WK 13.1 Gender and development
According to the reading, gender and development is an interdisciplinary field of research and applied study that implements a feminist approach to understanding and addressing the disparate impact that economic development and globalization have on people based upon their location, gender, class background, and other socio-political identities. A strictly economic approach to development views a country’s development in quantitative terms such as job creation, inflation control, and high employment. Gender and development consider many of these same factors, however, gender and development emphasize efforts towards understanding how multifaced these issues are in the entangled context of culture, government, and globalization. Furthermore, there is also a term ‘women in development’ which is a theory of development by contesting that economic development had identical impacts on men and women. The focus of the 1970s feminist movements and their repeated calls of employment opportunities in the development agenda meant that particular attention was given to the productive labor of women, leaving aside reproductive concerns and social welfare. The gender and development theory focus on the socially constructed differences between men and women, the need to challenge existing gender roles and relations, and the creation and effects of class differences on development.
What I learned is that gender and development approach is not concerned specifically with women, but with the way in which a society assigns roles, responsibilities and expectations to both women and men. It also shows the way in which men and women work together.
Do you know if there are other approaches with different paradigms also have played a historically important role in advancing theories ad practices in gender and development?
Hanane Ben Abdeslam
Comments
Post a Comment