Document(s) 3 of 13

In September 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, 189 governments across the world made a commitment to take collective responsibility for halving world poverty by 2015. The Millennium Declaration laid out a number of key development goals framed to reflect its fundamental values. Along with the reduction of poverty and hunger, these included commitments to the promotion of human development, environmental sustainability and development partnership. In addition, they included an explicit commitment to gender equality as an end in itself: “No individual and no nation must be denied the opportunity to benefit from development. The equality rights and opportunities of women and men must be assured.”

This book brings together arguments, findings and lessons from the development literature that are relevant to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from the standpoint of gender equality. This is because, firstly, while there may be other forms of socio-economic disparity in a society that are far wider than gender – e.g. race in apartheid South Africa, caste in India or class in Brazil – gender inequality is more pervasive than other forms of inequality. It is a feature of social relations in most societies, although it may take different forms. Consequently, understanding the causes and consequences of gender inequality should be of concern to all societies in the world, rich as well as poor.

Secondly, gender inequality is also pervasive across different groups within societies. It cuts across other forms of inequality so that it is a feature of rich as well as poor groups, racially dominant as well as racially subordinate groups, privileged as well as ‘untouchable’ castes. Within a society, the forms taken by gender inequality may vary across different strata. They are often, though not invariably, more severe among the poor. Consequently, gender inequality intersects with economic deprivation to produce more intensified forms of poverty for women than men. Gender inequality is part and parcel of the processes of causing and deepening poverty in a society and must therefore constitute part and parcel of measures to eradicate poverty.

And finally, gender inequality structures the relations of production and reproduction in different societies. Men play a critical role in earning household livelihoods in much of the world but generally play a negligible role in the unpaid work of reproduction in the domestic arena. Women, on the other hand, play a critical role in the unpaid work of caring for the family. While their role in the productive sphere varies, it is generally highest among poorer households. However, there is a marked inequality in the resources that men and women are able to mobilise to carry out their responsibilities, in the value and recognition given to their contributions and in their capacity to exercise agency on their own behalf.

As the evidence marshalled in this handbook demonstrates, despite decades of gender research and advocacy, policy-makers continue to operate with the notion of the ‘male breadwinner’. Efforts to promote the productivity of the poor are largely targeted to men while women are expected to carry on contributing to household livelihoods and caring for the family with little or no recognition or support for their efforts. If households had been the egalitarian institutions portrayed in conventional economics and in the imagination of many policy-makers, the preoccupation with ‘the male breadwinner’ would have mattered less. A redistribution of resources and responsibilities among family members would have prevented the emergence, or exacerbation, of inequalities in the household.

However, households are not necessarily egalitarian. Rather, they operate as sites of co-operative conflict in which men as a group have been able to use their privileged access to resources both in the household and in the wider public domain to defend and promote their own interests, often at the expense of women and girls. In other words, inequalities in the domestic domain intersect with inequalities in purportedly gender-neutral institutions of markets, state and community to make gender inequality a society-wide phenomenon. This means that women and men experience poverty differently and unequally and become poor through different, though related, processes. Poverty – and gender inequalities – therefore have to be tackled at the societal level as well as through explicit interventions tailored to addressing specific forms of disadvantage.

Chapter 1 provides a brief history of the changing policy

discourse and the processes that led to the greater visibility of both poverty reduction and gender equality. It argues that this visibility reflects the increased attention to human agency, human capital and human capabilities as factors in the achievement of pro-poor growth, combined with evidence that gender is one of the critical variables mediating economic growth and human development. However, it notes that because women continue to be perceived primarily in terms of their reproductive roles, there is no explicit mention of gender inequality in relation to the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) on poverty eradication. Indeed, gender equality largely appears in the MDGs in relation to health and education. Women’s economic agency as a force for poverty reduction continues to be overlooked in the policy discourse. However, enhancing women’s access to various resources and ensuring that greater social value is given to their contributions lies within the domain of policy-makers and its pay-offs are likely to be enormous.

Chapter 2 charts the gradual evolution of macroeconomic analysis from its earlier gender-blindness to current attempts to make it more gender aware. In some cases, conventional models are disaggregated where possible by gender; in others, gender inequality is introduced as a variable; and in still others, attempts are made to re-conceptualise the economy in terms of the interacting gender relations of production and reproduction. Within this literature, there is a greater appreciation of women’s economic agency as well as their role in reproduction. The chapter also reports on attempts to explore these relationships empirically, particularly in the context of globalisation. These findings necessarily take the form of broad generalisations since they deal with national and international data. However, they help to generate some important hypotheses and propositions about the interactions between gender and poverty that help frame the more detailed, micro-level and contextual analysis in the rest of the book. While a number of studies suggest that there is indeed a relationship between gender equality and economic growth, there are conflicting findings as to whether the relationship is a synergy (greater equality translates into greater growth) or trade-off (greater inequality fuels higher levels of growth). This debate forms the starting point of the analysis in the rest of the book and is returned to in the final chapter.

Chapter 3 sketches out an ‘institutional framework’ for the analysis of gender inequality within the economy and explores its variation across the world. In the context of economic analysis, attention to institutions helps to reveal that a great deal of human behaviour is governed by social norms and that such norms have powerful material ramifications in people’s lives. The discussion shows that while gender inequalities may be near universal, they are not uniform, either across space or over time. There is now a body of work testifying to the existence of a ‘geography of gender’ – regional differences in the forms and magnitude of gender inequality. While family and kinship ideologies and relations play an important role in the construction of these inequalities, they are also reinforced, modified or transformed by the interaction between family, kinship and wider social processes, including state legislation, public action and macroeconomic change. What seems to emerge out of the empirical findings is that gender inequality in such dimensions as education, wages and legal infrastructure is only partly related to per capita GNP. It is also related to broad regional variations in patriarchal regimes, particularly among the poorer countries of the world.

This chapter goes on to consider the extent to which the geographical distribution of inequality has changed in recent times, particularly given the accelerating forces of globalisation and the internationalisation of production. It concludes that there has been some reduction in gender inequality in important aspects of women’s lives, but to a greater extent in some regions than others, and to a greater extent in some dimensions of inequality than others. However, while there has been an undoubted ‘feminisation of labour’ in recent years, the terms on which women have entered the labour market, and the accompanying implications for men, mean that this has had contradictory implications for gender equality.

Chapter 4 turns to a more detailed examination of the relationship between gender inequality and poverty at regional and national levels, drawing on findings from three different approaches to poverty analysis: the poverty line approach; the capabilities approach (using human development indicators); and participatory poverty assessments. The rationale for this focus is that these are the main approaches through which policy-makers in a range of development agencies obtain their

insights into poverty. The discussion confirms the overall conclusion of the previous chapter that institutional norms and practices play an important role in shaping gender inequality. Consequently, the relationship between poverty and inequality varies in different parts of the world. In some regions, it take the form of inequality at the level of life expectancy and survival chances; in others, it takes the forms of heavier work burdens and greater time poverty.

A number of important implications can be drawn from this chapter. First of all, it presents a challenge to conventional models of the household, which perceive it as a site of co-operation and which have led in the past to the neglect of critical forms of gender inequality. Secondly, it reinforces the message that gender inequality takes different forms in different societies and hence cannot be addressed through any kind of blue-print approach. And finally, given that gender inequality is not just a product of scarcity, it suggests that economic growth alone may not be adequate to address gender inequality.

Women’s role as economic actors – and its critical importance to the livelihoods of the poor across the world – is considered in Chapter 5. However, different regional constraints on women’s economic agency differentiate the relationship between women’s work and household poverty. In those regions of the world where these constraints are particularly severe, the relationship takes the form of one between women’s paid work and household poverty. In other regions, there are higher levels of paid work by women generally and the relationship between household poverty and women’s work relates to the kinds of economic activity women engage in. It is clear, however, that women’s work is critical to the survival and security of poor households and an important route through which they are able escape out of poverty. Greater importance should therefore be given to women’s economic contributions in the design of policy. The chapter argues that economic growth must be accompanied by a genuine effort to address the constraints that undermine returns to women’s labour if women from low-income households are to be able to take advantage of the opportunities generated. This means dismantling various forms of discrimination in the public domain and paying greater attention to women’s workloads in the domestic domain.

Chapter 6 focuses on the human development concerns of the MDGs. The first part of the chapter examines the distribution of gender inequalities in a number of key human development outcomes and links them to gender inequalities in forms of agency permitted to women and girls in different parts of the world and to the successes and failures of different governments in addressing these inequalities. It considers factors such as child survival rates, women’s nutritional levels and hazardous livelihoods, and also discusses the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It suggests that improving women’s access to resources is one route through which the MDGs on human development – including those relating in gender inequalities – can be achieved. The second part of the chapter explores how, as well as an end goal of development, gender equality can also be seen as a route through which other human development goals can be achieved. There are a number of links between women’s well-being, agency and resources, on the one hand, and a variety of demographic and welfare outcomes on the other. These include the link between mothers’ education and child mortality and the positive connection between increased income in the hands of women and improved family well-being.

Chapter 7 reinforces the critical importance of certain resources to women’s capacity to exercise agency, but this time focuses on forms of agency that are in the interests of women themselves – in other words, those that serve the goals of women’s empowerment and gender justice. Using the three indicators used to track the goal of women’s empowerment in the MDGs, the chapter considers the transformatory potential of women’s access to education and literacy; to paid work, particularly waged employment; and to political representation. The discussion considers the arguments and evidence supporting access to these different resources as preconditions for women’s empowerment. It also looks at some of the qualifications that have been put forward to suggest that, although necessary, these resources are not always sufficient. Such reservations provide some insights into the kinds of policies needed to realise the potential of these resources to transform the life chances of poor women. The chapter also notes that not all forms of public action have to be undertaken by the state or international development agencies but that political pressure also has to come from below. Arguing that collective action is

central to social transformation, it offers a number of examples that have given a voice to women, as well as men, from poorer sections of the population.

The final chapter (Chapter 8) attempts to draw out the implications of the relationship between gender equality and pro-poor growth for policy efforts to achieve the MDGs. It first returns to the question that has framed the discussion throughout the book of whether the relationship is one of synergy or a trade-off. Examining the evidence, it concludes that there does appear to be a trade-off between gender inequality and economic growth in the present era of intensified global competition. Women’s lower costs and lesser bargaining power in the market place have been the basis of export-oriented growth based on labour-intensive manufacturing. However, if attention is turned to countries that had high levels of gender equality but grew more slowly during this period, the trade-off appears to be less stark. These tend to be countries that prioritised investment in the human capabilities of their population so that the fruits of growth were distributed more evenly across the population in the course of growth rather than in its later phase. There is, in other words, no trade-off between gender equality and economic growth once the focus moves from short-rate gains to long-term, sustainable and pro-poor growth.

Chapter 8 also provides a gender audit of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), since many current efforts to centralise poverty concerns in national development policies are organised around these papers. It offers some lessons learned and stresses the importance of participatory approaches and of wide-ranging stakeholder consultations, which both governments and international development agencies have committed themselves to building and strengthening. Finally, it suggests that there is a need for active and organised constituencies at the grassroots level to exercise pressure for gender equality goals and to hold governments, donors and international agencies accountable for their action or inaction.

Document(s) 3 of 13