Chapter 6 Review Questions Answer Key

1. Proponents of the women and development (WAD) approach focused on women’s knowledge, work, goals, and responsibilities and called for women-only projects that would enhance women’s powers and sideline patriarchal forces. They called for recognition of women’s special role in the development process. While an important corrective to the uncritical assumption that gender power relations could be easily changed by development projects, WAD remained a minority approach to development. Yet its concern with women’s cultures, economic exploitation, and the need for alternatives to capitalist development in some cases led local grassroots organizations to develop women-only projects that were intended to keep women out of the worst effects of capitalist development.

2. According to the United Nations, gender mainstreaming is the integration of gender into the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the policies and programs in all political, economic, and societal spheres. The approach integrates checklists, gender impact assessments, awareness-raising, training manuals, expert meetings, and data collection.

3. Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security recognized sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) as a human rights issue and introduced gender perspectives in the peace and security work of the United Nations. Specifically, Resolution 1325 acknowledges that armed conflict has a unique impact on women and girls and that specific gender strategies are required to address the needs of women and girls during conflicts and in the post-conflict stages. The recommendations arising from Resolution 1325 include the prevention of SGBV; a gender perspective in peace negotiations, disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) strategies, peacekeeping operations, and reporting; and increased participation of women in international institutions and training, and as UN humanitarian personnel and military observers.

4. The focus on women and girls’ economic empowerment, however, must not ignore other important gender equality concerns, including the oppression of marginalized communities and gender non-conforming men and transgender individuals and the need for intersectional analyses of diverse gender experiences (consideration of members from diverse social categories). Gender and development scholarship has offered important insights into why gender inequality persists. While historical trajectories of gender and development studies often present a continuum of development thinking, beginning with the women in development (WID) approach, moving on to deeper analyses of gender inequality and masculinities, the programs and policies that have emerged over time do not follow a neat historical and linear trajectory, nor do they reflect the progressive work of feminist and gender and development scholars. While addressing gender inequality in international development as a human rights imperative, as well as central to development projects’ success and efforts to improve the quality of life for all, achieving gender equality requires involvement of diverse actors and stakeholders informed by critical feminist theoretical insights. In the sections below, we document the progression in feminist scholarship from a WID approach to a gender and development (GAD) framework and to contemporary analysis of masculinities and development.

5. The 1980 World Conference on Women in Copenhagen called for the inclusion of men into development work supporting women’s equality and empowerment. In the 1990s, men and masculinities were increasingly identified as development issues focusing, for instance, on the role of men in the spread of HIV/AIDS, violence against women, and opposition to women’s empowerment. Men were also encouraged to co-operate with gender mainstreaming efforts, although the focus remained on women. Since the turn of the century, increasing attention has been paid to the developmental problems of men and boys, particularly their underperformance in schools, high levels of youth unemployment, their involvement in crime, and their role in the spread of HIV/AIDS.

6. The welfare approach was highly influenced by prevailing theories of modernization and economic growth. Development issues were constructed as “problems” to be solved with policies and programs geared to addressing “overpopulation,” rurality, and lack of modernization. As such, the family planning approach involved treating women as the “focus of social control of fertility.” Indonesia, for example, introduced a strong national family planning program in the 1950s with the introduction of contraceptives. By 1970, President Suharto had introduced the National Family Planning Coordinator Board (BKBBN) to control population growth in the country. Family planning fieldworkers visited individual households, and Village Contraceptive Distribution Centres were set up around the country. This comprehensive national policy provided most rural and remote communities with contraceptives; however, the contraceptive choices were limited, and the delivery of services was shaped by authoritarian state structures and coercion. Targeting women for population control and essentializing them in relation to biological functions as mothers continues to dominate some contemporary approaches to addressing maternal and newborn health, treating women as “walking wombs.”

7. Feminist theory and gender analytical frameworks have shaped international commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment for more than 50 years. Over these five decades, the international community has committed to a large and growing list of commitments to gender equality, including feminist foreign policies adopted in Sweden (2015) and Canada (2017) and multilateral commitments to gender equality outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including SDG 5 on Gender Equality introduced in 2015 and Security Council Resolution 1325 designed to promote women, peace, and security in 2000, to name a few. The growing number of international commitments marks an important moment for the international community to consider the challenges and successes, as well as future opportunities for the promotion of gender equality.

8. Women’s economic empowerment may produce other benefits such as improving a country’s economic performance; however, women’s economic empowerment must also be seen as a rights-based strategy and a gender equality priority. A feminist approach to women’s economic empowerment recognizes that the “current economic model is broken” and that strategies to simultaneously tackle gender inequality and economic inequality are needed. Doing so requires commitments to address structural and social causes of economic inequality, promoting and investing in collective organizing, and supporting the agency and decision-making power of marginalized groups. Drawing on feminist scholarship, the Oxfam Canada report highlights the social norms, structures, attitudes, and behaviours that affect daily practice.

9. Targeting women for population control and essentializing them in relation to biological functions as mothers continues to dominate some contemporary approaches to addressing maternal and newborn health, treating women as “walking wombs.”

10. The question, implicitly as well as explicitly raised by post-colonial and decolonial feminists, asks whether it is possible to create alliances among women from different parts of the Global North and South. Such alliances, based on the idea that women worldwide have something in common, have been referred to as Global Sisterhood. The critiques of women from the Global South, in particular DAWN and other post-colonial and decolonial feminists, raise serious questions about the idea of a Global Sisterhood, as it often reinforces the dominant position of Western feminisms. Instead, feminists from the Global South have looked for an alternative to create alliances that would recognize and respect differences and adopt more democratic agenda-setting and prioritizing of issues related to gender and development.