Change and progress in the computer age happen fast. As recently as 1960, the development establishment paid little attention to women and could safely ignore the women who protested. Today, planners' desks are piled high with "women-and- development" papers, books and monographs, and development bureaucrats have, by and large, learned that they may not refer to farmers as only "he".
How much difference do all those words make? Reading some of them can give us an idea about what women expect from development, and how well the planning structures have responded in the past two decades. The following survey covers some of the most important papers, books and documents on the topic, criticizing them from the basis of someone who believes that development should serve - not use - women.
During the 1950s and 1960s, a few conferences on development issues discussed the involvement of women in the development process, albeit rather tangentially. The most important pioneering work on the subject appeared in Ester Boserup's Woman's Role in Economic Development. It documented and discussed in detail the negative impact of the development process on women. Boserup showed how colonialism and the forms of modernization it brought lowered women's status while raising men's, by imposing new patterns of sex roles on farming and trading, and by carrying such inequalities to the new industrial and urban sectors.
When Boserup wrote this book, she could truthfully begin with these words: "In the vast and ever growing literature on economic development, reflections on the particular problems of women are few and far between." Boserup's own work is a first step toward rectifying that problem, both through its own analyses, and by serving as a cornerstone for numerous further works and projects. Many of the topics introduced or elucidated by Boserup have become major themes in the women and development movement.
Woman's Role in Economic Development pointed out the ways in which modern agricultural methods hurt women. New implements and instruction about new techniques were available to men only, raising their productivity and their perceived worth in the society. Women's productivity and perceived social worth decreased by comparison. Their workload often increased, for often when men grew cash crops they were unavailable for, or unwilling to do, their traditional farm chores. In addition, many women lost informal rights to the land they farmed; in Boserup's words, women's role changed from that of a decision-making cultivator, to that of a "family aid" or "hired hand." Other economic changes affecting women include the transition from a subsistence economy in which, in some parts of the world, women have a great deal of autonomy to a cash economy, which usually replicates the industrialized world's patterns of male domination.
Boserup advocates greater roles for women in these modern industrial work forces, and calls for greater educational opportunities to facilitate such employment. She disagrees with a strain of development thinking prevalent at the time she was writing, which argued against policies to give women better employment, on the theory that they would be taking jobs away from men (who really needed them) in areas of high unemployment. Boserup claimed that women's working would create opportunities for other avenues of development.
Boserup writes as a planner and economist, who sees development as a process benefitting national economies through modernization. When development excludes women from full participation, it denies its benefits to women and it functions far less effectively. Planners should increase women's involvement and productivity in the modern sector, and provide women with the necessary education. Boserup's confidence in the planning process, and in the necessity of fitting women into that process so as to increase their status, presages one main trend in women and development thinking today, which calls for an "integration of women into the development process."
the development of the issue
Throughout the 1970s, as women organized for their rights, the development bureaucracy began to respond. International meetings made a point to mention the impact on the status of women of whatever it was they discussed. The United Nations Conference on Population in 1977, for example, recognized the close connection between the role of women and population growth, especially with respect to the close correlation between rises in women's labor force participation and education, and declines in birth rates.
That same year, those who wished to involve women and women's needs in development planning, achieved a minor victory in United States policy. The Percy Amendment added to the Foreign Assistance Act called for United States representatives in international agencies "to encourage and promote the integration of women" into the economies of the nations involved, and into policy-making positions in those organizations, "thereby improving the status of women."
As a result, "women and development" became an official part of official development efforts in the United States. A Women in Development office was organized at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and agencies ranging from the World Bank to the non-governmental private voluntary organizations began to encourage special women's programs.
Meanwhile, in the field, development projects had already begun special programs to "involve women more in development" by the early 1970s. The Economic Commission for Africa of the United Nations, for example, had a meeting in March 1969 entitled The Regional Meeting on the Role of Women in National Development, followed by more specific meetings in Rabat and Addis Ababa during the following two years. By 1973-74, a number of action programs sponsored by the ECA had begun, especially in home economics and other traditional "women's" fields.
Concurrent with these developments was growing awareness of the impact of development on women in the United Nations. As early as November 1967, the General Assembly passed a Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, which promoted greater "economic participation of women" in order to promote the integration of women in development. By 1972, International Women's Year (which was originally suggested by a group of women's non-governmental organizations) was proclaimed for 1975, by the General Assembly of the United Nations, with the three themes of equality, development and peace.
Two special conferences that took place that year confirmed and energized the women and development movement. In July of 1975, both an official IWY conference and a dynamic public Tribune met for two weeks in Mexico. Two booklets are available from the United Nations describing each conference and their proceedings.
Together these conferences form a turning point in the movement to bring a new relationship between women and development, by providing the impetus, the networks, the energy, and the validity for a worldwide movement. In fact, most of the documents and many of the projects dealing with the issue owe their existence to these conferences either directly (as preparatory or follow-up documents) or historically, being inspired by the conference or conference follow-up.
For the purposes of this survey, the body of literature on women and development will be divided into three general categories, which, taken together, can give a comprehensive picture of what kinds of statements have been and are being made about women and development:
• Descriptions of the negative impact of development on women, or about the status of women in developing nations.
• Organizational documents and reports, and development agency literature on the topic.
• Policy recommendations and critical analyses of the women and development movement, and feminine approaches to solving the problem.
As with any categories, these overlap each other, some of them considerably, especially because so much of the material is anecdotal.
what does development mean for women
Materials on women and development produced since the 1975 IWY conference range from interviews to statistical tables and comprise diverse political perspectives.
Much of the literature takes the form of interviews or reports of interviews with third world women, which reflects a bias of the women and development movement - that development comes from the people involved. Some of the best materials of this genre, naturally enough, come from third world groups themselves.
One magazine, published in West Africa, while not exclusively about women, carries some of the finest articles about and for women. Famille et Developpement has covered such topics in the past few years as agriculture and women's work in the field; has run a major set of articles entitled "La polygamie est-elle un mal necessaire?" ("Is Polygamy a Necessary Evil?") which discusses the economic and historical factors involved in that practice, including interviews with women married to polygamous men; and even dared to publish on a previously undiscussed and taboo subject, clitoridectomy and infibulation. Famille et Developpement reaches grass-roots development workers, and just plain folks throughout francophone Africa. The magazine has succeeded in doing in its pages what the women and development movement should be all about - women's concerns are not only treated separately where appropriate, but the needs of women are treated as a prominent concern within whatever topic is being discussed whether it is tourism, and the growth of prostitution it generates, or housing and water problems, and what these mean to women.
Another French magazine, a quarterly published in the Ivory Coast, AGRIPROMO, devoted one issue to Le Travail de la femme (Women's Work). There are interviews with a woman from Burundi, "Si je ne travaille pas tout le temps je serai meprisee" ("If I Don't Work All the Time, I Will be Scorned") and, even more telling, interviews with men from Togo, "Ma femme m'aide, mais je ne I'aide pas" ("My Wife Helps Me, But I Don't Help Her") and "Ma femme ne fait pas du vrai travail" ("My Wife Doesn't Do Real Work"). In addition, there are charts of the differing workloads of women and men, as well as discussion guides, all written in simple French.
A fascinating pair of books report and analyse a series of talks with women in six developing countries: Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Mexico. Perdita Huston, the author, an American journalist and development planner, sought over 150 women's opinions on the ways the modernization process has affected their lives. Huston used an unstructured, open-ended approach in her interviews, without attempting to fit the women she talked to into a predetermined set of questions - and a predetermined set of assumptions. She met with women where they gathered in groups, in the fields, markets, or health care facilities and talked with them informally. From these groups she asked for volunteers for individual, in-depth interviews, lasting one hour or more, which Huston began with the question, "How does your life differ from that of your mother and grandmother?"
One of these books. Message from the Village, recounts portions of these discussions, edited heavily for their content on women's views of family planning (for,which Huston's study was funded) and on personal autonomy. The interviews are presented country by country, with short introductions and descriptions of the women and the context of the interview. There is a short concluding chapter suggesting ways to improve family planning programmes. Huston calls for measures to change men's attitudes, and to deal with male dominance, which Huston believes is the strongest barrier to family planning. She also emphasizes the need for women's leadership and stronger women's organizations.
The second book, based on the same set of interviews, Third World Women Speak Out, includes conversation about a wider range of topics, especially on the ways in which women see the social and economic changes in their lives, in their families, in education, health care, and politics. It also recounts interviews with professionals such as health care workers, political leaders and academics.
Huston finds out that women's opinions about the modernization of their societies are mixed: "The changes most often mentioned by rural women I interviewed as characterizing the 'new times' were increased dependence on cash and the newly available educational opportunities. The first of these factors "makes life more difficult"; the second offers to their children advantages that were not available to previous generations". Not only were some of the economic changes seen as harmful in themselves, but also as they alter family relationships. For instance, one woman from Kenya commented that men had wrongly used their extra money, staying away from home and finding women elsewhere.
Particularly interesting are the women's comments on family planning, desirable family size, and the constraints that prevent women from using contraceptives; the discussion of "female circumcision" or infibulation, which well portraysthe dilemmas women face; and discussions with women about the education they desire for their daughters.
A commentary at the end of the volume analyzes Huston's interviews from standard social science approach. It adds some numerical data: in a third of the statements about the relationship between economic problems and the household situation, women complained that men spend what they earn on themselves, not sharing it with the family. This part of the text reports a fact that should help to dispel any residual notions that people in developing areas are passive victims; women mentioned solutions to economic problems more frequently than they mentioned economic problems themselves.
A great deal of other literature has appeared describing the problems women face in development. In her new book, The Sisterhood of Man, Kathleen Newland discusses the status of women in seven major areas: legal systems, educational systems, the labour market, the family, politics, the mass media, and health systems. Unlike many analysts, Newland refuses to neatly slice the realities of women's societies into first and third worlds according to nations. Thus we find mention of progressive, feminist magazines like Famille et Developpement from Senegal and Femme in France juxtaposed with discussions of the images of women in journals like McCalls from the USA or romance novels in Latin America. What emerges is a picture of women's status determined mostly by sex roles, no matter where in the world one searches..
Newland's work details numerous facts, written with a consistently pro-woman vocabulary. Newland supports many of the changes brought about by the women's movement, and includes a very short chapter on the empowerment of women at the end of the volume. One only wishes that such a lucid thinker and fine writer as Newland might delve deeper into these policy changes on which she only touches.
For an excellent collection of popularly written articles surveying the status of women in third and first worlds, one might look toward the New Internationalist's issue, "Women Hold Up Half the Sky" . One article is an interview with a Bangladeshi woman, talking about her early marriage and her husband who beats her ("Oh, sister, I have so many problems"); another is an interview with a South African woman, and yet another by an African, on women in Guinea Bissau. An introductory article by Maggie Black describes some of the ways in which the development process has excluded women.
The Handbook of International Data on Women provides a completely different sort of information on women and development numerical. It is an indispensable volume for anyone needing statistical information about the status of women across the globe. The authors, Elise Boulding, Shirley Nuss, Dorothy Lee Carson and Michael Greenstein, used data collected by various agencies of the United Nations and the Institute of Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The data, ranked by nation, detail the participation of women in numerous industries and forms of employment; by birth, marriage, reproductive and death information; and about political structures as they affect women. The authors developed two new terms to describe their way of presenting the information. One is the "index of femaleness" which shows the proportion and the number of those engaged in certain activities (such as an occupation or a level of education) who are women. The other is the "distribution index" which shows what percentage and number of women are involved in a subgroup of a larger category of women (for example, a table showing what percent of all live births that have been recorded by mother's age, were to women in a given age group).
The authors remind us about the difficulties in obtaining regular and reliable figures on women which both result from the undervaluing of women, and cause further inattention to women's needs. Yet, they say, even these inadequacies in the data paint an accurate picture of the problem facing those who want to write about women.
what do the official agencies say?
The large planning agencies have, of course, said much on the topic of how development relates to women and to women's concerns. This section reviews, very briefly, several pieces of popular promotional literature on this topic, coming from international and non-governmental agencies.
From literature produced by several of the international aid agencies it is possible to discern something about how such agencies think about women and development. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has issued a booklet called The Missing Half, a slick, illustrated 48 page pamphlet. With short text, large graphic designs, and numerous photographs, it could serve as a good introduction to the problems of women and development.
Some of the most powerful discussion of the issues takes place through its pictures. Most show women at work-sowing, harvesting, winnowing, pounding, and serving food; driving a tractor, caring for children. One particularly moving picture shows a mother nursing her baby as she sits in the marketplace, her face staring blankly, perhaps as she muses about the chores that await her.
The narrative takes a stab at development programs, commenting that "the first people needing to be developed are the developers themselves. "Unfortunately, sometimes the language slips into a somewhat condescending perspective (many family planning programmes have failed "because of the incapacity of uneducated women to adapt themselves to abrupt changes") and once, despite all the booklet has said about women as agricultural producers, the text refers to a "farmer and his wife." One of the best paragraphs comes at the very end, where it discusses the relationship between development programmes and women: "Women's participation in development should not, however, be considered solely in terms of their contribution to the society and the economy. It is a goal in its own right."
Another booklet from the United Nations Development Programme, by Ester Boserup and Christina Liljencrantz, is Integration of Women in Development. The first third of its text is devoted to a short presentation of "the nature of the problem," pointing out a number of ways in which the modern economic sector excludes women. The second section deals with some of the changes the authors call for in order for women to become a fuller part of that modern industrial sector: changes in attitudes toward the marriage and reproductive cycle; literacy and job training, including giving women the tools for nontraditional, better-paying jobs; policies to hire women in both the public and private sectors. The final section calls for legislative programs that give and publicize women's rights, and also calls for programs that provide training facilities that will help both men and women to raise their productivity. The text itself is dry and uninspired, neither numerous hard facts on the one hand, nor anecdotes, are included. And, although at the very beginning and at the very end, the authors reassure us that development exists for the benefit of people, much of the body of the text urges women to accommodate themselves to the development system.
The World Bank has also brought out a pamphlet called Recognizing the "Invisible" Woman in Development: The World Bank's Experience. The title itself reveals a great deal — women invisible to whom? Only to those whose self interest blinds them to the women whose work sustains societies around the world.
The text of the book presents a variety of development themes, some of the problems facing women, and what measures the World Bank has been taking to alleviate them. The presentation deals with both the theme of justice for women and the interests of women. Some of the sections discuss the need for women to have control over their work:
Failure to recognize the economic contribution of women implies failure to consider the factors affecting their contribution, the ways in which they are prepared for their tasks, the tools and techniques they use, and the efficiency of their efforts. The support by society, which women may need, is also ignored, as is the question of whether they control the proceeds of, or rewards from, their efforts.
The text also suggests that the low participation of women in unions, and the inability of women to exercise power in the unions to which they do belong, prevents women from earning what they should. Other parts of the book are genuinely sympathetic to the double workload women face, and critical of programs that have not recognized that burden, as for example, a study of the impact of water programs in Kenya that showed "when water was made more accessible, women received less assistance from other family members in fetching it. Without supporting programmes, such as improving the efficiency of the water-carrying system, improved access to water may hold no benefits for women".
What this booklet lacks is not a coherent analysis of the problems facing women but rather the dynamism of third world women. One has the sense - not only in the title - that the developing world is still one that needs to be acted upon by external agents of change. The World Bank explains what its projects are doing for women overseas, with little sense of women's presence in these projects. This, of course, characterizes the structural problem of the World Bank style of development itself, and one that most assuredly affects its attitudes toward women in their projects.
analysing the developers - what are planning?
The following sections survey some documents discussing the various approaches to women and development, and proposing options for the future. It includes both papers that are somewhat theoretical and a sampling of reports of projects and conferences that analyze the woman/development relationship and prescribe new programs. Only one book is reviewed here, and unfortunately there are none by third world women. Virtually all of the rest of the important work on the topic is found in a few key collections of works, either in book, report, or magazine form.
Since it is generally agreed by now that the development process has excluded women, the differences occur in the solutions proposed by the agencies, planners and theorists. By now, the phrase "integration of women into development" has become a code word used in many, many different ways. Some people using the phrase agree with its utilitarian meaning: women can be a legitimate means for reaching certain development goals; others use it less deliberately, or try to give it new meanings.
Much literature promoting the "integration of women into development" comes from the large planning agencies.
One relevant report - for what it omits, as well as what it includes — is a compilation of preparatory papers for a January 1978 conference called The International Conference on Women and Food. It was held in the United States and sponsored by the Consortium for International Development and the US Agency for International Development, to focus on the United Nations World Food Conference resolution on Women and Food. However, the preparatory papers, taken as a whole, do not emphasize women's role. Of the ten papers included, half are by men, half by women. Each one of the five essays by women deals directly with the problems of women and development, either from an overall perspective (such as Elise Boulding's "Women, Peripheries and Food Production") or with reference to a particular region or topic (like Kathleen Cloud's "Sex Roles in Food Production and Food Distribution in the Sahel"). Of the five papers by men, one (by Douglas Caton, reviewed below) deals in depth with women; the others do not, being concerned with strategies" for increasing food production and with analyses of food systems - with occasional reference to women.
Perhaps some authors felt that women had already achieved equality in the development process, so there was no need for specific mention of their needs.
One paper aware of the exclusion of women in development planning was written by Douglas Caton o f AID . "Elements of the Food Production/Distribution System: An Overview on How Women can Contribute" is the only one in the collection by a man to discuss the role of women in development.
From the title, one can discern what Caton means by "food system." It could not be the small plots that women farm throughout much of the developing world, for there women contribute enormously to their families' food needs. In fact, it is the modern capitalist, cash-oriented system to which Caton refers.
Part of Caton's paper discusses the various operations of a food system, which he describes in part as follows: "Agricultural production activities are composed of a set of individual farm input-output production function relationships."
Progress - for women and for the economy - depends upon women's greater involvement in this sector: "Lessening women's work burden, such as getting water and firewood, or working in the fields, has no pay-off for women, and for the nation, unless it is accompanied by a complementary effort along the road to full economic integration, such as training in modern production practices, and crop intensification or diversification."
Caton selects Taiwan as one example of successful integration of women into the modern economy, that could serve as a model for integration in agriculture. He enthusiastically pulled women into technical occupations, because there 'women were explicitly dealt with as a national resource'. Caton heralds in particular the involvement of women in the electronic industries, where "foreign investors, under the cited agreements with the Chinese (sic) government, established labor compounds consisting of a manufacturing plant, dormitories, food, health and recreational facilities, and training facilities."
Even if it does not already sound like the "company store" all over again, some comments made by Rachael Grossman will illustrate another side. In her article "Women's Place in the Integrated Circuit" , she shows what the involvement of women in Southeast Asian electronics industries has meant. Young women leave home to work in factories producing electronic components for calculators, computers, etc. They are often housed in barracks-like accommodations, earning less than a dollar a day. They peer through microscopes for long hours and deal with potent chemicals. Many of them develop such severe eye problems from this work that by their mid-twenties they are retired, with few or no transferable skills, no savings, and alienated from their traditional culture.
A very different understanding of the "integration of women into development" comes from development planner and writer Barbara Rogers. Beginning with a discussion of how different cultures assign roles according to gender, The Domestication of Women then describes how male-dominated Western biases have affected development planning. The book points out the structural sexism of planning agencies, notably in two divisions of the United Nations, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN Development Programme. That sexism brings harm to women through the development program it sponsors; Rogers shows in detail how data gathering and project implication have a negative impact on women. She points out that even the phrase "status of women" implies a very passive attitude toward women's role, an attitude that continues to see women as objects rather than subjects of development. As a result, Rogers places heavy emphasis on the need for much greater inclusion of women in leadership roles within planning agencies.
One main theme throughout Rogers' work is that women already are included in development, and must not be perceived as tangential to it. Separate women's projects only ghettoize women and leave unchanged the power relationships within the planning agencies. What is really needed is for women to be integrated into projects as full, equally powerful members of the planning process.
While Rogers so firmly and rightly insists that women must have more power in planning, she never goes a next step, to ask about and to comment on the structures that have so assiduously excluded women. At the beginning of the book, Rogers states that she will not be discussing motives but only the impact of certain policies. But, will not the same mistakes be repeated if another question is not asked: what structures and priorities in mainstream development have permitted it, until now, to exclude women? If women, and all people, are to be subjects and authors of their development, it is not only the sexism of the planning bureaucracies that needs to change but their entire structure, perspective and even function.
women who slice the knot differently
The phrase "integrating women into development" means different, almost opposite, things to different people. For some like Caton, it means including women more and including more women, in the modern agriculture and industrial sectors. For others, like Rogers, it means that women must have equal power in development planning structures, so that they may make development meet their needs.
The longer the development bureaucracies call for "integration of women into development," the more many women are criticizing what that has meant and will mean for women. The point, they say emphatically, is not to increase women's role in the modernization process that the developing world is undergoing. Rather, when the reasons why women have been excluded are examined, it will become apparent that what is needed is an overhaul of the entire development process and economic structures. For them, participation of women means direction of that process by women; in fact, by all those involved.
African Achola Pala provides one such critique of efforts to include women in a short, lucid essay "Definitions of Women and Development: An African Perspective." (This appears in an essential volume for those interested in the topic, Women and National Development: The Complexities of Change).
Pala argues that the problems of women in African absolutely cannot be considered apart from "the wider struggle by African people to free themselves from poverty and ideological domination." Many of the studies, she says, that show that women have been denied the fruits of the development process, neglect the reality that that process has not really helped men either. In fact, she writes that African women are already well-developed into their economies; the problem actually facing them is that those are dependent economies.
Pala argues' that the problems of women in Africa ab should not be considered; but that, rather than being considered just in comparison to African men's status, it be studied with respect to the social and economic situation in which they live. "What we must look for, then, is not how African women lost their development opportunity during colonial or contemporary neocolonial periods... but, rather, the differential impact of such socio-economic conditions on men and women. "Her recommendations, building on this analysis, call for, among other things, emphasis on development priorities "as local communities see them. " That will be the effective way to bettering African women's load and to making change work for them.
Another perspective on the movement to "integrate women into development" is provided by Ingrid Palmer. In an article "New Official Ideas on Women and Development," Palmer approaches several new policies or ideas from the perspective of what they can be expected to do for women. For example, the Basic Needs Approach calls for development strategies that address the needs of the very poorest people; that emphasize production increases that provide the essentials the poor need; and that include greater participation of people in decision making. Palmer brings a feminist critique which shows that the BNA will not and cannot help women without prior mobilization of women; "until woman's direct access to resources is specified, there can be no real realignment of economic opportunities and of rights of appropriation over the returns to those opportunities between the sexes. "Furthermore, specific application of BNA policies to women would be needed. Even some of the basic components of the BNA do not address women's needs. For example, where it calls for higher productivity, new employment, this may bring far more benefits to men who form the larger part of the unemployed Women already busy - may lose further ground Palmer states "there may thus be a case for giving priority to changing women's present inadequate employment into adequate employment, even at the cost of retaining some male unemployment."
Palmer reverses the usual priorities. She demands something of development for women, rather than claiming that women must serve development for their own good.
********
Much more has been written, and should be written, on development and women how women have been told they should "join development efforts" and how development really could better women's lives.
What is currently available is still inadequate. The reams of paper used for discourses on the subject often* repeat themselves or provide variations on a theme. We need a greater number of incisive analyses especially written by women, and by third world women, we need to seek it out, encourage it, read it, and promote the policies that will support women. And that, in the end, will transform development in some very basic ways.