Document(s) 4 of 13

A gender perspective means recognising that women stand at the crossroads between production and reproduction, between economic activity and the care of human beings, and therefore between economic growth and human development. They are workers in both spheres – those most responsible and therefore with most at stake, those who suffer most when the two spheres meet at cross-purposes, and those most sensitive to the need for better integration between the two.
Gita Sen

Introduction

The main focus of this book is the gender dimensions of poverty and their implications for public policy. Poverty is ‘gendered’ because women and men experience poverty differently – and unequally – and become poor through different, though related, processes. This book brings together concepts, arguments and findings to show: (a) what these gender dimensions are; and (b) how they affect poverty reduction strategies. In particular, it shows that such strategies need to take gender into account if they are to be effective (see box 1.1).

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Poverty is ‘gendered’ because women and men experience poverty differently – and unequally – and become poor through different, though related, processes.

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The problems of gender inequality and poverty are not the same and have different causes and consequences. For example, a change in the price of a country’s staple food may be an issue of life and death for poor families, but it is unlikely to affect women (or men) in wealthier households. Equally, the existence of a ‘glass ceiling’ in senior management discriminates against professional women but has little direct relevance to the lives of the poor, men or women.

Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence that women and girls are more disadvantaged than men and boys, both across societies and among the poor. Promoting gender equality in the wider society – or reinforcing inequality – can therefore have effects that cut across class and social status. For example, government departments that work with the poor need to challenge gender inequality in their own ranks if they are to provide equitable services. This handbook, however,

only discusses the wider gender inequalities in society when they relate to the gender dimensions of poverty.

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The argument for addressing gender inequality, therefore, is not simply that it exists in all societies but that it exists at all levels of society. It makes the effects of poverty worse for women and biases the form taken by economic growth.

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Box 1.1 Gender, Gender Equality and Gender Inequality

‘Gender’ refers to the rules, norms, customs and practices by which biological differences between males and females are translated into socially constructed differences between men and women and boys and girls. This results in the two genders being valued differently and in their having unequal opportunities and life chances.

In the context of this book, ‘gender equality’ means both equality of treatment under the law and equality of opportunity. In addition, since these do not take structural inequality into account, it also includes substantive equality and equality of agency. Substantive equality means that the different circumstances and characteristics of men and women have to be considered to avoid unfair gender-related outcomes. For example, in a case where a man and a woman both have the qualifications for a particular occupation, the latter may be unable to take it up if there is no childcare available. Equality of agency means ensuring that both women and men can make strategic life choices for themselves (and help determine the conditions under which these choices are made).

Gender inequality is constructed both through society’s formal laws and statutes and through unwritten norms and shared understandings. It is not only pervasive across all societies but also the most prevalent form of social disadvantage within societies. It cuts across all other forms of inequality, such as class, caste and race. And because gender is key to the organisation of production and reproduction, women are also “at the crossroads between . . . . economic growth and human development”. The argument for addressing gender inequality, therefore, is not simply that it exists in all societies but that it exists at all levels of society. It makes the effects of poverty worse for women and biases the form taken by economic growth.

While the analysis focuses mainly on female disadvantage, the situation of men and boys will also be included for several reasons:

• Women’s poverty relative to men and absolute levels of poverty among women may have different implications for public policy;
• The needs and priorities expressed by poor households, as well as their ability to meet them, are influenced by prevailing social models of masculinity as well as femininity. Both of these can prevent household members escaping from poverty; and
• In certain contexts, or in relation to certain aspects of poverty, men have been found to be at a greater disadvantage than women.

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There are two main ways in which national policy can try to reduce absolute levels of poverty: forms of economic growth that benefit the poor along with the rest of society; and redistribution of national income to pull people out of poverty.

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Box 1.2 Poverty and National Policy

A nation’s poverty is measured by the number of households that are unable to meet certain minimum basic needs. It is determined by two central variables:

1. the Gross National Product (GNP), which measures the total amount of goods and services available at a particular point in time; and
2. the distribution of GNP, which determines the extent to which different households have access to the goods and services necessary to meet their basic needs.

There are two main ways in which national policy can try to reduce absolute levels of poverty:

• forms of economic growth that benefit the poor along with the rest of society; and
• redistribution of national income to pull people out of poverty.

A Brief History of Poverty Reduction Policies

Up to the 1960s: Early strategies for growth

In the early post-war years, development policy emphasised economic growth. In fact, development was equated with economic growth, economic growth with industrialisation and industrialisation with investment in physical capital formation. ‘Import-substituting’ industrialisation (replacing imported goods with domestic production) was recommended as the way for countries to become more self-reliant. The benefits of this were expected to gradually ‘trickle down’ through society to its poorer members. The role of labour and human capital was seen almost entirely in terms of ‘manpower’ needs. However, by the end of the 1960s, it was obvious that such strategies had failed to bring about the expected reductions in poverty and inequality.

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. . . both the economic crisis and the structural adjustment policies had tremendous social costs.

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1970s and 1980s: Economic crises and structural adjustment

In the 1970s, there was a greater concern with the productivity of small farmers, with meeting basic needs and with income-generation for the landless poor. These approaches, however, tended to be project-based and piecemeal. Also, they were soon overtaken by the accumulated effects of the oil crisis, the slow-down in growth rates in the advanced industrialised countries and the increasing debt burden of the less developed countries. This led to poverty reduction being seen in the 1980s as less important than the problems of unsustainable budget deficits and balance of payments.

Structural adjustment policies (SAPs) were then imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These: (a) let market forces set relative prices; (b) cut back state expenditure and intervention; and (c) liberalised economies and opened them up to international trade and foreign investment. However, both the economic crisis and the SAPs had tremendous social costs. An influential study by UNICEF argued that, while these policies might be necessary, their human costs had to be an integral part of the package rather than an additional welfare component. Such arguments helped bring about a return to a more direct concern with poverty reduction.

1990s: Reports from the World Bank and UNDP

The 1990 World Development Report (WDR) from the World Bank moved away from the preoccupation with ‘getting prices right’ that had dominated the Bank’s policies in the 1980s. Its new poverty agenda put forward two ways of promoting pro-poor growth:

• broad-based, labour-intensive strategies to generate income-earning opportunities for the poor by using their most abundant asset – their labour power; and
• social investment in basic health and education to improve the productivity of labour.

These were to be supplemented by transfers and safety nets to assist the most vulnerable and least accessible sections of the poor, such as those in remote areas, the elderly and the disabled. Key influences on the Bank’s thinking were the East Asian ‘miracle’ and the new theory of ‘endogenous’ growth (see box 2.1, page 25). The report attributed the former primarily to: (a) open economies; (b) labour-intensive and export-oriented production (particularly in the manufacturing sector); and (c) state investment in basic education. The latter stressed the interaction between human and other forms of capital in generating economic growth.

The 1990 Human Development Report (HDR) from the

A woman garment cutter at a ready-to-wear clothing factory in Japan
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United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) owed a great deal to the work of Amartya Sen. It drew on his idea of human ‘capabilities’ – the resources and abilities that enable people to achieve the range of valued ways of being and doing possible in a particular society. This put human agency at the heart of development. Poverty was seen to refer not only to the impoverished state in which the poor lived but also to their lack of opportunities – for both social and personal reasons – to choose other ways to live. UNDP recommended a ‘judicious’ mix of institutions to promote ‘human-centred’ growth.

The HDR created the Human Development Index (HDI), based on a composite of life expectancy, infant mortality and educational attainment. This offered an alternative measure of development progress to GNP. Although there was a broadly positive relationship between per capita GNP and levels of human development, the extent to which increased per capita GNP had led to improvements in human development varied considerably among countries. It appeared that the more equal the conditions from which a country started out, the more likely it was that subsequent growth would lead to poverty reduction.

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Amartya Sen’s idea of human ‘capabilities’ . . . put human agency at the heart of development.

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2000: World Development Report (WDR)

The 2000 WDR provided a deeper understanding of the relationship between poverty and growth than the 1990 Report. It was organised around the three themes of ‘opportunity’, ‘security’ and ‘voice’.

Opportunity was still discussed in the context of market-led, labour-intensive growth. However, the idea of the ‘assets’ of the poor was expanded to include not only labour and human capital but also natural, financial, social and physical assets. This reflected the influence of the growing literature on poor people’s livelihoods (see Chapter 4). The report noted that lack of assets was both a cause and an effect of poverty. It suggested that simultaneous action was needed on several fronts, with priority given to what poor people lacked most relative to the opportunities available to them. The idea of ‘synergies’ was emphasised as a guiding principle for promoting livelihood strategies. These synergies included, for example, that between

a mother’s education and her children’s nutritional levels and those between the causes of poverty.

Security was much more prominent than in the 1990 report. This was because of the growing globalisation of production and trade and the financial crisis caused by short-term fluctuations in international capital flow (e.g. in the ‘miracle’ economies of East Asia).

Voice was related in particular to the inability of the poor to influence policies that directly affected their lives. The question of ‘voice’ had recently been given increasing attention in policy discussions about national strategies. Participatory methodologies intended to include the voices of the poor were part of country poverty assessments carried out by the Bank and other donors throughout the 1990s. Worldwide consultations with the poor contributed to the analysis in this report.

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The main goals [of the MDGs] concern income poverty, human development, gender equality, environmental sustainability and global partnership.

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The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

In the course of the 1990s, poverty reduction was adopted as an overarching goal by almost every major international and bilateral development agency and as the basis of development co-operation. In 1996, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries laid out their strategy for the twenty-first century in terms of a number of International Development Targets (IDTs). These were based on agreements that had been reached in various meetings during the 1990s. The first target was halving world poverty by 2015. The IDTs were subsequently revised to become the basis of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), agreed to at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 and subscribed to by both developed and developing countries. The main goals concern income poverty, human development, gender equality, environmental sustainability and global partnership. Targets and indicators were set to assess progress in achieving them (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1: The Millennium Development Goals

Table 1.1: The Millennium Development Goals (continued)

* The selection of indicators for Goals 7 and 8 is subject to further refinement.

Table 1.1: The Millennium Development Goals (continued)

* The selection of indicators for Goals 7 and 8 is subject to further refinement.

Putting Gender on the Policy Agenda

1970s and 1980s: Making the links between gender and development

It is not surprising that gender concerns were missing from early growth-oriented strategies since these generally did not consider the ‘human factor’ in development. In the 1970s, however, when greater attention began to be paid to basic needs, rural productivity and informal sector activity, there was growing advocacy on the issue of women in development. This took two distinct forms: an argument for economic equity and depiction of women as the poorest of the poor. Both started from the premise that women were important economic actors. However, they emphasised different aspects of women’s performance and used different analytical approaches.

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Conventional measures of economic activity . . . significantly underestimated the level of women’s economic contributions.

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The economic equity argument

This argument focused on the effects of development planning on women’s economic status. An influential example is a 1970 publication by Boserup (see box 1.3). It basically maintained that national governments and international development agencies had not understood that women had productive, as well as reproductive, roles. Conventional measures of economic activity, based on Western market-based economies, significantly underestimated the level of women’s economic contributions. They both

• failed to acknowledge the magnitude and value of women’s unpaid work; and
• undercounted women’s paid work outside the ‘modern’ sector.

The ‘household’ was assumed to follow the model of an idealised ‘Western nuclear family’ with a male breadwinner and dependent women and children. This led planners to focus mainstream development interventions on men. At the same time, they directed various welfare programmes – such as maternal and child health, family planning and nutrition – to women. The result was the emergence and widening of a gender-based productivity gap and negative impacts on women’s status in the economy.

Box 1.3 The Geography of Gender Roles in Farming

Boserup pointed out that gender roles in farming had a distinct geographical pattern. In areas of agriculture based on shifting cultivation, women played the major role in food production, with some help from men. Sub-Saharan Africa was described as a prime example of these ‘female farming systems’. Similar patterns, however, were also found among ‘Indian and Negro’ communities in parts of Latin America and among many tribal groups in north-eastern India and South-East Asia. Female labour force participation tended to be extremely high in these areas. Women also played an active role in trading activities in some of them (namely, South-East Asia, southern India and western Africa).

In ‘male farming systems’, on the other hand, agriculture was largely the responsibility of men, with women confined to a limited number of tasks. These were mainly found in regions of settled farming with plough-based cultivation and private ownership of land. Due to the practice of female seclusion, women did very little work in the fields and concentrated mainly on tasks that could be undertaken in the domestic domain. Instead, cultivating families relied on hired labour from landless families. Male farming systems characterised the Middle East, India and Pakistan. These were also regions with very low female participation in trading activities. In addition, a number of countries in Latin America also followed this pattern of low participation by women in agriculture and high percentages of wage labour.

Boserup’s equity-based argument saw women as economic actors rather than welfare clients and focused on the need to improve their productivity. It had limited success in the 1970s, however. The type of programmes needed to improve women’s economic opportunities implied a change in gender relations that would have affected the cultural fabric of society. Moreover, the call for gender equality at all levels also included

Woman planting rice, Indonesia
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within development agencies – hence an understandable reluctance by largely male-staffed agencies to implement such programmes.

Women as the poorest of the poor

What made greater headway in development circles in the 1970s was the argument that there was a link between women and poverty. Attention was drawn to the disproportionate number of female-headed households among the poor and the fact that women in poor households were largely responsible for meeting families’ basic needs. This led to the spread of income-generating projects for women intended to help them meet these needs, but which had little effect on their marginalised status in the development process. Genuine anti-poverty strategies, which justified assistance to poor women on the grounds of poverty reduction rather than family welfare, would have meant significant disbursements for women. They therefore ran into the same problems as ‘equity-based’ programmes. Early initiatives on women in development thus did little to

change gender biases in poverty alleviation efforts and left them intact in macroeconomic policies.

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Gender analysis of adjustment policies by the Commonwealth Secretariat showed how cutbacks in public social services were forcing women to increase their own efforts in the reproductive arena.

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SAPs and the ‘invisible adjustments’ made by women

The SAPs that dominated development policy in the 1980s emphasised market-oriented growth strategies, with a stress on ‘getting prices right’. This was also a period when attempts were made to link gender concerns with macroeconomic policy. UNICEF, for example, drew attention to the ‘invisible adjustments’ being made by women in poor households in their attempts to cope with the economic crisis. It called for adjustment ‘with a human face’. Gender analysis of adjustment policies by the Commonwealth Secretariat combined welfare and efficiency arguments. It showed how cutbacks in public social services were forcing women to increase their own efforts in the reproductive arena (e.g. by caring for sick family members who might previously have been hospitalised). The increased burden of reproductive work: (a) meant that women were less able to respond to economic incentives; (b) slowed the reallocation of resources into the traded sector; and (c) made economic reform less effective.

Gender and the 1990 WDR

The World Bank’s 1990 WDR had little to say about the gender dimensions of poverty in its analysis. It did point out that figures on health, nutrition, education and labour force participation showed that women were often severely disadvantaged compared to men and faced “all manner of cultural, social, legal and economic obstacles that men – even poor men do not. They typically work longer hours and, when they are paid at all, for lower wages.” It noted the large number of single-mother households, and that “raising women’s incomes directly is a good way to reach children as well as to strengthen women’s status and bargaining power within the household”. In addition, it referred to the gender bias of agricultural extension services even where many, if not most, farmers were women. However, although its discussion of economic opportunities for the poor covered a range of issues – including infrastructure, land rights, credit, non-farm linkages, rural-urban migration, the informal sector and technological

change – gender analysis was confined to a couple of boxes and to a brief mention of women’s higher rates of loan repayment compared to men’s.

More attention was given to gender issues in the section on social services for the poor. These included: (a) gender inequalities in education and literacy; (b) high levels of maternal mortality; and (c) the negative effects of high fertility on mothers’ health. In policy terms, family planning services together with female education and employment were seen as important for reducing fertility rates. It also suggested that primary health care targeted at mothers could help to reduce maternal mortality. Girls’ education was given special attention. Scholarships for girls and an increase in the number of female teachers in countries with strong gender discrimination were recommended as ways to overcome gender bias, as well as longer-term policies to increase women’s participation in the labour market.

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The 1995 HDR . . . stated that “poverty has a woman’s face – of 1.3 billion people in poverty, 70 per cent are women”.

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Gender and the Human Development Report (HDR)

The first HDR in 1990 also barely touched on gender issues. It did note, however, that the increasing number of female-headed households has led to a ‘feminisation of poverty’ and that problems of gender inequality were relevant in both the North and South. It also pointed out that women “are typically less qualified than men [and] tend to get into lower paying jobs, having fewer opportunities to be upwardly mobile, leaving them less able than men to provide a decent living to their families”.

The 1995 Report, on the other hand, focused on gender inequality to tie in with the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. It therefore offered a much more elaborate analysis of gender issues. It stated that the purpose of development was “to enlarge all human choices, not just income”. It also suggested that removing gender inequality had very little to do with the level of national income and stated that “poverty has a woman’s face – of 1.3 billion people in poverty, 70 per cent are women”. It noted that the causes behind the ‘feminisation of poverty’ differed in the South and North. For the former it was “the tragic consequence of women’s unequal access to economic opportunities”. However, in the latter, it

was linked to “the unequal situation in the labour market, [women’s] treatment under social welfare system and status power in the families”. Attempts to estimate women’s unpaid work helped draw attention to the size of the contribution that they made to the economic growth of their countries.

The HDR concluded that, because of inequities in the structures of power, gender equality would not come about through the free workings of economic and political processes. Governments therefore needed to reform their policies and introduce affirmative actions to promote equality and ensure that women had access to productive resources (see box 1.4).

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The HDR concluded that . . . governments . . . needed to . . . introduce affirmative actions to promote equality and ensure that women had access to productive resources.

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Box 1.4 UNDP’s Five Steps to Gender Equality

Concluding that government intervention was necessary to bring about gender equality, the 1995 Human Development Report offered a five-point agenda for accelerating progress towards that goal:

1. Mobilisation of national and international efforts to bring about legal equality in an agreed period of time;
2. Altering economic and institutional arrangements to promote more choices for women and men in the work place (e.g. paternity as well as maternity leave, flexible work schedules, family-friendly taxes and social security incentives);
3. At least 30% of decision-making positions to be held by women;
4. Programmes to ensure universal female education, improved reproductive health and increased credit for women; and
5. National and international programmes to provide people, especially women, with more access to economic and political opportunities (e.g. basic social services for all, reproductive health care, credit for the poor, poverty reduction and capacity building and empowerment).

Gender and the 2000 World Development Report

The 2000 WDR focused on poverty and offered a more complex view of gender than the 1990 report. Gender featured at various points in its discussion of the key themes of opportunity, empowerment and security, but particularly under empowerment. Here the Report recognised the institutional nature of gender inequality, tracing women’s disadvantage to kinship rules, community norms, legal systems and public provision. Critical kinship rules that help determine the extent of gender equality were identified as:

• the rules of inheritance, which determine women’s ownership of resources; and
• the rules of marriage, which determine women’s domestic autonomy.

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The World Bank’s most comprehensive treatment of gender to date is the 2001 Policy Research Report, Engendering Development: Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice.

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The 2000 WDR argued for a gender approach to understanding poverty, noting that greater gender equity is not only desirable in its own right but also for “its instrumental social and economic benefits for poverty reduction”. There was no analysis, however, of gender biases in labour and other markets. This suggests that the Bank continued to see the market as impersonal, and hence ‘gender-neutral’. In addition, the 2000 WDR failed to note that gender inequality is central to both how poverty is caused and the form it takes.

The World Bank’s 2001 report

The World Bank’s most comprehensive treatment of gender to date is the 2001 Policy Research Report, Engendering Development: Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice. This documented different aspects of gender inequality using evidence from both the developed and developing world. Like the 2000 WDR, Engendering Development noted how important kinship systems are in constructing gender inequality. It drew on the new thinking on ‘household economics’ to explore the structure of power, incentives and resources in the household (see Chapter 3). It also looked at the ways in which the beliefs and values of households and communities interact with wider

legal frameworks to reproduce gender bias in key institutions. These include those of the state as well as those of the market.

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Female earnings are around 70–80 per cent of male earnings in both developed and developing countries. Only 20 per cent of this difference can be explained by conventional economic variables . . . Rather . . . these inequalities are perpetuated by ‘taboos and prejudices’ in the labour market.

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The report noted that labour markets around the world have a hierarchical structure in which sectors, occupations and activities are segregated by gender. Women tend to be under-represented in better-paid formal sector jobs and over-represented in the unpaid and informal sectors (particularly in subcontracting, temporary, casual or home-based work). As a result, female earnings are around 70–80 per cent of male earnings in both developed and developing countries. Only 20 per cent of this difference can be explained by conventional economic variables, such as educational attainment, work experience and job characteristics. Rather, the report makes clear that these inequalities are perpetuated by ‘taboos and prejudices’ in the labour market.

The report also documented how globalisation is opening and expanding national markets, and pointed to the potential gains and costs associated with this. Gains include some signs that the gender gap in wages is decreasing in industries in both North and South. Costs include the failure of legislation to prevent continued discrimination against women workers, as well as the exposure of those in the ‘traded’ industries to fluctuations in the global economy. As a result, the report concluded that, “competitive markets may not be the best way to eliminate gender discrimination, so government has a role to play in regulating markets and in providing critical economic infrastructure” (see box 1.5).

The overall analysis of Engendering Development suggests a combination of the sort of broad-based pro-poor economic growth strategies being promoted by the World Bank and IMF and the kind of rights-based approach to human development adopted by a number of UN and bilateral donor agencies. However:

• It is much stronger on growth-based policies than rights-based ones. It understands rights in terms of regulation rather than redistribution, i.e. getting rid of discriminatory laws and introducing more equitable ones. It stresses civil and political rights (and their negative ‘freedom from’) rather than economic and social rights (and their positive ‘freedom to’).

Box 1.5 How the State can Address Gender Inequality

Engendering Development suggests some positive actions that a state can take to reduce the gender discrimination that causes harm to society as a whole. It can “tax and subsidise, persuade and regulate, prohibit and punish, or provide services . . . It can directly prohibit prejudicial behaviour – such as when it requires enterprises to hire workers on the basis of skills rather than on the basis of sex, and sanctions or fines violations”.

The report also proposes a three-part strategy to promote gender equality in the development process:

1. Reforming institutions to establish equal rights and opportunities for women and men;
2. Fostering a rights-based approach to development and growth as the most effective way to reduce gender disparity; and
3. Taking active measures to redress persistent inequalities in political voice.

• It is concerned with gender inequality in a wide sense, and does not pay much specific attention to its links with poverty.
• It comes from the Bank’s research division, so it is not clear that it commits the institution to adopting the recommendations in its own work.

Gender and the Millennium Development Goals

Although international organisations approached poverty and human development in different ways during the 1990s, their treatment of gender was similar. They mainly looked at it in terms of the social sectors, focusing on inequalities in access to education, particularly primary education. However, gender has had a very limited place in economic policies and production-related strategies.

Mother with a baby tending a market stall in Senegal
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The International Development Targets (IDTs) – on which the MDGs were based – also addressed gender issues only in relation to human development goals, with “progress towards gender equality and the empowerment of women” shown by the elimination of gender disparity in primary and secondary education. There was also a commitment to reproductive health services and to the reduction of maternal mortality – a major cause of female deaths in poorer countries – by three-fourths by 2015. While these are important goals, closing the gender gap in indicators of health and education not only requires better service delivery. It also means increasing women’s economic agency and the value they give themselves and are given by their community.

The MDGs are only a partial improvement on the IDTs as women are still not part of the poverty reduction goal. Instead women continue to be identified with human development goals – in relation to education, maternal mortality and the incidence of HIV/AIDS. There are, however, a number of important new features:

• Gender equality is treated as an explicit goal.
• Indicators of progress to reduce gender disparities in primary and secondary education include:

  – the ratio of boys and girls at all levels of education;

  – gender disparities in adult literacy;

  – the percentage of women in waged employment in the non-agricultural sector; and

  –the percentage of women holding seats in national parliament.

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Unless macroeconomic thinking is better informed by gender analysis, macroeconomic policy will remain gender blind.

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Conclusion

It has taken nearly half a century for the goals of poverty reduction and gender equality to achieve this prominence in mainstream policy concerns. In the process, the understanding of poverty has been transformed from the early equation with income poverty to a more multi-dimensional understanding. This includes its human dimensions as well as its structural causes (see Chapter 4). The understanding of gender issues has also grown, but more slowly and unevenly. This is partly political, since gender equity may be threatening to the power and privilege of policy-makers themselves rather than being confined to a constituency ‘out there’. However, it is also partly conceptual and lies in the nature of mainstream macroeconomic analysis, models and methodologies.

The work of gender advocates and feminist academics has helped to keep gender issues alive in the development agenda in some form or other since the 1970s. Moreover, the clear links that have been identified between poverty and gender inequality, particularly where SAPs have been imposed, have shown that unless macroeconomic thinking is better informed by gender analysis, macroeconomic policy will remain gender blind.

Document(s) 4 of 13