Download Gendered Geographies

Dr Kate Maclean
Department of Geography
King’s College London
http://www2.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/women-and-economics/investing-in-women/index.html
What is gender?
 Different responsibilities
 Different barriers
 Different kinds and levels of scrutiny
 Conundrum of equality and difference
Development’s gendered results
 Of 1.2 billion people living in poverty worldwide,
70% are women
 Women own around only 1% of the world's titled
land
 Women do two-thirds of the world's work but
receive only 10% of the world's income
 80% of the world's 27 million refugees are women
 Women are 2/3 of the 1 billion+ illiterate adults
who have no access to basic education
http://www.internationalwomensday.com/facts.asp
The ‘black box’: Households
Industrialisation and Gender
Public/ private spaces
Gendered Binaries
 Cooperation/Competition
 Nature/ Culture
 Care/Risk
 Reproductive/ Productive
 Tradition/ Progress
GDP – Invisible reproductive labour
 “Women contribute about 70% of the total time spent
at these activities--even in egalitarian nations such as
Sweden. They do virtually all the housework in poorer
nations such as India. Some feminists argue
persuasively that including housework in the GDP
would raise the "consciousness" of women...Yet other
feminists do not want explicit calculations of
production for housewives, because that would
conflict with their agenda of getting women out of the
household and into the labor force.”
BusinessWeek: October 16, 1995
Women in Development
 “It is important to engage the untapped energies
and abilities of people, especially poor women, if
lasting progress is to be made. Development
assistance providers must recognize the pervasive
additional obstacles that poor women face and
give serious attention to those impediments as
road blocks not only to women but also to effective
national development. “
http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/cross-cutting_programs/wid/
Women and Development
 Women have always been central to
development
 Why has their contribution to development
been excluded?
 Women don’t need to be mainstreamed, the
mainstream needs to be feminised
 Practical needs
 “Practical needs are the needs women identify in their socially
accepted roles in society. Practical gender needs do not
challenge the gender divisions of labour or women’s
subordinate position in society, although rising out of them.
Practical gender needs are a response to immediate perceived
necessity, identified within a specific context.” (Moser 1993:
40)
 Strategic needs
 “Strategic needs are the needs women identify because of
their subordinate position to men in their society. Strategic
gender needs vary according to particular contexts. They
relate to gender divisions of labour, violence, equal wages and
women’s control over their bodies.” (Moser 1993: 39)
Gender and Development
“GAD aims not only to ‘integrate women into
development, but [to] look for potential in
development initiatives to transform
unequal social/gender relations and to
empower women’ (Canadian Council for
International Co-operation 1991: 5)”
(Bhavani et al 2003: 5)
Microfinance
 Collateral free
 Reduces
administration
costs
 Peer pressure
ensures very low
repayment rates
,
A political approach
 Self Employed Women’s Association, India, 1972
 “At SEWA we organise workers to achieve their goals of
full employment and self reliance through the strategy
of struggle and development. The struggle is against
the many constraints and limitations imposed on
them by society and the economy, while development
activities strengthen women’s bargaining power and
offer them new alternatives. Practically, the strategy is
carried out through the joint action of union and
cooperatives.”
‘Suicides and pressure
tactics tarnish image of
micro-finance lending’
Microlender Forecloses
On Goat
October 18, 2010
Masculinity
 The forgotten half of gender
 Gender often means women: Department for Women,
Women’s Equity Bureau, Commission on the status of
Women, Convention on the Elimination of all Form s
of Discrimination against Women
Conclusion
 Women are economically active and always have been
 The economy is not gender-neutral
 Gender and Development scholarship, projects and
policies seek to level the economic playing field
without essentialising gender roles.