CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 4
4.3 Gender and development in the third world
4.3.2 Women in Development (WID)
Boserup was joined by a group of largely western feminists influenced by liberalism who created their own language and preoccupations under the title Women in Development (WID) (Parpart 1993; Rathgeber 1990). The term “WID” was initially used by the Women’s
Committee of the Washington, DC chapter of the Society for International Development as part of a deliberate strategy to bring to the attention of policy makers in the north, the new evidence generated by the work of Ester Boserup (Moser 1993; Rathegeber 1990). These specialists stressed women’s equality, which could be achieved through education, employment, and material benefits such as land and credit.
Under the rubric of WID, the recognition that women’s experience of development and societal change differed from that of men was
institutionalized and it became legitimate for research to focus specifically on women’s experiences and perceptions (Rathgeber 1990:491).
Initially the concerns of WID specialists continued be marginalised. However, increasingly
development planners from the major world institutions recognised that their policies were not working and decided that they needed to include women in their planning in order to curb world population and reach the poorest of the poor. With this recognition came the
declaration by the United Nations of the Decade for the Advancement of Women from 1975 - 1985 at a world meeting in Mexico (Moser 1989). As a result, gender research increased and WID policy makers gained recognition within development bureaucracies.
During the period of the decade from 1975-1985, the WID approach continued to emphasise an equity approach in their planning. They lobbied to gain equity for women in the
development planning process and to ensure that women were seen as active participants in development (Moser 1989; 1993). Since then, WID planners involved in government and multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, have shifted their emphasis from equity to what they term the efficiency model which seeks to ensure that development efforts are more effective and efficient (Moser 1993). While there remains an emphasis in the WID school on the need for women’s equal economic participation in the development process, there is now also a focus on strengthening the capacity of women to be involved in the development process (Moser 1993).
For Caroline Moser (1989; 1993), an influential gender and development specialist employed by the World Bank, developing women’s capacity lies in understanding that in most third world households, women play a triple role. This triple role includes reproduction, production, and community managing functions. Women’s work includes not only the reproductive work of childbearing and rearing responsibilities, but also productive work as secondary earners in the agricultural and informal sectors. In addition, in situations where resources such as water and health are inadequate, women in their roles as wives and mothers take it upon themselves to manage their communities. They often initiate and organise local protest groups to ensure the survival of their communities.
There is, however, a spatial division between the public world of men and the private world of women. This spatial division results in only the productive roles of women being valued while their reproductive and community managing work is either ignored or undervalued because it seen as “natural” and nonproductive (Moser 1993:27-36). In most third world
countries, argues Moser (1993:27), the myth of the male as the primary breadwinner
predominates even where the reality suggests otherwise. Also in these situations men do not have a clearly defined reproductive function means that very different roles are undertaken between men and women. In the community, a woman’s role is to provide items for
collective consumption while men have a community leadership role which is formalised in the political sphere. In contrast to women, men’s work is valued either directly through remuneration or indirectly through status and political power. “While the tendency is to see women’s and men’s needs as similar, the reality of their lives shows a very different
situation” (Moser 1989:1801).
In asserting that the development needs of men and women were very different through an analysis of their roles in the sexual division of labour, the WID approach laid the foundation for gender and development planning theory. Moser (1989; 1993) argued that men and women do not only play different roles in society, have distinct levels of control over
resources, but they also therefore have very different needs. In defining the needs of women she appropriated the work of political scientist Maxine Molyneux (1985) who had made the distinction between strategic and practical needs of women.
Molyneux (1985) argued against the notion of “women’s interests”. She asserted that oppression results from a range of structures and mechanisms functioning on a number of different levels and thus even interests shared by women are shaped by class, race, and ethnicity and are therefore sometimes competing and conflicting. Having said this,
Molyneux (1985) maintained that women nonetheless had certain general interests. These she termed “gender interests” to differentiate them “from the false homogeneity imposed by the notion of women’s interests” (Molyneux 1985:232).
Gender interests develop as a result of their social positioning and can be either strategic or practical. Strategic gender interests are those interests formulated from an analysis of women’s subordination to men in order to achieve a more equitable society. They include the abolition of the sexual division of labour, the alleviation of domestic labour and childcare, the removal of institutional forms of discrimination, attainment of political equality, the establishment of the freedom of choice over childbearing, and the adoption of adequate measures against male violence and control over women (Molyneux 1985:232). Practical
gender interests are those formulated from the concrete conditions experienced by women as a result of their social positioning within the gender division of labour. They are usually a response to an immediate perceived need for human survival without any long terms goals for structural change (Molyneux 1985:233).
Moser (1989; 1993) popularised this distinction between strategic and gender interests in the development literature. For Moser, distinguishing differing needs is crucial to the planning process which focuses on the prioritised concerns of women. Moser (1989; 1993) defines these prioritised concerns as interests which she then translates into needs.
With this distinction, gender policy and planning can be formulated and the tools and techniques for implementing them clarified. For example, if the strategic gender interest... is for a more equal society, then a strategic gender need... can be identified as the abolition of the gender division of labour. On the other hand, if the practical gender interest is for human survival, then a practical gender need could be the provision of water (Moser 1993:38).
Moser’s appropriation of strategic and practical needs is still widely used today in the literature, particularly in training materials on gender and development (CEDPA 1996;
Parker 1993; Slocum et al 1995; von Kotze and Holloway 1996; Williams et al 1994).