The Intersection of Development and Gender: A Critical Analysis

When we talk about development, the conversation most often turns to GDP growth, infrastructure, and economic output. But these numbers tell only part of the story. What happens to that growth if half the population is excluded from shaping or benefiting from it? The relationship between development and gender is not just a feminist concern – it is a structural one. How a society defines development, and who gets to participate in it, directly determines how equitable and sustainable that progress will be.

Development beyond economics: why gender matters 🔗

For most of the 20th century, development was measured almost entirely by economic indicators – per capita income, industrial output, and GDP growth. This framing treated women as passive recipients of development rather than as active contributors to it. The problem with this view is both moral and practical. According to UNDP India, women’s contribution to India’s GDP stands at only 17%, far below the global average of 37% – and this gap reflects not a lack of capability, but a lack of equal opportunity.

The economist Ester Boserup was among the first to systematically document this gap. Her landmark 1970 work showed that as new agricultural technologies were introduced in developing countries, they were directed almost exclusively at men, sidelining women who already did much of the farming work. This set the intellectual groundwork for a broader rethinking: development cannot be gender-neutral, because society itself is not gender-neutral.

From WID to GAD: a shift in thinking 🔗

Debates about how to address gender in development have evolved significantly over the past five decades. Three major frameworks have shaped this conversation: Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD), and Gender and Development (GAD).

Women in Development (WID) 🔗

The WID approach, which emerged in the early 1970s from American liberal feminism, focused on integrating women into existing development processes. It argued that women had been left out of development by oversight, and the fix was to include them – particularly through access to employment, credit, and education. The approach was non-confrontational: it did not question the existing economic order or gender relations, it simply sought to bring women into them. While WID helped put women on the development agenda for the first time, it had significant limitations. It treated women primarily as economic inputs and did not address the unequal power structures that kept them marginalized in the first place.

Women and Development (WAD) 🔗

The WAD approach, which followed in the latter half of the 1970s, took a more structural view. Rather than assuming women were absent from development, WAD argued that women had always been part of economic processes – their contributions were simply invisible and undervalued. WAD drew from dependency theory and critiqued how capitalist development itself created and perpetuated women’s exploitation. It was an important conceptual bridge, but it still did not fully address how gender relations themselves – not just economic exclusion – shaped inequality.

Gender and Development (GAD) 🔗

The GAD framework, which emerged in the 1980s from socialist feminism, represented the most comprehensive shift. GAD moved the focus from women in isolation to gender as a social relation – examining how the roles, responsibilities, and power assigned to men and women are constructed by society, and how development policies either challenge or reinforce those constructions. Instead of asking “how do we include women in development?”, GAD asked “why are women systematically excluded, and how do we transform the structures that cause this?” This meant looking at patriarchy, unpaid care work, political representation, land rights, and legal equality – not just employment and income.

Measuring what matters: the GDI and GEM 🔗

A major step in bringing gender into the development mainstream was the creation of tools that could actually measure gender inequality in human development outcomes. In 1995, UNDP introduced the Gender Development Index (GDI) alongside the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The GDI compares women’s and men’s achievements in health, education, and command over economic resources – essentially adjusting the Human Development Index (HDI) to account for gender gaps. A GDI value of 1 indicates full gender parity; values below 1 signal that women are disadvantaged relative to men.

The GEM captures a different dimension – it measures women’s active participation in political and economic decision-making, looking at their share of parliamentary seats, senior managerial roles, and earned income. Together, these indices made it possible to see what aggregate growth figures concealed: that economic progress does not automatically translate into gender equality.

For India, the data are sobering. India ranks 129th on the Global Gender Gap Index (2024), trailing even several of its regional neighbors. While India’s GDI has improved – rising from 0.738 in 2000 to 0.829 by 2018 – significant regional disparities remain. States like Kerala, Mizoram, and Goa perform well on gender development, while Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan lag far behind.

The economic cost of ignoring gender 🔗

The argument for gender-inclusive development is not only ethical – it is economic. The UN estimates that India could increase its GDP by up to 60% and generate approximately $700 billion in additional output by 2025 if women participated in the economy on par with men. Despite this, women contribute just 18% to India’s GDP while making up nearly half the population, with over 90% of employed women working in informal, low-wage, insecure jobs.

Unpaid care work is a core part of this equation. Women in India spend an average of 352 minutes per day on unpaid domestic and care work – time that cannot be spent on education, employment, or civic participation. This labour is largely invisible in development accounting, yet estimates value it at nearly 40% of GDP. Development frameworks that fail to account for this effectively subsidize economic growth on the backs of women’s uncompensated labour.

Development policies: when gender is excluded – and when it’s included 🔗

India’s development history offers clear examples of both approaches. Early Five Year Plans focused on industrial and agricultural growth with little attention to gender. It was not until a later plan document that a dedicated chapter on ‘Women and Development’ appeared, acknowledging women’s economic independence, healthcare access, and family planning as development priorities in their own right – a significant, if belated, acknowledgment.

More recent policies have attempted to embed gender directly into development frameworks. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is a key example – it legally mandates that at least one-third of all jobs go to women, requires equal wages, and stipulates on-site childcare at work sites. By 2022-23, women made up 57.8% of MGNREGA beneficiaries, demonstrating what happens when structural supports are built directly into policy design.

The National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) has mobilised nearly 9.89 crore women into self-help groups, providing access to credit, skill development, and financial services. India’s female labour force participation rate has also seen meaningful improvement – rising from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 37% in 2022-23 – a 13.7 percentage point increase linked directly to focused policy interventions.

On the political front, the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments (1993) reserved seats for women in local panchayats and municipal bodies, creating a foundation for their participation in governance at the grassroots. The Women’s Reservation Act of 2023 extended this logic to the national level, reserving one-third of Lok Sabha and state assembly seats for women – a milestone in political inclusion.

Structural barriers that persist 🔗

Despite these advances, structural barriers remain deeply entrenched. India is the only large country where more girls die than boys, and girls are significantly more likely to drop out of school. Women own only 9% of agricultural land despite comprising 42% of the agricultural labour force, and just 14% of all landowners in India are women. Land ownership is not just an economic issue – it determines social standing, collateral for credit, and security in old age.

Cultural barriers and occupational segregation, according to the International Labour Organization, play a more significant role than legal barriers in restricting women’s economic participation. India has relatively few laws that formally prevent women from working, but social norms, mobility constraints, and the burden of unpaid care work create real and persistent limits. The concentration of women in informal sector work – in garment manufacturing, domestic service, and subsistence agriculture – means their labour remains systematically undervalued and unprotected.

Why gender must be central to the development agenda 🔗

The evidence is clear: development that ignores gender is neither efficient nor equitable. UN Women India works with the Ministry of Women and Child Development to integrate Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) into fiscal planning – ensuring that public spending is assessed for its differential impact on men and women. This shift from welfare-oriented programmes to systemic gender mainstreaming reflects the core insight of the GAD framework: changing outcomes requires changing the structures that produce them.

As development theory has evolved, it has increasingly recognised that empowerment must address both practical gender needs – food, shelter, employment – and strategic gender needs: land rights, political voice, freedom from violence, and control over one’s own life. Short-term material gains matter, but they are insufficient if the underlying power imbalances remain unchanged. A gender-inclusive development agenda is not a concession to one group’s interests – it is the basis for any development that is truly sustainable and just.

What do you think? If GDP growth does not automatically improve women’s position in society, what does this tell us about how we define “development” itself? And in a country like India, where policy frameworks increasingly acknowledge gender inequality, why do structural barriers around land ownership, informal labour, and unpaid care work remain so resistant to change?

References

1. https://www.undp.org/india/gender-equality
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_and_development
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_development
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8. https://india.un.org/en/172095-gender-equality-and-youth-development
9. https://www.policycircle.org/opinion/gender-gap-female-labour/
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11. https://www.pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=1779252
12. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2004351
13. https://wcd.nic.in/womendevelopment/national-policy-women-empowerment
14. https://www.unicef.org/india/what-we-do/gender-equality
15. https://www.cfr.org/womens-participation-in-global-economy/case-studies/india/
16. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/countries/india
17. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/women-and-development