Gender and Development

Janet Momsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317378402
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This revised and updated third edition of Gender and Development provides a concise, accessible introduction to gender and development issues in the developing world and in the transition countries of Eastern and Central Europe.

The nine chapters include discussions on: changes in theoretical approaches, gender complexities and the Sustainable Development Goals; social and biological reproduction including changing attitudes to family planning; variation in education and access to housing; differences in health and violence at major life stages for women and men; natural disasters, climate change and declining natural resources; and gender roles in rural and urban areas. There is also enhanced coverage of topics such as global trade, sport as a development tool, masculinities and sustainable agriculture. Maps and statistics have been updated throughout and their coverage widened. New case studies have been added on Bangladesh, violence in Peru and India, and halal tourism and garbage collection in the Maldives. The book features student-friendly items such as chapter learning objectives, discussion questions and annotated guides to further reading and websites. The text is enlivened throughout with examples and case studies drawn from the author's worldwide field research and consultancies with international development agencies over four decades and her experience of teaching the topic to undergraduates and postgraduates in many countries.

Gender and Development is the only broad-based introduction to the topic written specifically for a student audience. It will be an essential text for a variety of courses on development, women's studies, sociology, anthropology and geography.

Introduction

Gender is a development issue

Learning objectives

When you have finished reading this chapter, you should be able to:

• understand flexible gender identities and roles

• appreciate the gender impact of sudden economic change

• be aware of different approaches to gender and development

• be familiar with the basic spatial patterns of gender and development.

This book is concerned with the changing impact of development on women and men. Since the first edition was published in 2004 new problems including climate change, terrorism, economic shocks, civil wars and increasing rates of migration have led to a reorientation of development policies. Yet the development process continues to affect women and men in different ways. The after-effects of colonialism, and the peripheral position of poor countries of the South and those with economies in transition, exacerbate the effects of gender discrimination. The modern sector takes over subsistence activities formerly undertaken by women. Often a majority of the better-paid jobs involving new technology go to men, but male income is less likely to be spent on the family. However, new low-paid and low-skilled jobs for young women are also created in factories producing goods for export (Box 1.1).

Modernization of agriculture has altered the division of labour between the sexes, increasing women’s dependent status as well as workload. Women often lose control over resources such as land and are generally excluded from access to improved agricultural methods. They may also suffer more than men from the impact of climate change largely because male mobility is higher than female, both between places and between jobs, and more women are being left alone to support children. In some countries, especially in the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America, women often cannot do paid work or travel without a male guardian’s written permission. Women may carry a double or even triple burden of work as they cope with housework, childcare and subsistence food production, in addition to an expanding involvement in paid employment. Everywhere women work longer hours than men. The pressure on gender relations of the changing status of women, particularly of young women, combined with growing impoverishment at the household level, is crucial to the success or failure of development policies.

Plate 1.1 Bangladesh: young women working in a garment factory in Dhaka. They are doing finishing work on garments

Source: author

Gender (the socially acquired notions of masculinity and femininity by which women and men are identified) is a widely used and often misunderstood term. It is sometimes mistakenly conflated with sex or used to refer only to women. Gender identities, because they are socially acquired, are flexible and not simple binary constructions. Women and girls with non-conforming sexual identities including lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgendered and inter-sex (LBGTI) persons may be especially vulnerable to gender-based violence (GBV). In societies everywhere heterosexuality is considered to be the norm and is socially regulated. Today there is greater awareness of multiple sexualities and transgender individuals in poor countries of the South, but 72 countries in 2018 still criminalized same-sex practices, based in many cases on unchanged colonial laws. International development has itself harmed individuals with non-conforming sexual identities through conquest, migration and globalization as well as colonialism (Oosterhoff and Sweetman 2018).

In Polynesia, in families without daughters, one son may be selected when very young to be raised as a girl to fulfil the family’s needs for someone to undertake a daughter’s roles, such as care of siblings and housework. As adults, these individuals usually continue to live and dress as women, and occupy female roles with jobs as waitresses or maids in the rapidly growing tourist industry, or even as transvestite prostitutes. Today the faafafine (trying to be like a lady) are also found in Melanesia and are becoming more open and in some forms more aggressive (Fairbairn-Dunlop 2002; Ardener and Shaw 2005). Bacha posh, literally meaning ‘dressed up as a boy’, is a cultural practice in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in which some families without sons will pick a daughter to live and behave like a boy. She will dress like a boy, have her hair cut short and take a male name. This enables the child to behave more freely, attend school, play sports and find work, and allows the family to avoid the stigma associated with not having male children. Unlike the faafafine, the bacha posh usually switch back to being women when they reach marriageable age in their late teens. Many women find this difficult because they have not been socialized in women’s roles and miss the freedom they had as a boy (Worcholak 2012). Such traditional patterns of gender flexibility also occur in other parts of the Global South.

Gender relations (the socially constructed form of relations between women and men) have been interrogated in terms of the way development policies change the balance of power between women and men. Gender roles (the household tasks and types of employment socially assigned to women and men) are not fixed and globally consistent and indeed become more flexible with the changes brought about by economic development. Everywhere gender is crosscut by differences in class, race, ethnicity, religion, age and disability. The much-criticized binary division between ‘Western’ women and the ‘Other’, between white and non-white and between colonizer and colonized is both patronizing and simplistic (Mohanty 1984). Feminists have often seen women as socially constituted as a homogeneous group on the basis of shared oppression. But in order to understand these gender relations we must interpret them within specific societies and on the basis of historical and political practice, not a priori on gender terms alone. Different places and societies have different practices and it is necessary to be cognisant of this heterogeneity within a certain global homogeneity of gender roles. At the same time we need to be aware of different voices and to give them agency. The subaltern voice is hard to hear but by presenting experiences from fieldwork, I have tried to incorporate it. The voices of educated women and men of the South can interpret postcoloniality, but because they write in the colonizers’ languages, their voices have to be listened to on several levels. By combining an appreciation of different places and different voices we can arrive at an understanding of how the process of economic change in the South and in the post-communist countries is impacting people and communities (Kinnaird and Momsen 1993).

Clearly, the roles of men and women in different places show great variation: most clerks in Martinique are women but this is not so in Madras, just as women make up the vast majority of domestic servants in Lima but not in Lagos. Nearly 90 per cent of sales workers in Accra are women but in Algeria they are almost all men (Plates 1.2 and 7.2). In every country the jobs done predominantly by women are the least well paid and have the lowest status. In the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, Russia and China, where most jobs were open to men and women under communism, the transition to capitalism has led to increased unemployment, especially for women. Dentistry in Hungary had long been largely a female occupation because it had lower status than medicine, but after 1989 dentists were able to earn more from foreign patients than physicians and suddenly dental schools had a majority of male students. In most parts of the world the gender gap in political representation has become smaller, but in the former USSR and its satellite countries in Eastern and Central Europe there has been a rapid decline in average female representation in parliament, from 27 per cent in 1987 under communism to 7 per cent in 1994 (United Nations 1995b). The relationship between development and the spatial patterns of the gender gap provides the main theme of this book.

In the third millennium most of the world’s population is living more comfortably than it was a century ago and life expectancy has increased. Birth rates are rapidly falling and population growth rates peaked in South America in 1961, Africa in 1981, Asia in 1985 and Oceania in 2005, as women gain more rights and have access to contraception. Absolute decline in population numbers takes longer, but as health care improves, women are becoming in the majority as they live longer than men (Dorling 2013). Women as a group now have a greater voice in both their public and private lives. The spread of education and literacy has opened up new opportunities for many people and the time–space compression associated with globalization is making possible the increasingly rapid and widespread distribution of information and scientific knowledge. Improvements in communications, however, also make us aware that economic development is not always unidirectional and benefits are not equally available.

Plate 1.2 Burkina Faso: women vegetable growers accompanied by small children, selling their produce in the town of Ouahigouya in northern Burkina Faso. Buyers, generally men, come from as far away as Togo

Source: Vincent Dao, University of California, Davis

Women’s organizations, and the various United Nations international women’s conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen, Nairobi and Beijing over the last three decades, have put gender issues firmly on the development agenda but economic growth and modernization is not gender neutral. The experiences of different states and regions show that economic prosperity helps gender equality but some gender gaps are resistant to change. Rapid growth, as in the East Asian countries, has led to a narrowing of the gender differences in wages and education but inequality in political representation remains.

Sudden changes, such as new kinds of industrialization or the post-Cold War transition in Eastern Europe, create new gender differences in which women are generally the losers (Box 1.1).

Box 1.1 Bangladesh: gendered progress in development

Bangladesh has the seventh largest population and is the eighth most densely populated country in the world. Shortly after independence in 1971 Bangladesh was infamously dubbed an economic basket case (Paprocki 2018: 959). The country is seen as a successful example of neoliberal development and has recently been upgraded from a low-income country (LDC) to a lower-middle-income country (LMIC) according to the World Bank’s classification. The government now aspires to graduate to middle-income status by 2021 and Bangladesh is considered as one of 11 emerging economies (Alamgir 2017). The Human Development Index for the country has improved from 36 in 1995 to 50 in 2013. Much of this change has been brought about through the activities of domestic and international NGOs and the inflow of remittances from Bangladeshi male migrants working overseas.

There are clear gender aspects of this change. In 2002 Bangladesh had 106 men per 100 women but by 2014 this had fallen to 102. In 2002 life expectancy for both men and women was the same at 60.8 years but just 12 years later male life expectancy had risen to 68.5 but female life expectancy was 70.2 years. This greater improvement in life expectancy for women reflects in part the fall in the fertility rate over the same period from 3.8 children per woman to 2.2, with an increasing number of pregnancies and births benefiting from modern birth control and medical services. This was helped by the largest total and per capita funding for population control of any country in the world during the 1980s which improved access to reproductive health care for poor women, but was accompanied by reports of forced sterilizations and other problems (Paprocki 2018).

Then in 1976 Bangladesh, through the Grameen Bank, led the way in another major development trend, becoming the first site of microcredit aimed at reducing rural poverty through providing small loans to rural women (Yunus 1997). Other agencies also provided loans and the Grameen Bank diversified and began working with other lenders such as foreign telephone companies. By 2000 the Grameen Bank was lending money to 2.36 million borrowers in more than 40,000 Bangladeshi villages. Over 60 per cent of rural households are now members of microfinance agencies but the results are mixed, with rural indebtedness increasing and the empowerment of women limited.

Opportunities for female employment and urbanization have also brought many changes. Although Bangladesh has achieved gender parity at primary school level, adult literacy is higher for men at 62 per cent compared to 53 per cent for women. The rate of child marriage and early pregnancy is still one of the highest in the world and women’s lives are dominated by a patrilineal and patrilocal system. As a predominantly Muslim country Bangladeshi women’s lives are controlled by the system of purdah under which any kind of work for women outside the home is a violation of purdah. Yet the migration of men has enabled women to take leadership roles in their rural communities as hygiene promoters and community midwives, and by discouraging girls to marry before they are 18 (Guardian Weekly 9 October 2015). But when the garment industry started in Bangladesh in the 1970s, women workers were needed in the cities.

The garment industry

In 1974 Europe and the USA under the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) imposed quotas on the import of clothes from the newly industrialized countries, namely Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, in order to protect their own clothing industries. Bangladesh was quota free and had very low wages for women workers. The country first exported ready-made clothes to France in 1977. South Korea provided the necessary training and technology to Bangladesh to enable it to compete in the global market and by 1986 Bangladesh had 753 factories, increasing to 3,000 in 2000. Most of the factories are in the capital Dhaka with some in Chittagong. Today Bangladesh is the second largest exporter of garments, after China, in the world and the ready-made garment industry (RMG) sector accounts for 80 per cent of the country’s annual exports and employs nearly four million women (Plate 1.1).

Factory work in the garment industry conflicts with cultural expectations, but poverty has driven a redefinition of purdah as purdah of the mind, thus making factory w...