In a recent contribution to openGlobalRights, Barb MacLaren argues for advancing women’s economic and social rights, focusing her point specifically on employment and household income. She depicts education and health as ancillary to supporting income and employment, but not as a right in themselves or for the improvement of women’s capabilities. Unfortunately, her arguments overlook 30 years of research on gender inequality and the power dynamics inside households. She also replicates some of the shortcomings of the earlier WID (Women in Development) movement that ignored the interconnections between employment, income generation via agriculture, land ownership, the care of persons done on an unpaid basis by women, violence against women and the role of gendered social norms. MacLaren also reproduces the common neglect of unpaid care in programming design in development agencies, and the lack of gender mainstreaming in development approaches and debates. Lastly, although she mentions Colombia’s legislation addressing violence against women and on women’s human rights, she skips over it.
In the 1950s and 1960s, experts pretended that their development policies were gender neutral. They perceived women as reproducers, consumers and passive recipients of policy programs, but they saw men as productive workers and therefore agents of change. The 1970s Women in Development (WID) movement sought to change that by highlighting women’s active participation in the economy, especially their role in agricultural production. They tried to change how the development community engaged with women and to make them see women as productive agents in the monetised economy. However, the movement paid little attention to the role women played in unpaid productive roles—what would today be called unpaid labour and the care economy. WID also glossed over how women’s lack of access to economic resources, justice, education and health, along with the violence they suffered, allowed gender inequalities to persist.
Income and employment are but a few of the factors at play in women’s human development and wellbeing. Out of this realisation emerged the Gender and Development (GAD) movement in the mid-1980s. GAD studies the economic, social and political structures that create gender inequality. It questions not only the asymmetry in power, but also in decision-making between men and women. GAD highlights how social norms on male and female roles influence the distribution of paid and unpaid labour, caring labour, income, assets, political participation, natural resource allocation and violence. In short, while WID assumed that the economic advancement of women would improve their status, GAD understands that income and employment are but a few of the factors at play in women’s human development and wellbeing. The factors at play have also come to be seen as women’s human rights.
