The Intersection of Feminism and Development: A Historical Perspective

For most of the twentieth century, mainstream development thinking treated women as an afterthought – invisible in economic statistics, absent from policy tables, and assumed to benefit automatically from broader growth. That assumption began to crack in the 1970s, when feminist scholars and activists pushed back with a simple but radical argument: development cannot work for everyone if it ignores half the population. What followed was a decades-long dialogue between feminism and development that reshaped international policy, produced landmark global agreements, and fundamentally changed how the world thinks about women’s role in society and the economy.

How development thinking ignored women 🔗

Until the 1970s, development was widely treated as gender-neutral. The assumption was that economic growth would automatically lift all boats, including women’s. This view was shattered by economist Ester Boserup’s 1970 book Women’s Role in Economic Development, which showed that development processes actually affect men and women differently – and often disadvantage women. Boserup’s work was a catalyst. It demonstrated that women’s productive labor, particularly in agriculture and the informal economy, was systematically unrecognized and undervalued in national accounts and policy frameworks. Her findings gave feminist advocates a rigorous empirical foundation to demand inclusion in international development agendas.

The UN Decade for Women: a turning point 🔗

The global institutional response crystallized with the declaration of 1975 as the International Women’s Year, which led the United Nations to organize its first World Conference on Women in Mexico City. That conference declared the years 1976-1985 as the UN Decade for Women, with the stated goals of equality, development, and peace. The program’s aim was the promotion of equal rights and opportunities for women around the world. More than just a symbolic gesture, the Decade became the scaffolding on which feminist visions of development were built, debated, and progressively refined over ten years of international conferencing and civil society organizing.

The 1975 conference is considered by scholars to have been a watershed moment – it fostered not only new policies around women and gender but also completely new and more radically diverse ways of conceptualizing feminisms. Crucially, it established a format that would define global women’s conferences going forward: a formal intergovernmental meeting of state delegates alongside a parallel NGO Tribune where civil society could deliberate independently. This dual structure gave feminist networks space to develop their own critiques – often more radical than what governments were prepared to commit to officially.

Three conferences, three stages of feminist development thinking 🔗

Mexico City, 1975: consciousness-raising 🔗

The Decade formally consisted of three international meetings – in Mexico City for “consciousness-raising,” Copenhagen for creating “networks,” and Nairobi for “the solidarity of women worldwide,” along with regional meetings involving specific UN agencies and nongovernmental organizations. Mexico City set the agenda and exposed, almost immediately, the tensions that would define the decade. Many European and U.S. feminists focused on issues such as equal pay and workplace discrimination, while women from the Global South emphasized basic needs such as access to water, national sovereignty, and freedom from violence. These disagreements reflected not just different priorities but fundamentally different understandings of what liberation meant for women in different geopolitical contexts.

Copenhagen, 1980: mid-decade assessment 🔗

By the time delegates gathered in Copenhagen in 1980 for the mid-decade review, it was clear that the goals set in Mexico City had not been adequately met. The conference focused on three specific areas where women’s advancement remained stalled: education, employment, and health. Progress was uneven across regions, and debates grew sharper about why conventional development strategies were failing women. This is where feminist critiques of the dominant Women in Development (WID) approach began to gain serious traction, as practitioners and scholars questioned whether simply “adding women” to existing development frameworks was sufficient.

Nairobi, 1985: the birth of global feminism 🔗

The 1985 World Conference in Nairobi was convened at a time when the movement for gender equality had finally gained true global recognition – 15,000 representatives of non-governmental organizations participated in a parallel NGO Forum, and the event was described by many as “the birth of global feminism.” The 157 participating governments unanimously adopted the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women, a landmark document that broke new ground by declaring all issues to be women’s issues. This was a decisive departure from narrow conceptions of “women’s problems” as separate from economic policy, environment, peace, or governance.

The Nairobi conference developed a more inclusive, practical framework, particularly through the inclusion of Global South voices, and the Forward-Looking Strategies served as a roadmap for gender equality in economic, political, and social aspects through the year 2000.

The WID approach and its feminist critics 🔗

Running parallel to these conferences was a growing body of feminist scholarship aimed at changing how development agencies approached women’s issues. The Women in Development (WID) approach, which emerged in the early 1970s and was institutionalized in U.S. foreign assistance legislation, advocated for integrating women into existing development processes. The WID approach initially accepted existing social structures in the recipient country and looked at how to better integrate women into existing development initiatives – the straightforward goal was to increase the productivity and earnings of women.

On the surface, WID was a significant step forward. It got women onto development agendas and led to the creation of dedicated institutional machineries inside donor agencies and governments. Many UN programs and funds were created during the duration of the decade that have remained active, such as the United Nations Development Fund for Women, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which 170 countries ratified by 1985.

However, WID carried a fundamental flaw. With WID, the dominant rationale for women’s development programs was increased efficiency – mostly what women could do to accelerate development. This framing cast women primarily as instruments of growth rather than as rights-bearing agents with their own interests. The priority of WID later became concerned with how women could contribute to development, drifting away from its initial goals of addressing equity. Critics pointed out that WID never challenged the underlying structures – patriarchy, colonial economic relations, and unequal global trade – that produced women’s subordination in the first place.

The WID approach avoided reality because it did not challenge the basic social relations of gender, assuming that gender relations would automatically change as women joined development processes. Treating women as beneficiaries to be “included,” rather than as integral participants who should shape the development agenda itself, left the deeper architecture of inequality untouched.

From WID to WAD to GAD: the feminist shift 🔗

Feminist theorists responded to WID’s limitations with two successive frameworks. The Women and Development (WAD) approach, influenced by dependency theory and neo-Marxist feminism, argued that women have always been part of the development process – the problem was not their exclusion but the exploitative global economic system itself. WAD came from the perspective that equality would be essential to improving women’s positions, but still framed change in terms of providing women access to the productive sector. While sharper than WID in its structural analysis, WAD still stopped short of challenging gendered power relations at their root.

The more transformative break came with the Gender and Development (GAD) approach, which emerged in the 1980s from socialist feminist scholarship. GAD departed from WID, which had discussed women’s subordination without examining broader systems of gender relations, and challenged the WID focus on women as an important “target group” and “untapped resources” for development. GAD insisted that development policy must examine how gender is socially constructed, how it operates as a relation of power, and how it intersects with class, race, and colonial history.

GAD emphasized what development can do for women, rather than what women can do for development. The approach pointed out that women have been systematically subordinated and assigned secondary roles, and recognized that development can impact women and men differently. Critically, GAD looks at patriarchy and unequal relations of power between men and women as major problems that prevent equitable development and women’s full participation, aiming at creating equitable and sustainable development for both.

DAWN and the voice of the Global South 🔗

The most powerful challenge to mainstream feminist development thinking came not from Western academia but from the Global South. DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), a new Southern network of researchers, launched its feminist critique of development at Nairobi in 1985. Its first sparks came from a now-famous meeting in Bangalore in 1984, where women from the Global South gathered to share their experiences about what was happening in their countries and regions.

DAWN economists Gita Sen and Caren Grown presented a platform for feminist economics at the 1985 World Conference on Women in Nairobi. Their ideas were later published as Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives, which critiqued mainstream development programs and envisioned an alternative feminist paradigm focusing on women’s empowerment. The book was a game-changer: it connected grassroots women’s struggles – food insecurity in Africa, the Latin American debt crisis, militarism in the Pacific – to macroeconomic structures and neoliberal policy. By locating women’s experiences of development in colonial and neocolonial contexts, DAWN introduced an analytical framework that changed the terms of the debate on women’s issues worldwide.

In the 1980s, Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed by the IMF and World Bank prioritized debt repayment over social welfare, dismantling public services and worsening poverty – policies that disproportionately harmed women, children, and the poor. DAWN made these gendered impacts of austerity central to the feminist agenda at Nairobi, arguing that macroeconomic justice was inseparable from gender justice.

Critiquing development metrics: what gets measured matters 🔗

Feminists during the Decade also mounted a sustained critique of the metrics used to assess development. Standard measures like GDP growth were blind to women’s unpaid reproductive and care work – the labor that sustains households, communities, and economies but registers nowhere in official statistics. One issue that Nairobi highlighted was unpaid work, particularly domestic and subsistence work performed by women around the world, which had in most cases been marginalized in global discourse dominated by the Western lens.

This critique had lasting consequences. It eventually contributed to the development of tools like the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) within the UN human development framework – instruments specifically designed to capture dimensions of well-being that conventional economic metrics ignored. The feminist argument was not just normative but methodological: if you measure development badly, you will design it badly.

From integration to transformation: the legacy of the Decade 🔗

The decade from 1976 to 1985 shifted the conversation from asking whether women mattered in development to asking how development must be fundamentally restructured to serve women’s interests. The conferences prompted many governments to create women’s bureaus, ministries, and policies addressing gender equality, as well as leading to increased funding and infrastructure for women’s issues globally. Institutionally, CEDAW gave women a legally binding international framework to hold governments accountable, while the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies set a programmatic roadmap that directly shaped the landmark 1995 Beijing Platform for Action.

But the deeper legacy was conceptual. The Decade forced a confrontation between two fundamentally different visions of change: one that sought women’s inclusion in existing structures (WID), and one that demanded the structural transformation of those very structures (GAD and DAWN). Women from the Global South challenged Western feminist priorities, arguing that survival – access to food, land, and jobs – was as important as legal rights. That argument expanded the feminist definition of development to encompass economic justice, decolonization, and the rights of the most marginalized – a broadening that continues to shape gender and development discourse today.

What do you think? If the WID approach treated women primarily as contributors to economic growth, does a development framework that centers women’s empowerment look meaningfully different in practice – or does it risk becoming another form of top-down policy? And given that DAWN’s critique emerged specifically from Global South women’s experiences, how should development agendas today ensure that the most marginalized women’s voices shape policy rather than simply inform it?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_and_development
2. https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/gender-equality