Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
key
points
•
The links between unequal gender relations and development
have been increasingly recognized within development policy and
planning.
•
Promoting gender equality and empowering women is a key develop-
ment priority and is one of the eight MDGs (see also Chapter 1.5).
•
Women often have triple work roles within the family and commu-
nity, comprised of productive, social reproductive and community
managing roles.
•
Social reproductive work within the household, such as domestic
tasks, care of children and older or disabled relatives, subsistence
agriculture and so on, is usually carried out by women and is often
undervalued in both society and development policy and planning.
•
Households are often characterized by unequal power relations and
conflicting interests that result in women's and children's limited
involvement in decision-making processes and inequalities in access
to resources.
•
Household members' access to resources is also influenced by wider
social relations in rural and urban areas, alongside communal
expectations and responsibilities that are institutionalized at a
range of spatial scales.
169
further
reading
Momsen's second edition of
Gender and Development
(2004) and
Varley's essay, 'Gender, families and households', in Desai and Potter's
second edition of
The Companion to Development Studies
(2008) pro-
vide helpful introductions to gender, households and development in
the global South. Part 2 of Visvanathan et al.'s
The Women, Gender and
Development Reader
(1997)
,
focuses
on 'Households and Families'.
Chapters 5 and 10 of Kabeer's
Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in
Development Thought
(1994) provide in-depth discussion of gender and
household economics and the social relations approach. McIlwaine
and Datta's article, 'From feminising to engendering development'
(2003) in
Gender, Place and Culture
provides a good overview of
changing approaches to gender within development policy and plan-
ning, while Cornwall et al.'s
Feminisms in Development: Contradictions,
Contestations and Challenges
(2007) contains feminist analyses of a
range of contemporary development issues and concerns.
