Diverse Perspectives on Women and Development: From Structural to Gender Relations

How we think about women’s role in development has changed dramatically over the past half-century. The conversation has shifted from simply asking “how do we include women in development?” to asking a far deeper question: “what power structures keep women subordinate in the first place, and how do we dismantle them?” This evolution in thinking – from broad structural theories to gender-specific frameworks and empowerment models – has reshaped development policy across the globe. Understanding these shifts is essential for anyone trying to make sense of why gender inequality persists and what approaches actually work to address it.

Structural theories and their blind spots 🔗

For much of the 20th century, two grand structural theories dominated thinking about inequality and underdevelopment: Marxism and dependency theory. Both offered powerful tools for critiquing economic systems, yet both fell significantly short when it came to explaining women’s subordination.

The Marxist perspective 🔗

Marxist theories of gender are fundamentally rooted in the relationship between class exploitation and women’s oppression, treating women’s inequality as a product of capitalism’s economic and social structures. When applied to development, Marxist thinkers argued that women’s unpaid domestic labor sustains the capitalist system by reproducing the workforce at no cost to employers. According to Marxist feminists, women face a dual form of exploitation – in the paid labor market and through unpaid domestic work – and this dual burden keeps them economically dependent and socially subordinate.

However, the core weakness of the Marxist framework is its tendency to reduce all gender inequality to a matter of class. By focusing almost exclusively on class dynamics, it overlooks the ways in which gender roles are socially constructed and reproduced independently of economic relations. Cultural norms, legal discrimination, and patriarchal institutions shape women’s lives in ways that class analysis alone cannot explain. As critics like Gayle Rubin pointed out, Marxism offered an incomplete analysis of sexism under capitalism, failing to account for the sex-gender system that operates alongside – and often independently of – economic class.

Dependency theory and women in the Global South 🔗

Dependency theory, which emerged as a critique of the unequal economic relationships between developed and developing nations, similarly offered important insights while reproducing its own blind spots. Scott’s critique of dependency theory identifies it as being grounded in masculinist conceptions of history, human labor, and the division between public and private life – rendering the structural bases of gender inequality largely invisible.

In the classical works of dependency theory, race and gender are largely absent – a striking omission given the evident realities of patriarchal oppression in Latin America and the Global South during the very decades these theories were being written. A key example is the work of Ruy Mauro Marini, who developed the concept of “super-exploitation” but failed to identify unpaid reproductive work in the household – largely done by women – as its most essential form. When women in the Global South are considered at all within dependency frameworks, they are described as “doubly oppressed” – by global capitalism and by colonial history – but the local, gendered power structures that perpetuate their subordination in everyday life remain unexamined.

Women in Development (WID): a first step forward 🔗

By the 1970s, frustration with these structural theories’ neglect of gender issues gave rise to the Women in Development (WID) approach. WID emerged from a recognition that development programs were largely bypassing women, treating them as passive recipients rather than active contributors. The term was adopted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with the underlying argument that women represented an untapped economic resource whose contributions to development were being ignored.

WID pushed for women’s integration into development processes – getting them access to employment, credit, education, and markets. It was a practical step forward that helped move women onto the development agenda. But it carried a fundamental limitation: it treated women as a category to be inserted into existing systems, without questioning those systems themselves. WID addressed practical gender needs by focusing on integrating women into the development process, but did not challenge existing gender relations – and because resources rather than power were seen as central, interventions could sometimes tilt the balance of power further in men’s favor.

Women and Development (WAD): a partial correction 🔗

The Women and Development (WAD) approach that followed tried to place women’s issues within a broader critique of global inequality, drawing more explicitly on dependency theory’s concerns about the exploitative relationships between the Global North and South. While this was an improvement, WAD remained narrow in scope. Its focus on working-class women excluded those not in formal employment and confined the political field to work-related activity, making it difficult to build coalitions across class lines or to address the full range of gender inequalities women experience.

The Gender and Development (GAD) approach: centering gender relations 🔗

The most significant conceptual breakthrough came with the emergence of the Gender and Development (GAD) approach in the 1980s. GAD fundamentally reframed the question. Rather than asking how women can be better included in existing development structures, it asked why those structures produce gender inequality in the first place.

The GAD perspective’s core argument is that you cannot understand women’s subordination by looking at “women” in isolation – you must examine the power relationship between women and men. This shift from “women” to “gender” is theoretically crucial. “Women” refers to a biological category; “gender” refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, and expectations assigned to people based on their sex. Gender defines traits forged throughout the history of social relations and, while it originates in biological difference, goes far beyond the physiological in terms of the roles each sex is expected to play in society.

The GAD approach signals three key departures from WID: it shifts focus from women to gender and identifies unequal power relations between women and men; it re-examines all social, political, and economic structures from the perspective of gender differentials; and it aims to develop strategies that address these differences at a structural level.

Caroline Moser’s framework: practical and strategic needs 🔗

One of the most influential tools to emerge from the GAD tradition was the Moser Gender Planning Framework, developed by Caroline Moser at the Development Planning Unit of University College London in the 1980s. Moser introduced a critical distinction between practical gender needs – immediate needs like access to water, food, and health care – and strategic gender needs, which address the underlying causes of gender inequality such as access to education, employment, legal rights, and decision-making power.

Moser’s framework emphasized the importance of understanding the different roles that women and men play within households and communities, and how development initiatives often misinterpret or overlook these roles entirely. By distinguishing between immediate solutions and long-term structural change, the framework gave development planners a way to design interventions that went beyond treating symptoms and began to address root causes.

GAD in practice: from analysis to action 🔗

GAD was discussed by feminists and women-focused NGOs during the 1980s with the goal of improving women’s rights and increasing gender equity. Its practical applications ranged from organizing collective meal programs and health cooperatives to neighborhood water rights groups – initiatives that collectivized women’s survival challenges rather than leaving them as private burdens. By the 1990s, international development agencies had begun adopting GAD rhetoric, and the approach gained further momentum with the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995, which signaled the centrality of gender equality within global development work. Gender equality was later enshrined as Goal 5 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals – to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

The empowerment approach: from integration to transformation 🔗

Flowing directly from GAD is the empowerment approach, which shifts the focus from identifying problems to building the capacity of women to act on their own behalf. If GAD maps the system of unequal power relations, empowerment is the process of dismantling it.

Women’s empowerment through a gender perspective refers to the process of promoting women’s rights, equality, and autonomy by challenging and changing the social, economic, and political structures that perpetuate gender inequality. This approach recognizes that gender is a fundamental aspect of power relations, and that addressing power imbalances between men and women is a necessary step toward lasting change.

Naila Kabeer and the three dimensions of empowerment 🔗

Scholar Naila Kabeer has been central to refining what empowerment actually means in development contexts. Kabeer defines empowerment as the process by which women gain control over their lives, choices, and the resources needed to realize their potential, critiquing traditional development approaches that focused solely on women’s integration into the workforce. Development thinkers following Kabeer typically break empowerment down into three interconnected elements: resources (the preconditions for making choices – material, human, and social), agency (the ability to make strategic decisions and act on them), and achievement (the outcomes that result from that agency). Empowering women across all three dimensions, according to Kabeer, often requires structural and systematic changes – not just individual-level interventions.

Longwe’s Women Empowerment Framework 🔗

Sara Longwe developed the Women’s Empowerment Framework (WEF) in 1995, which was subsequently adopted by the United Nations as a tool to plan and monitor women-related development programs worldwide. The framework identifies five dimensions of women’s empowerment: welfare, access, conscientization, participation, and control – forming a progression from basic needs fulfillment toward genuine decision-making power over one’s life and resources.

Critiques and continuing challenges 🔗

Despite the advances represented by GAD and empowerment frameworks, several significant critiques have emerged. One persistent concern is that empowerment has been co-opted by neoliberal development agendas, with scholars like Batliwala arguing that the “power” has been taken out of empowerment – reducing transformative feminist goals to individual entrepreneurship or market participation without challenging underlying structural inequalities.

A second major concern is the failure to account for intersectionality. A more integrative and multidisciplinary approach to empowerment is needed – one that incorporates an intersectional lens and employs the life course approach to understand how women’s experiences vary across class, caste, ethnicity, and religion. A woman’s experience of subordination is never based on gender alone; it is shaped by multiple, overlapping systems of inequality. Women’s jobs outside the home tend to be the lowest-earning, least secure, and most dangerous available – a reality shaped as much by race and class as by gender – and any development framework that ignores these intersections risks reproducing the very hierarchies it seeks to dismantle.

Additionally, even where GAD principles have been formally adopted, international development agencies have tended to adopt gender mainstreaming as an analytic framework rather than as a genuine development strategy – making it easier to discuss empowerment in mission statements than to implement it through programming that meaningfully challenges women’s subordination in households and institutions.

Why this evolution in thinking matters 🔗

The trajectory from structural theories to gender relations approaches to empowerment frameworks is not just an academic debate – it has real consequences for how development resources are allocated, what programs get funded, and whose interests are centered. Moving from seeing women as an “untapped resource” (WID) to understanding them as agents operating within deeply unequal power structures (GAD/empowerment) changes what solutions look like. It means asking not just whether a woman has a loan, but whether she has genuine control over how it is used. It means not just counting women in the workforce, but examining whether the conditions of that work reflect or reinforce their subordination. Over the past 20 years, women all over the world have increased their participation in the labor market, but they continue to work in less prestigious jobs, are paid less, and have fewer opportunities for advancement – a reminder that inclusion without structural transformation is not the same as equality.

The most current frameworks recognize that lasting change requires transformation at every level – from household dynamics to global policy – and that protecting women’s rights, health, and security while increasing their participation in decision-making are key processes that lead to overall progress toward gender equality.

What do you think? If development programs focus primarily on giving women access to economic resources without addressing the power dynamics at home and in institutions, can they achieve meaningful gender equality? And given that women’s experiences differ so widely across class, caste, and ethnicity, is it possible to design a single “empowerment” framework that works across different cultural contexts?

References

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