Evolving Paradigms: From Women in Development to Gender and Development

For much of the twentieth century, development planners assumed that economic growth would automatically benefit everyone – including women. When that assumption was proven wrong, the world had to rethink not just its policies, but its entire understanding of gender, power, and development. The result was a major intellectual and practical shift: from the Women in Development (WID) approach to the more transformative Gender and Development (GAD) paradigm. Understanding this shift is essential for anyone studying how societies address inequality, particularly in contexts like India where structural gender disparities remain deeply embedded.

The origins of Women in Development (WID) 🔗

The WID framework emerged in the 1970s, largely catalyzed by Danish economist Ester Boserup‘s 1970 book Women’s Role in Economic Development. Boserup’s research challenged the assumption that development programs affected men and women equally, demonstrating instead that economic modernization often marginalized women and disrupted their traditional roles as producers. Her data was striking: according to the 1971 census in India, women constituted 48.2% of the population but accounted for only 13% of recorded economic activity, with 94% of the female workforce concentrated in the unorganized sector.

Boserup’s work inspired the UN Decade for Women (1975-1985), pushing international agencies to reconsider their gender-blind development strategies. The WID approach reconceptualized women’s relationship to development – instead of treating women primarily as mothers and caregivers in need of welfare, it recognized them as workers, entrepreneurs, and leaders. The core argument to policymakers was both ethical and economic: excluding half the population was unjust, and development programs would be more effective if women were integrated into them.

What WID focused on 🔗

WID concentrated on giving women access to education, employment, and credit. Early WID projects focused on practical needs – building a well closer to a village so women spent less time fetching water, or providing skills training so women could generate income. These were real improvements, and the WID movement was genuinely groundbreaking in making women visible to policymakers for the first time. However, the approach also had a fundamental blind spot: it asked what women could contribute to development, not what development could do for women.

The limitations that led to change 🔗

By the late 1980s, WID’s shortcomings were becoming impossible to ignore. WID focused on women as a unit of analysis without recognizing the important divisions that exist among women, and it treated them as a homogeneous category. It tried to fit women into a pre-existing, unequal system without questioning the rules of that system.

More critically, WID often added to women’s burdens rather than reducing them. It encouraged women to enter paid employment – but without asking men to share domestic responsibilities, it simply created a “double burden.” Women were now expected to manage both paid work and their full load of unpaid care work. WID/WAD intervention strategies tended to concentrate on income-generating activities without accounting for the time burdens such strategies placed on women, and no value was ascribed to social and cultural reproduction. The root cause – unequal power relations between men and women – was left entirely intact.

The rise of Gender and Development (GAD) 🔗

The Gender and Development paradigm emerged prominently in the 1980s as a direct response to these failures. GAD is essentially based on three 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. This was a fundamentally different starting point from WID.

The most important conceptual leap in GAD is the move from women as the unit of analysis to gender relations. GAD departed from WID, which discussed women’s subordination without examining broader systems of gender relations. It argued that to focus on women in isolation was to misidentify the actual problem. The real problem was not simply that women were excluded – it was the unequal social relations between men and women that structured that exclusion in the first place.

GAD’s core argument: gender is relational 🔗

The GAD paradigm centers on gender relations, the transformation of which cannot be accomplished without the participation of men, because it is the relations between men and women that are the object of change. This means that development interventions must address both men’s and women’s roles, responsibilities, and access to power. With WID, the dominant rationale for women’s development programs was efficiency – mostly what women could do to accelerate development. But GAD emphasized what development could do for women. It shifted the goal from efficiency to equity and empowerment.

GAD also challenged the separation between the public and private spheres. The unpaid labor performed by women in the household – including child-rearing and domestic chores – is crucial to the functioning of the economy, yet it is often invisible and undervalued. GAD pushes for recognition of this labor and calls for policies that address the unequal distribution of domestic responsibilities.

Practical needs vs. strategic gender needs 🔗

One of the most useful distinctions that GAD introduced is between practical gender needs and strategic gender needs. Practical needs are immediate and tangible – access to clean water, food, or healthcare. WID addressed these well. Strategic needs, by contrast, are about long-term systemic change: practical gender needs do not challenge the gender division of labor or women’s subordinate position in society, whereas strategic gender needs address the structures that sustain inequality – things like inheritance rights, equal political representation, and the elimination of gender-based violence. GAD insisted that development must address both, but with a clear eye on transforming the structural conditions that keep inequality in place.

Creating autonomous spaces for women 🔗

A key element of the GAD framework is the creation of autonomous spaces – physical and social environments where women can come together, share experiences, build solidarity, and collectively organize for change. These are not merely support groups; they are sites of political consciousness and collective action.

In India, Self-Help Groups (SHGs) have been used to empower women economically by providing access to micro-credit and collective decision-making opportunities. These groups have enabled women to gain financial independence while also creating spaces to challenge patriarchal norms within their communities. They address issues like access to credit, healthcare, and education – but crucially, they also give women a voice in local governance. Community-led initiatives like the Self-Help Group-Based Intervention for Combating Violence Against Women (SHGIVAW) in Rajasthan combine microfinance with participatory training, mobilizing women as both economic actors and challengers of gender-based violence. This dual focus is very much in the spirit of GAD: meeting practical needs while simultaneously building toward strategic transformation.

Participatory development: prioritizing women’s voices 🔗

GAD also places strong emphasis on participatory development – the idea that development cannot be done for women but must be done with them. Small, grassroots-level projects that actively involve women in planning, implementation, and evaluation are central to this approach. An alternative view of development has evolved out of grassroots experiences, where ideas and policies are shaped by everyday practice rather than by dominant development theory.

India’s Panchayati Raj system offers a significant example of participatory politics in action. The reservation of seats for women in panchayats (village councils) has given women formal political power and has led to greater attention to issues such as women’s health, education, and safety at the local level. Organizations like the Mahila Housing Trust (MHT) have demonstrated how equipping women with knowledge and skills to lead community initiatives transforms not just individual lives but entire neighborhoods. These examples show participatory development in practice: women shaping the policies that govern them, rather than being passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere.

WID vs. GAD: a side-by-side comparison 🔗

The difference between WID and GAD is not just academic – it translates directly into how development projects are designed and what outcomes they aim for. WID primarily focuses on women as a separate group and seeks to include them in existing development structures. GAD, by contrast, examines the power relations between men and women and aims to transform the structural barriers to equality – discriminatory laws, social norms, and unequal access to decision-making. The WID approach sought to integrate women in development processes, but GAD looked at empowering women and transforming unequal relations between men and women. In WID, women were seen as resources in the development process; in GAD, they are agents who can transform their own subordination.

Challenges in implementing GAD 🔗

Despite its conceptual strengths, GAD faces real implementation challenges. Although many development agencies are now committed to a gender approach, in practice the primary institutional perspective often remains WID. There is a persistent tendency to overlap WID and GAD in policy, reducing gender transformation to mean primarily economic betterment for women rather than structural change.

In a country like India, GAD must also grapple with the intersecting dimensions of inequality. Expanding educational or employment opportunities is vital for advancing women’s social independence, but it alone cannot dismantle entrenched gender norms or power relationships within the household. Women from lower castes or marginalized communities face compounded forms of discrimination, and a strategy that works for urban, educated women may do nothing for rural women fighting for land rights. This is why GAD must remain flexible, intersectional, and grounded in local realities.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 – achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls – reflects the ongoing global commitment to the principles that GAD has championed. But as the evidence from India shows, achieving this goal requires more than policies on paper. It demands sustained attention to the power structures, social norms, and institutional arrangements that continue to define what women can and cannot do.

What do you think? If WID was a necessary first step in making women visible to policymakers, does that make its limitations forgivable – or did it ultimately delay more meaningful change? And in contexts like rural India, where caste, class, and gender all intersect, can any single development framework truly address the full complexity of women’s lives?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ester_Boserup
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_development
3. https://gender.study/issues-of-gender-and-development/welfare-to-women-in-development-evolution/
4. https://journalism.university/fundamentals-of-development-and-communication/women-development-perspectives-exploration/
5. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/367479768_A_PARADIGM_SHIFT_FROM_WOMEN_IN_DEVELOPMENT_WID_TO_GENDER_AND_DEVELOPMENT_GAD_Examining_why_there_was_a_paradigm_shift_from_WID_-_WAD_to_GAD_in_an_Effort_to_Address_Gender_Inequalities
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_and_development
7. https://www.unescwa.org/sd-glossary/gender-and-development-gad
8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/367479768_A_PARADIGM_SHIFT_FROM_WOMEN_IN_DEVELOPMENT_WID_TO_GENDER_AND_DEVELOPMENT_GAD_Examining_why_there_was_a_paradigm_shift_from_WID_-_WAD_to_GAD_in_an_Effort_to-Address_Gender_Inequalities
9. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp10/chapter/womenand-development/
10. https://gender.study/issues-of-gender-and-development/gad-approach-gender-equity-development/
11. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12203628/
12. https://www.mahilahousingtrust.org/women-empowerment-key-to-sustainable-development-in-india/
13. https://www.academia.edu/17832448/Why_there_was_a_Paradigm_shift_from_Women_in_Development_WID_to_Gender_and_Develppment_GAD_
14. https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal5