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within exploitative global capitalist relations of production. Both WID
and WAD approaches, however, were criticised for tending to treat all
women as a single homogeneous group - regardless of differences of
social class, race, ethnicity, age, religion, disability and so on - and for
focusing only on women's roles. Feminists increasingly highlighted the
inadequacies of WID and WAD in analysing gender relations (the
socially constructed form of relations between men and women) and
how development may influence these.
From the 1980s, a greater focus on gender relations led to the third
approach, Gender and Development (GAD). Informed by socialist femi-
nist perspectives, this approach saw gender as socially, rather than
biologically, constructed. As Momsen (2004: 2) explains, gender refers
to 'the socially acquired notions of masculinity and femininity by which
women and men are identified' and varies in different cultural contexts.
GAD aimed to analyse the gendered division of labour within the public
and the private spheres and transform unequal power relations
between men and women. GAD viewed women (and men) as active
agents rather than as passive recipients of 'development' and attempted
to understand holistically the social, cultural, economic and political
structures and institutions that perpetuate gender inequality (Young,
1997). Since the Fourth World UN Conference for Women in Beijing in
1995, the GAD approach has had a major influence on the agendas of
mainstream development institutions such as the World Bank.
Promoting gender equality and empowering women is now a key devel-
opment priority, reflected in one of the eight overarching Millennium
Development Goals (see Chapter 1.5).
Despite the relative success of GAD in mainstreaming gender
issues within development, feminists in the global South and others
have argued that the radical feminist goals of the original movement
have become diluted and the approach has not adequately chal-
lenged dominant modernist and neoliberal ideologies. Further criti-
cisms include a lack of attention to difference and diversity among
women and to men's roles and identities. Feminist geographers have
highlighted the importance of place and space in influencing gender
relations and ideologies, emphasizing the need to contextualize
local practices within specific socio-economic, political and cultural
contexts.
The UN Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993 and the inter-
national ratification of a growing number of UN human rights treaties,
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