Women in Development (WID) was a term coined in early 1970’s, and was first used by the Women’s Committee of Washington DC, Chapter of the Society for International Development. The term was subsequently adopted by the UN and other international aid agencies including USAID. The underlying rationale behind this approach was the philosophy that women can provide economic contribution to development though they remain as an untapped resource.
Put forth with a primary focus of enhancing women’s role in economic development, WID led to rendering a high profile to international policies for improvement of educational and employment opportunities for women and enhancement of their political representation for their broader physical and social welfare.
Despite, on the outset, advocating for women’s access to increased resources for their development, WID was grounded on the acceptance of existing social structures, which, inevitably, stood for women’s confinement into domestic chores and traditional roles and responsibilities conferred by the society. Thus, it avoided questioning the sources and nature of women’s subordination and oppression in line with the more radical structuralist perspectives such as dependency theory. It merely focused on changing attitudes of poor women through providing them with necessary education.
Women and Development (WAD) school of thought was result of a quick realization on part of the development practitioners and social scientists that ‘women always have been an integral part of development process in a global system of exploitation and inequality, and it is from this perspective that we need to examine why women had not benefited from the development strategies of the past decades, that is, by questioning the sources and nature of women’s subordination and oppression’.
While coming forward in tracing and highlighting the plight of women in developing countries, the WAD approach also maintained that ‘Third World men are also adversely affected by the structure of the inequalities and exploitation within the international system, and discourages a strict analytical focus on the problems of women independent of those of men, since both the sexes are disadvantaged within the oppressive global structures based on class and capital.’
The WAD school of thought appeared to assume that women’s position will improve with more equitable international structures, and it sides with WID in solving the problem of under-representation of women in economic, political and social structure by carefully designed intervention strategies rather than by more fundamental shifts in the social relations of gender.
Gender and Development (GAD) criticizes WID approach blaming it for its limited scope in, though, contributing somewhat in improving women’s economic conditions, but overall neglecting their social, economic and political empowerment vis-à-vis men in development context. The realization and criticism led to a thorough gender analysis of social analysis and aspiration for the ultimate empowerment of women. Broadly speaking, the focus of this approach was on gender now, rather than only on women. The rationale behind this approach was that ‘the focus on gender rather than women makes it critical to look not only at the category ‘women’ – since that is only half the story – but at women in relation to men, and the way in which relations between these categories are socially constructed.’
The GAD approach was, however, different from WID in three respects. First, it shifts the focus from women to gender and identifies the unequal power relations between women and men. Second, it re-examines all social, political and economic structures and development policies from the perspective of gender differentials. And lastly, it recognizes that achieving gender equality demands ‘transformative change’ in gender relations from household to global level.
Fayyaz Yaseen Blog 