID tended to focus on women almost exclusively and assumed that
women were outside the mainstream of development
 WID, WAD & GAD
• As a result of criticisms of the WID approach, the Women and Development (WAD)
approach arose in the latter part of the 1970s
• Adopting a Marxist feminist approach, the main argument of WAD was that women
had always been part of the development processes. WAD asserts that women have
always been important economic actors
• The main focus of WAD is on the interaction between women and development

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processes rather than purely on strategies to integrate women into development
• WAD saw global inequalities as the main problem facing poor countries and,
therefore, the citizens of those countries
• Women And Development (WAD)– Women to lead the process of Development
• Roots in socialist / Marxist feminism – 1970s
• relationship between women and the process of capitalist development
• Unfair international economic – capitalism –
Critique - WAD
• the WAD perspective suffers from a tendency to view women as a
class, and pay little attention to the differences among women
• It also presumes that the position of women around the world will

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improve when international conditions become more equitable
• WAD fails to fully consider the relationships between patriarchy,
modes of production, and the marginalization of women
• It underplays the role of patriarchy in undermining women’s
development and does not adequately address the question of social
relations between men and women and their impact on development
 WID, WAD & GAD
• Gender And Development – Power relation b/w women & men
• originated in the 1980s
• In the 1980s further reflections on the development experiences of women gave rise to GAD
• GAD represented a coming together of many feminist ideas. It sought to bring together both the
lessons learned from, and the limitations of, the WID and WAD approaches
• GAD is not concerned with women exclusively but with the way in which gender relations allot

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specific roles, responsibilities and expectations between men and women, often to the detriment of
women
• Development, therefore, is about deep and important changes to relations dealing with gender
inequality within society. This approach also pays particular attention to the oppression of women
in the family or the ‘private sphere’ of women’s live
• GAD focuses on the social or gender relations (i.e. the division of labour) between men and women
in society and seeks to address issues of access and control over resources and power
• the unequal relationship between the sexes hinders development and female participation
• To change the structure of power & bring balance
• Decision making – development – distribution of resources
• Benefits of development -
 Globalization and Gender
• some view globalization as a recent phenomenon, others see it as having a historic
trajectory
• three historical waves of globalization: European colonialism, the imposition of
western development, and the current era of free trade
• globalization can mean ‘internationalization’, implying cross-border relationships
between countries to facilitate international exchange and interdependence
• ‘westernization’ or ‘modernization’ implying spread of modernity (capitalism,

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rationalism, industrialism, bureaucratize) over the world, where pre-existent
cultures are destroyed
• globalization involves intensification of world-wide social relations that link distant
localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events happening many
kilometres away
• The fundamental premise of globalization is that an increasing degree of integration
among societies plays a crucial role in social and economic changes
• Thus, through the process of globalization, wealth is spread to all parts of the world
by creating productive employment, increasing productivity and higher incomes for
all, especially the world poor
 Globalization and Gender Critique
• The benefits of globalization over the years have been subject to debate and consistent controversy
• While some argue that globalization contributes to reducing poverty in the developing countries, others maintain that it is
rather perpetuating higher degrees of international inequality
• Globalization is worsening living standards of people in the developing countries, especially in rural communities
• Globalization has led to a decline in the power of national governments to directly influence their economies
• Developing countries as a ripe field to harvest profits, but also a reservoir of labour force whereby women are actively
recruited

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• Promoting TNCs can create jobs for men and women, however, women who find jobs in such corporations are underpaid
• Women are viewed to be more reliable than men in routine assembly work. It is not surprising that patriarchal settings like
Asia, Central America and the Middle Eastern regions compete for foreign trade and encourage women to enter the
workforce
• For example, about 85% of workforce of the Maquiladoras, trans-national export processing corporation in Mexico, are
young women because women are said to be docile, work long hours and get paid below minimum wages and their wages
are lower than men’s
• Increased workload for women could prevent them from participating in the decisions-making processes that affect their
own development
• Globalization in the name of efficiency requiring nations to implement macro-economic policies such as privatization,
unregulated markets, reduction in public expenditure and increasing exports and growth rates has caused problems for
women
Gender Critique of SAPs
• The IMF and the World Bank were established in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New
Hampshire, in the United States
• At this meeting, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States set up a
system to facilitate the reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II

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• The main purpose of the new organizations was to provide a basis for monetary
and currency stability for increased trade and expansion of these economies
• This was to be accomplished by providing financial support during periods of
balance-of-payments difficulties, that is, when imports exceeded exports
• The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was later added, and, according to
Dennis Pantin, each of these institutions would play a complementary role in the
management of a world economy that did not restrict the movement of goods,
services, and money
Gender Critique of SAPs
• Since the emergence of the new nation-states in Africa, Asia, the
Caribbean, and the Pacific in the 1950s and 1960s, the Bretton Woods
Agreement has widened in scope
• As a result of the current trend in monetarist, or neoliberal,

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economics, the role of this agreement has expanded
• The IMF provides short-term stabilization assistance to countries with
balance-of-payments difficulties, on condition that they implement
certain fiscal and monetary policies
• The World Bank, on the other hand, is more concerned with long-
term adjustment through restructuring of host economies along fixed
lines
 Gender Critique of SAPs – Conditionalities
• Stabilization or reduction of budget or balance-of-payments deficits,
reduction of budget deficits or freezes in public-sector employment, cut-
backs in public-sector investment, removal of public-sector subsidies
(usually away from the agriculture and social sector to the private
commercial sector), and tax reform
• Promotion of the private sector through contracting of public services, sale

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of state enterprises, and deregulation
• Market liberalization and price reforms, in which the local market is opened
to greater foreign and domestic competition; exchange-rate liberalization,
usually devaluations or floatation of local currency to encourage exports;
and removal of price controls and supports to local industry
• Rationalization of public-sector institutions, including civil-service (public-
sector) reform, privatization of state enterprises, and reform of the social
sector to make it cost-effective
 Gender Critique of SAPs
• In the Third World, these programs have been severely criticized
• They are not tailored to the particular needs of individual economies –
one fit all solution
• They contribute to major declines in standards of living, including

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nutritional levels, educational standards, employment rates, and access
to social-support systems
• They shift more of the responsibility for health care, education, and care
of the sick and elderly to women already burdened by unpaid work
• They increase social ills, such as violent crime, drug abuse, and violence
against women
• They result in increased levels of migration (legal and illegal) from the
South to the North