gender issues and the challenges of development in the 21st century

8/10/2019 Gender Issues and the Challenges of Development in the 21st Century

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Gender Issues and the

Challenges of Development

in the 21stCentury


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Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 3

A Historical Perspective: The Evolution of Women in Development to Gender and

Development ............................................................................................................................. 5

Effects of Globalization: Challenges of the 21stCentury .......................................................... 6

Sector-wise analysis ................................................................................................................... 7

Manufacturing sector ............................................................................................................. 7

Service sector ......................................................................................................................... 8

Agriculture Sector .................................................................................................................. 8

The concept of social technology .............................................................................................. 9

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 11


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Introduction

Modernization theory has historically been used to explain the development of the third-

world nation. This theory contends that industrialization leads to economic development. As

a result of the economic development, a state of political stability is created in the country.Political stability benefits all classes of the population. Modernization theory presumes that,

urbanization- often accompanied by increased industrialization, literacy, and exposure to the

mass media-would offer women greater occupational and educational opportunities, thereby

enhancing their status." Arguments that economic development does indeed help women in

developing nations show that though short-term results of industrialization are unfavourable

to progress of women, in the long run as wealth flows through all segments of society,

everyone benefits from the change.

The year 1970 marked a shift in perspectives on development studies- Earlier, it was

automatically assumed that men and women benefit from development in the same way.

There existed no gender perspectives in studies of economic development. However, post-

1970s marked an era where realization dawned on development economists and theorists that

economic development did not affect different sections of people in a similar manner. The

development of the economy did not eradicate poverty and the fruits of development did not

reach certain categories of people, especially women. The 1970s saw a change in

development theory that sought to include women into prevailing development paradigms.

The issue was not perceived by theorists to be an academic one, but rather a practical one;

simply integrating the women in the system would facilitate their upward mobility in the

society and get them freedom from their subordination.

Ester Boserups analysis of development in, Womens Role in Economic Development,

was a defining moment in the study of gendered development. Boserup criticized the focus

on modernization and economic development that had led discussions in the development

theory. According to Boserup, the benefits gained by a country in the process of economic

development did not reach women. Repressive social orders and the absence of women from

the formal economy are two factors that thwart economic growth in developing nations from

reaching women. Studies in the 1970s conclusively proved that the trickle-down effect to

ensure that the benefits of economic development reached different categories of people

could not be relied on. The various cusps in the form of social hierarchies and the like

prevented the fruits of development from reaching women. As an example, women produce


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60-80% of food in developing nations. Since agrarian production occurs in rural areas, and

industrialization focuses on urban areas, women benefit little.

Current gendered development theory concentrates not only on the economic restrictions

women have to face, but the social constraints as well. This approach takes a rounded

approach to the development of women and identifies the full gamut of repressive structures

that are responsible for the subordination of women:

It favours the elimination of legal, customary, and labour market constraints on womens

mobility and economic participation while realizing that these constraints are rooted in long-

standing gender ideologies and asymmetrical gender relations.

This approach recognizes that not only the public sphere but also the private sphere is

responsible for the condition of women: both the spheres are sources of oppression of

women.

The plans for execution of this most recent theory on gendered development can be seen in

the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG). These goals were created at the

UN Summit in 2000 with the intention of achieving all eight MDGs by 2015. The following

are the 8 MDGs purported to be achieved by 2015-

1. End Poverty and Hunger

2. Universal Primary Education

3. Gender Equality

4. Child Health

5. Maternal Health

6. Combat HIV/AIDS

7. Environmental Sustainability

8. Global Partnership

It is clear from the above objectives of the United Nations that development of women is

primary focus of policies of the UN. The MDGs do not directly talk about economic

development. However, improvement in the conditions of women across the world in the

form of better maternal health, universal primary education and promotion of gender equality

is essential to economic development. The MDGs give authority to the claim that for the


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development of the Third World, not just economic problems but also social problems ought

to be addressed.

A Historical Perspective: The Evolution of Women in Development to

Gender and Development

Research on a sample space of African farmers in the 70s proved that development was

essentially gender blind- it was insensitive to the needs of women, far from being gender

neutral- and could possibly be detrimental to progress of women. The Women in

Development (WID) approach evolved in the 70s constructed the problem of development as

being womens marginalization from a benign process. Womens subservience was seen as

having its roots in their marginalization from the domain of the market and their restrictedcontact with, and control, over resources. It was hence considered crucial to make a place for

women in development with the help of the law by trying to limit discrimination and by

encouraging their participation in education and employment. The WID approach resulted in

resources being targeted at women. The approach tended to make clear womens significant

contributions to the production process and income generation. Although the focus of WID

was greater gender equality, the approach failed to deal with the real structural problem: the

imbalanced gender roles and relations- the primary factor contributing to gender

subordination and exclusion of women. This approach tended to divert the efforts and time

spent by women from domestic activities to education or employment.

As a reaction to WID, in the 1980s, Gender and Development (GAD) approach started

gaining grounds. GAD focused on gender roles and relations to improve womens lives. The

term gender suggested a focus on both women and men. The GAD approach marks that

mere addition of women and girls to the existing processes of development is not sufficient,

but there is a need to identify as to why they are excluded in the first place. GAD advocates

that the emphasis should be on addressing the inequities of power at the basis of that

exclusion. GAD focused on the human centred concept of development rather than economic

growth. GAD schemes are all-inclusive and seek to address womens gender interests by

seeking the elimination of traditional forms of discrimination. (Molyneux 1985; Moser 1989).

The 1990s saw the rise of rights as many NGOs and agencies embraced a rights-based

method of development. Rights escalate the acknowledgment that womens demands are

reasonable claims. The establishment of sexual and reproductive rights is a step forward inensuring women their rights. Among other rights, efforts have been made to ensure the right


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to live free from violence to women. The rights approach has broadened the understanding of

violence against women from domestic to gender based. Focus also shifted in

understanding development from mere economic development to a more holistic social

development. However, economic growth remains the main driving force. WID has mostly

been replaced by GAD, which has been institutionalised within the notion of gender

mainstreaming. Mainstreaming includes assuring that a gendered perspective is vital to all

activities, including planning, implementation and monitoring of all programmes, projects,

and legislation. While criticized if undertaken merely as a tick box exercise, gender

mainstreaming proposes a possibility of placing gender at the centre of development. A

dismal fact of the present-day is that womens rights, particularly sexual and reproductive

health rights, are not generally recognized as rights, and violence against women remains

predominant across the world. Women still lack full and equal participation in economic and

political life. Mainstreaming has yet bear fruits and integration of women into the system

needs prioritization.

Effects of Globalization: Challenges of the 21stCentury

Participation of women in paid work rapidly increased in the previous century. Not only has

it climbed in almost all regions of the world but it has also spearheaded the overall

employment growth in recent years. Womens employment all over the world has grown

significantly faster than mens since 1980, except in Africa. With a slugging (or somewhat

declining) male labour force participation rate, the differences between male and female

labour force participation rates have contracted significantly in many regions. Among OECD

countries, womens entry into the labour force has been most evident in the Netherlands and

Spain- countries where women had previously (1980s) been less active. In Canada, the

United States of America, and the Scandinavian countries, women now comprise nearly half

of the active population, with activity rates of over 70 per cent in the core age groups. In

developing countries, womens labour force participation rate has also been rising and

currently well exceeds 60 per cent. However in most of the Middle East countries, the female

contribution in economic activity remains low. Women in the developing nations who are

economically active in the rural and urban informal sectors are frequently undercounted.

Nevertheless, the overall tendency seems distinctive: womens participation in paid

employment has been increasing progressively in developing countries as well. The impact of

economic forces released by globalization and changing labour market undercurrents has


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played a vital role in this ascendance. Admittedly, there have also been other key factors.

Among these are secular enhancements in womens level of educational accomplishment,

decreasing fertility rates, improved access to health care, as well as changing lifestyles and

attitudes. However, the link between general advances in a countrys social development

indicators, which are strongly associated with most of the above-mentioned factors, and

female labour force participation rates is not an upfront one. Given the intricacies, the

emphasis here is reasonably narrow. It is limited to employment effects that can directly be

tied to (a) development in trade and FDI flows on the one hand, and (b) changing structure of

output and restructuring of production on the other. Developing countries figure more

prominently than the developed in the former, while the reverse is the case in the latter.

Sector-wise analysis

Manufacturing sector

Participation of women workers in the recently industrialized countries, where manufacturing

production has been heavily oriented towards exports, has increased considerably. In fact, no

country has increased its exports of manufactured goods without resorting to women workers.

It is now acknowledged formally that industrialization in the context of globalization is as

much female-led as it is export-led. In some developing countries, the employment effect ofexport orientation has been a drastic turning point for womens engagement in the money

economy. As an example, Bangladesh in 1978 had only four garment factories; however, by

1995 it had 2400 employing 1.2 million workers of which ninety per cent were women under

the age of 25. The garment manufacturing sector employed 70 per cent of the women in wage

employment in the country. Besides Bangladesh, many other countries have seen such

dramatic increases both in export manufacturing volume and in the share of women in the

manufacturing labour force like the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Mauritius, and the

Philippines etc. Usually, the greater volume of exports of labour-intensive goods, such as

clothing, semiconductors, toys, sporting goods and shoes, the higher is the proportion of

women workers. Besides, for the same product categories within the export sector, in the

foreign-owned firm, the number of women seems to be higher. However, transformation

from labour-intensive production methods to skill and capital-intensive methods since late in

the 1980s has led, in many middle-income countries, for the demand for womens labour in

manufacturing sector to be reduced. The examples in this case are Puerto Rico, Singapore and

Taiwan Province of China. In the Republic of Korea also, the composition of the labour force


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in the electronics industry has altered in favour of male workers, as production in this sector

shifted to more sophisticated communication and information technology. Likewise, in the

assembly-plants of Mexico, the share of female workers fell from 77 per cent in 1982 to

under 60 per cent in 1990. These trends are suggestive of the fact that female gains in

manufacturing employment occur only when the techniques of manufacturing are labour

intensive. The shift to capital intensive and skill intensive techniques results in a fall in

womens participation in the production process.

Service sector

The fast growing international financial services sector also seems to employ a high

percentage of female workers, though mostly in areas of low skill application such as data

entry. Outsourcing by corporations in data-reliant services, such as credit card providers, mail

order businesses, airlines and rail systems employs a significant percentage of women. The

Caribbean and some Asian countries (China, India, Malaysia and the Philippines) are

recognised centres for such businesses. The labour force in the Caribbean almost completely

consists of females. Other customized, higher-skill business services are increasingly being

relocated to developing countries and employs relatively high proportions of women, even at

higher grades (the software design, computer programming, and financial services).

However, there are not enough consolidated data on this type of employment in this sector toestablish its worldwide importance or trends. In many developing countries, in addition to

export-oriented manufacturing, trade-related employment in the service sector (tourism,

finance, and information processing) has also been rising. As an instance, in Thailand by

1982 tourism had become the largest provider of foreign exchange, and by 1990 was

generating 7 per cent of total export value.

Agriculture Sector

Market liberalization coupled with the promotion of export crops in agriculture, which has

generally accompanied trade liberalization in developing countries, have had ambiguous

employment effects. Latin Americas export crop expansion has displaced women from

permanent agricultural employment into seasonal employment. Women lost employment on

subsistence plots, but could more easily find seasonal employment in low paying jobs

requiring intensive manual labour in the area of agricultural exports including harvesting

coffee, cotton and tobacco in Brazil; cultivating strawberries in Mexico, peanuts in Brazil,

fruits in Chile and flowers in Colombia. The cultivation of non-traditional export crops in

Caribbean has provided low-paying jobs for women but at the same time has undermined the


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production of food for the local market. This is likely to have disproportionately affected

women, since they have traditionally been the producers and marketers of food for the local

market. The case is somewhat different in Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe. These countries

have diversified their commodity exports to include non-traditional agricultural exports

(NTAEs), from which earnings have increased very rapidly in recent years. This sector has

transformed in that production and employment have been organized in large-scale

enterprises along quasi-industrial lines. Women usually comprise the great majority (about 90

per cent) of the workforce in this sector, not just in Kenya but also in other African countries,

and are paid cash in direct exchange for their labour. In the small-farm context, however, the

revenue from NTAEs controlled by women is far less than what they contribute in labour

input to production. The NTAEs also depend primarily on female labour force in Latin

American countries, especially Colombia and Mexico, where the sector is well established. In

these countries, where wages to profits ratio is low and occupational hazards can be severe,

there are marked gender inequalities. For example, the introduction of some non-traditional

crops in a number of poor communities in Guatemala, men were found to share the work with

women but not the profits from sales, which they appropriated in a unequal manner. In

Thailand, women have begun to contract out to MNCs on family-owned plots, producing

baby corn and asparagus on lands where formerly paddy was grown. Similarly, raising

shrimp under contract to foreign companies, women in southern Thailand have been able to

earn more in a shorter work day than what they could by cultivating rice. Many researchers,

however, have questioned the sustainability of this type of work, drawing attention to its

adverse environmental effects, health hazards and market fluctuations.

The concept of social technology

Professor Amartya Sen talks about the concept of social technology. He believes that

technology should not be viewed only in the narrow sense of particular mechanical or

chemical or biological processes used in making one good or another. The production process

involves not merely the relationship between, raw materials and final products, but also the

social organization that allows the use of specific techniques of production in factories or

workshops, or on land. Technology is not only about equipment and its operational

characteristics, but also about social arrangements that permit the equipment to be used and

the so-called productive processes to be carried on. On the one hand, it is not denied that the

sustenance, survival and reproduction of workers are obviously essential for the workers


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being available for outside work. On the other, the activities that produce or support that

sustenance, survival or reproduction are typically not regarded as contributing to output, and

are often classified as 'unproductive' labour. It is important to take an integrated view of the

pattern of activities outside and inside the home that together make up the production

processes in traditional as well as in modern societies. The prosperity of the household

depends on the totality of various activities - getting money incomes, purchasing or directly

producing (in the case of, say, peasants) food materials and other goods, producing eatable

food out of food materials, and so on. But in addition to aggregate prosperity, even the

divisions between sexes in general, and specifically those within the household, may also be

deeply influenced by the pattern of gender division of work.

The concept of social technology is of utmost important for an underdeveloped economy

where it forms a significant support system for the family in particular and communities in

general. The nature of 'social technology' has a deep effect on relating production and

earnings to the distribution of that earning between men and women and to gender divisions

of work and resources. The divisional arrangements that, on the one hand, may help in the

economic survival and in the over-all affluence of families and societies, may also impose,

through the same process, a typically unequal division of job-opportunities and work-

freedoms. They influence the division of fruits of joint activities - sometimes sustaininginequalities in the commodities consumed in relation to needs (e.g. of food in poorer

economies). The nature of the co-operative arrangements implicitly influences the

distributional parameters and the household's response to conflicts of interests.


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Bibliography

1.

1999 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development: Globalization, Gender

and Work (Report of the Secretary General)

2.

Amartya Sen, Gender and Cooperative Conflicts, Wider Working Papers, July 1987.3.

Sarah Bradshaw, Womens role in economic development: Overcoming the

constraints, May 2013

4. Enhancing Women's Participation in Economic Development World Bank Policy

Paper, 1014-8124

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