The Impact of Development on Women: Complexities and Challenges

Development is supposed to be a rising tide that lifts all boats – better education, more jobs, greater prosperity. But for millions of women around the world, the experience of development has been far more complicated. Instead of straightforwardly improving their lives, development processes have often delivered a paradox: new opportunities on one hand, and deepened inequalities on the other. Understanding this contradiction is essential to grasping how gender inequality persists – and in some cases intensifies – even as societies become wealthier and more modern.

Development and gender inequality: a complicated relationship
The double burden: working two shifts
Employment gains with an asterisk
How development reinforces gender stereotypes
Stereotypes in education
The gender-equality paradox in STEM
Stereotypes in the traditional economic sphere
Poverty, development, and the feminization of hardship
Rethinking what development means for women

Development and gender inequality: a complicated relationship

When economists and policymakers measure development, they typically look at GDP growth, infrastructure expansion, and rising employment rates. These are real gains. But as a landmark UN Population Fund report warned, GDP growth doesn’t automatically improve women’s lived experiences. Development, particularly in its early stages, has historically focused on economic and technological progress without challenging the patriarchal structures that restrict women’s mobility, voice, and access to opportunity. Women are frequently found at the margins of development processes – excluded from key decision-making roles while simultaneously being expected to absorb the social costs of rapid economic change.

Research on human development and gender inequality consistently shows that persistent structural inequalities mean women often experience lower human development outcomes than men. This is not simply a legacy of the past; it is actively reproduced through social norms and institutional structures that development programs have frequently failed to address.

The double burden: working two shifts

One of the most tangible ways development has created a paradox for women is through what sociologists call the “double burden” – or the “second shift.” As more women entered paid employment over the twentieth century, their domestic responsibilities did not diminish proportionally. Instead, they found themselves working full-time jobs while still carrying the majority of unpaid household labor.

According to the United Nations Development Programme, many women are forced into part-time or lower-skilled jobs specifically to manage the competing demands of their professional and domestic roles. The cultural assumption that domestic work is a woman’s natural responsibility has proven remarkably resistant to change, even as economies modernize. Global data shows that over three-quarters of all unpaid domestic care work worldwide is performed by women – and in developing economies, that share climbs above 80 percent.

The consequences are measurable. A review published in The BMJ found that unpaid domestic and care work is directly associated with greater mental health burden and reduced quality of life for women. The COVID-19 pandemic sharpened this reality dramatically, with women bearing a disproportionately larger increase in care work than men during lockdowns – a disparity that made returning to employment significantly harder for women afterward.

Research published in The Lancet Public Health further confirms that women globally spend an average of three to six hours per day on unpaid work, while men contribute just half an hour to two hours – even in countries where both partners are in full-time employment. This time deficit directly limits women’s capacity for career advancement, skill development, and economic mobility.

Employment gains with an asterisk

Development has undeniably pulled more women into the formal economy. But the nature of that employment tells a more troubling story. UN Women data reveals that nearly 60 percent of women’s employment globally is in the informal economy, with that figure exceeding 90 percent in low-income countries. Informal work typically means low pay, no social protection, and no job security – leaving women economically active but economically precarious.

The wage gap compounds the problem. The United Nations reports that women earn roughly 77 cents for every dollar earned by men for work of equal value – a gap that widens further for mothers. The International Labour Organization has long warned of the “feminization of working poverty” – a process where rising female labor market participation does not translate into economic security because women remain disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-paying, most precarious jobs.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report illustrates the structural dimension of this problem: the ILO estimates that for every five new jobs created for women, four are within the informal economy, compared to two out of three for men. And ILOSTAT analysis confirms that as of 2023, women hold only 30 percent of managerial positions globally – meaning that even as more women enter workplaces, they remain locked out of positions of economic power and decision-making.

How development reinforces gender stereotypes

Stereotypes in education

Education is often cited as the primary engine of women’s empowerment – and there is real evidence that it helps. But the educational environment itself can simultaneously reproduce the inequalities it is meant to dissolve. The World Bank notes that gender notions communicated through school curricula, textbooks, and teacher behavior affect girls’ academic self-perception and have a sustained negative impact on their pursuit of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects.

An OECD working paper on gender stereotypes in education highlights a particularly revealing dynamic: three out of four women do housework alongside their daughters, which risks passing gender-role expectations across generations even within households that have access to modern education. Stereotypes learned at home are reinforced in classrooms, and vice versa – creating a self-perpetuating cycle that formal education, as currently structured in many countries, does little to interrupt.

The gender-equality paradox in STEM

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding from development research is what scholars call the “gender-equality paradox.” Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the underrepresentation of women in math-intensive fields is actually more pronounced in more egalitarian and economically developed countries. The explanation? Gender stereotypes associating mathematics with men are measurably stronger in more developed, more egalitarian societies. Researchers at Université Paris Dauphine found that these stereotypes statistically account for the paradox entirely – suggesting that economic development and formal gender equality in rights do not automatically suppress gender norms. Instead, they appear to reshape them into subtler, more horizontal forms of differentiation.

In practical terms, this means that as a country becomes wealthier, women gain greater freedom of choice – but if the cultural environment still codes certain career paths as male, many women exercise that freedom in ways that replicate rather than challenge gendered divisions of labor.

Stereotypes in the traditional economic sphere

Women’s contributions to traditional and subsistence economies have long been devalued or rendered invisible. The UNFPA has noted that unpaid work not counted in national accounts results in lower social entitlements for women compared to men – a structural exclusion built directly into how development is measured and rewarded. Women in agricultural and rural economies often manage land, produce food, and sustain households without any formal economic recognition, leaving them without property rights, credit access, or social protection.

As the United Nations has observed, girls in many developing societies are socialized from an early age into the assumption that domestic and caregiving roles are their primary destiny. Development programs that introduce new economic opportunities without simultaneously challenging these socialization patterns often end up adding professional expectations on top of unchanged domestic ones – intensifying the double burden rather than resolving it.

Poverty, development, and the feminization of hardship

The aggregate data on poverty makes the stakes concrete. UN Women estimates that one in every ten women globally lives in extreme poverty, and if current trends continue, over 342 million women and girls will still be living on less than $2.15 a day by 2030. A striking 73.5 percent of women in wage employment have no access to social protection at all. Development, measured in macroeconomic terms, has advanced – but these gains have not translated into proportional improvements in women’s economic security or autonomy.

This is what the feminization of poverty describes: not simply that women are poorer than men, but that the structural conditions of development – informal labor markets, unpaid care work, gender wage gaps, lack of asset ownership – systematically channel women toward economic vulnerability even as national wealth grows. ILO and UN Women joint research confirms that women’s employment is shaped by domestic and caregiving responsibilities in ways that men’s employment is not – and that this structural difference is reproduced across generations.

Rethinking what development means for women

The lesson is not that development is harmful to women – it is that development as traditionally conceived and implemented is insufficient and often contradictory in its effects. Economic growth metrics and institutional reforms can coexist with deepening gender inequality because they do not automatically dismantle the patriarchal norms that structure how resources, time, and opportunity are distributed within households and labor markets.

A genuinely inclusive development model requires addressing the double burden through recognizing, reducing, and redistributing unpaid care work; challenging the gender stereotypes reproduced through educational institutions and media; ensuring women’s access to formal, protected, and well-paid employment; and counting women’s economic contributions – including unpaid contributions – within development frameworks themselves. Without these changes, development risks repeatedly handing women a door while leaving the structural barriers intact just inside it.

What do you think? If development can simultaneously create new opportunities for women and reinforce older inequalities, what would a genuinely gender-responsive development framework look like – and who should be responsible for building it? And given that gender stereotypes appear to strengthen rather than weaken in some of the world’s most “equal” societies, how should development policy address the gap between formal gender equality and the everyday realities women continue to face?

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Table of Contents

Development and gender inequality: a complicated relationship 🔗

The double burden: working two shifts 🔗

Employment gains with an asterisk 🔗

How development reinforces gender stereotypes 🔗

Stereotypes in education 🔗

The gender-equality paradox in STEM 🔗

Stereotypes in the traditional economic sphere 🔗

Poverty, development, and the feminization of hardship 🔗

Rethinking what development means for women 🔗