DP: What is the role of women in development theories

What is Development?

… expanding the choices people have to lead lives that they value.

UNDP Human Development Report

I would not answer the title question through this post but it is a way for me to raise my concern about the nowadays situation of women inside of our system but also my reflexion on this situation in the OECD countries.

According to the above quote that we saw at class (one of multitude definitions of development), my feeling is that it is still a group of people who are not always allowed to choose or don’t have the capacity to choose even in our so-called “developed” countries. The group of people is the women but I would like also to add as a variable education. In my opinion, if we want to change our system of values, education is the first step – but what kind of education-.

However, I would like to focus more here in the case of women. In my opinion, in most of case women are not considered as part integral of the society. Patriarchal system, political decisions or traditions still conditioned the role of women in the society. In my opinion, the gender issue is still considering a question for the feminists and I think it is an error, it might be a concern for the whole society.

Women have to struggle with different inequality and violence depending of where they are living and the position they have. You have explicit inequality like the physical violence but also the implicit way of inequality such as differences in the wages, the role of a women in our society, the double work (domestic unpaid work), under-representation in political and companies in high positions or the minimizing of the role of women in the society.

Another idea that I find interesting is that women are still dependent of the market situation, they are considering as an instrument for the market, – an idea from the Professor Silvia Federeci during the presentation of her book “Calibán y la bruja. Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria”, where I attended by chance-.

To return back to the title of the post, I make a similar reflexion with the development theories. We see that gender ‘s criteria are always included in index to measure the development of a country or in programmes to fight poverty such as the Millenium development goal. However, most of known theories of development have not taken in account gender concept in a concrete and deep analysis, – despite creation of institution focus on women such as UN Women-. I am conscious that now in development programs and index to measure it, you have the gender criteria but I have still the feeling there is a lack of serious awareness of this topic. In a perfect world we might talk about population and its condition to measure how “healthy” is a country.

I am not a specialist in gender issue but feminist theories have dealt with this topic in multitude aspects, but why we find almost only this this topic behind feminist theory and why not to include as a transversal variable in every general theories of development or in critics of our system –and further I would like also question the social movement.

However, I think that the situation of women is still weak and in the countries where they reach some equity the situation is taking step backward. So could we think if there have been real advances in how the women are considered or just some advances to content the progressive women?

To conclude, I would like to link this part with education issue. I remember that in the first class I chose the picture of a girl who was reading and I did the association between women and education. Again, with what I have seen in our classes and what is happening outside in the “real world”, the changes should come from people, so education is the basis. There is again another debate of what kind of education.  And finally of course, this post is a personal reflexion and not an academic work.

Comments Off on DP: What is the role of women in development theories / 26 Nov 2012 por Stephanie Barrial
IMSD /

Comentarios cerrados.