Recognizing Women in Development Policies: Shifts and Strategies

For much of the twentieth century, women barely appeared in the pages of formal development policy – except as mothers, caregivers, or targets of welfare programs. They were seen as dependent beneficiaries, not contributors. That changed dramatically in the 1970s, when a convergence of academic research, feminist advocacy, and international diplomacy forced a fundamental rethink. Women were no longer just a social concern. They were a key constituency in development itself. Understanding how that shift happened – and what followed – is essential to grasping how gender and development policy is designed today.

The welfare model: where women were before the 1970s
Ester Boserup and the intellectual turning point
The 1975 Mexico City conference: putting women on the policy map
The UN Decade for Women (1976-1985): from declaration to policy infrastructure
The Women in Development (WID) approach: from welfare to economic agency
The shift to Gender and Development (GAD): questioning the structures
What the evolution means for policy today

The welfare model: where women were before the 1970s

Development policy in the post-war era was shaped by a simple but deeply flawed assumption: economic growth would lift everyone equally. Women were largely invisible in this framework. The welfare approach of the 1950s and 1960s positioned women primarily as mothers, caregivers, and homemakers. Policies targeting them were centered on maternal health, child nutrition, and family planning – roles tied exclusively to their domestic identities.

This was not just a policy oversight. It reflected a deeper assumption that women’s economic contributions were either nonexistent or irrelevant to national development goals. Welfare policies actively reinforced gender inequalities by confining women to domestic roles, ignoring what women contributed in agriculture, trade, and informal labor markets. Women’s work – whether in the household or the wider economy – was systematically undervalued, underpaid, or rendered invisible in official statistics.

Ester Boserup and the intellectual turning point

The first major challenge to this thinking came from a Danish economist named Ester Boserup. In 1970, she published Woman’s Role in Economic Development – described as the first systematic investigation into what happens to women during economic and social growth in the developing world. Boserup used empirical data across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to demonstrate that development was not just bypassing women – it was often actively harming their economic and social status.

Her central argument was that women’s contributions, both in the household and in the paid workforce, contributed meaningfully to national economies. In many African societies, she documented that women occupied central roles in agricultural production, making key decisions about crop selection and resource allocation. Yet as modernization introduced new tools and technologies, men monopolized those resources, widening the productivity gap and marginalizing women economically. Boserup explained differences in women’s status as a matter of social structure rather than individual destiny, and she was among the first scholars to directly name the “invisibility of women” in economic analysis as a problem to be corrected.

Her work triggered a wave of feminist scholarship and policy reform. Her insights became foundational to the Women in Development (WID) movement that emerged in the 1970s, which challenged development programs to recognize women as economic actors rather than passive welfare recipients. Boserup’s book is also widely credited as a key motivation behind the UN Decade for Women – a decade-long international effort that would reshape global policy on women and development.

The 1975 Mexico City conference: putting women on the policy map

By the mid-1970s, the growing body of feminist scholarship had created enough political momentum for institutional change. As the international feminist movement gained momentum, the UN General Assembly declared 1975 as the International Women’s Year and organized the first World Conference on Women, held in Mexico City. The conference brought together 133 governments and 6,000 NGO representatives – a scale that demonstrated how seriously the international community had begun to take women’s issues.

The Mexico City conference produced two landmark documents: the Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and Peace, and the World Plan of Action for the Implementation of the Objectives of the International Women’s Year. Importantly, the language of these documents marked a decisive break from welfare-era thinking. Women were no longer framed as recipients of protection – they were framed as contributors to development and partners in peace. The shift was conceptual and political at once.

At the urging of the conference, the UN General Assembly subsequently declared 1976-1985 as the UN Decade for Women, with a stated focus on increasing literacy, vocational training, education, and employment opportunities for women, alongside improvements in health and welfare services.

The UN Decade for Women (1976-1985): from declaration to policy infrastructure

The Decade was not just symbolic. It produced concrete, institutional changes that transformed how governments and international organizations operated. To report progress annually, governments had to establish “women’s departments,” appoint cabinet ministers for women’s affairs, and begin formally assessing the roles and statuses of women in their countries. This was significant: it created accountability mechanisms where none had existed before.

Several key institutions were created during this period that remain active today, including the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women. By 1979, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which 170 countries had ratified by 1985. CEDAW established binding obligations on governments to eliminate discrimination against women in all areas of public and private life – a step far beyond any previous international agreement.

The three major conferences of the decade – Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), and Nairobi (1985) – each built on the last. The Copenhagen conference in 1980 identified persistent barriers to women’s advancement, including lack of political will, insufficient women in decision-making positions, and inadequate childcare and credit facilities. The Nairobi conference closed the decade by adopting the “Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women,” a document that broke new ground by declaring all issues to be women’s issues – signaling that gender equality could not be siloed from mainstream policy.

However, the Nairobi conference also issued a candid assessment of limitations. The data presented to member states revealed that the improvements of the decade had benefited only a limited number of women, with deteriorating economic conditions slowing progress in many developing countries. The decade had raised the agenda but had not delivered transformation for most women on the ground.

The Women in Development (WID) approach: from welfare to economic agency

The political momentum of the UN Decade gave formal shape to the Women in Development (WID) approach – a framework that had been building since the early 1970s. The WID approach emerged as a direct response to evidence that development processes had overlooked women’s economic contributions, particularly in agrarian societies. Its core argument was straightforward: women were being left out of development, and including them would make development both fairer and more effective.

WID made a strategic choice to frame women’s inclusion in economic terms. From 1975 onwards, the emphasis shifted to national governments developing strategies to give women equal access to educational and employment opportunities, political representation, and physical and social welfare. The adoption of efficiency arguments – demonstrating that excluding women wasted human resources and limited economic growth – proved strategically valuable in getting women’s issues onto mainstream development agendas.

The UN Development Programme established a special Division for Women in Development to ensure women participated in UNDP projects. In the United States, lobbying by the WID caucus of the Society for International Development resulted in the 1973 Percy Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, which required USAID programs to integrate women into national economies – one of the earliest legislative mandates of its kind.

Still, WID had real limitations. A 1985 OECD Development Center report concluded that many women-focused projects were too welfare-oriented, recommending that future projects avoid the home economics approach and focus on income-generating activities instead. Critics also argued that WID treated women as a homogeneous group and focused on integrating them into existing structures without questioning why those structures had excluded them in the first place.

The shift to Gender and Development (GAD): questioning the structures

By the 1980s, a new framework emerged to address these gaps. The Gender and Development (GAD) approach did not just ask how to include women – it asked why gender inequality existed and how development structures perpetuated it. GAD is grounded in three core premises: gender relations are fundamentally power relations; gender is a socio-cultural construction rather than a biological given; and structural changes in gender roles and relations are possible.

The GAD approach focused on the socially constructed differences between men and women, the need to challenge existing gender roles and relations, and the effects of class differences on development. Rather than treating women as a separate “target group” to be added into existing programs, GAD examined the relationships between men and women – and how those relationships were shaped by institutions, power, and social norms. GAD signals three clear departures from WID: it shifts focus from women to gender and unequal power relations; it re-examines all social, political, and economic structures through the lens of gender differentials; and it recognizes that achieving gender equality requires transformative change from the household to the global level.

The 1995 Beijing Conference gave further institutional force to GAD principles. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action asserted women’s rights as human rights and introduced gender mainstreaming as a policy strategy – integrating gender perspectives into all branches of development planning and implementation. Gender equality was also subsequently embedded in the UN Sustainable Development Goals as Goal 5, affirming that empowering women and girls is both an objective in itself and a prerequisite for sustainable development across all sectors.

What the evolution means for policy today

The progression from welfare to WID to GAD reflects more than a change in terminology. It reflects a fundamental shift in how development policy understands women’s place in society. The transition represented a shift from seeing women primarily as mothers and caregivers in need of support, to recognizing them as workers, entrepreneurs, and leaders whose inclusion is essential to economic and social progress.

Yet each transition also exposed the limits of the previous approach. WID got women on the map but kept them in a subordinate position within existing systems. GAD challenged those systems but struggled to translate transformative principles into on-the-ground practice. Today, there is growing acknowledgment that sustainable development cannot occur without the meaningful inclusion and empowerment of women in all aspects of development planning and implementation – not as a special category, but as full and equal participants whose rights, agency, and capabilities are central to the entire enterprise.

Gender disparities remain stark: on average, women in the global labour market still earn around 20 per cent less than men, and 54 per cent of countries still lack laws covering all key areas of gender equality. The policy evolution of the past five decades has created the frameworks and the language – but the work of making those frameworks real is still very much in progress.

What do you think? The shift from welfare to WID gave women economic visibility, but critics argue it stopped short of challenging the structures that kept them unequal – does making women “economically useful” go far enough, or does real change require questioning who controls economic systems in the first place? And given that gender wage gaps and legal inequalities persist decades after CEDAW, what does it say about the gap between international policy commitments and national implementation?

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Table of Contents

The welfare model: where women were before the 1970s 🔗

Ester Boserup and the intellectual turning point 🔗

The 1975 Mexico City conference: putting women on the policy map 🔗

The UN Decade for Women (1976-1985): from declaration to policy infrastructure 🔗

The Women in Development (WID) approach: from welfare to economic agency 🔗

The shift to Gender and Development (GAD): questioning the structures 🔗

What the evolution means for policy today 🔗