Unveiling the Definitions of Development and Its Impact on Women and Children

When we talk about a country’s growth, we often jump straight to numbers – GDP, per capita income, trade figures. But these numbers tell an incomplete story. A nation’s true progress is deeply tied to how its most vulnerable and most vital populations – women and children – are faring. Development, in its fullest sense, is not a purely economic event. It is a social, political, and human transformation, and understanding it requires a framework that goes beyond the balance sheet.

What does “development” really mean? 🔗

For decades, “development” was treated as a synonym for economic growth. The assumption was straightforward: a country produces more wealth, and that wealth naturally improves everyone’s lives. But this framing quickly unravels when you consider countries that are resource-rich yet have large populations without access to healthcare, education, or basic rights.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) offers a far more comprehensive view. It defines development as the process of enlarging people’s choices – specifically, choices that allow individuals to lead a long and healthy life, to be educated, and to enjoy a decent standard of living, along with political freedoms and guaranteed human rights. This is a departure from income-centric thinking. Development here is understood as a multifaceted process involving deep social, economic, and political changes, all aimed at improving the quality of human life.

This broader definition matters enormously when applied to women and children. A girl who has access to education but faces early marriage has expanded knowledge yet a contracted future. A woman who earns an income but has no voice in political decisions is economically included but socially marginalized. True development must address all these dimensions together.

Why women and children are at the center of development 🔗

Women and children are not just beneficiaries of development – they are its drivers. When women are educated and economically active, entire families benefit. When children receive early nutrition and learning opportunities, nations gain a more capable, productive population for generations ahead. This is precisely why their development must be explicitly targeted through appropriate policies and programs, rather than being assumed as a natural byproduct of general economic growth.

UN Women emphasizes that gender equality is not just a human rights issue – it is foundational to sustainable development. The concept of gender mainstreaming, formally endorsed through the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, mandates that the concerns and experiences of both women and men become an integral part of the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of all policies and programs across every sphere – political, economic, and social. The goal is not to create a separate “women’s track” of development, but to ensure that gender perspectives are woven into the mainstream of all decision-making.

Without this deliberate integration, development policies tend to be gender-blind, often reinforcing existing inequalities rather than correcting them.

The human development approach 🔗

The intellectual foundation for understanding development beyond economics comes from the Human Development Approach, developed by economist Mahbub ul Haq and anchored in Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s work on human capabilities. Introduced formally in UNDP’s first Human Development Report in 1990, this approach argues that the fundamental aim of development policy should be to expand the opportunities that people have to lead meaningful lives. Economic growth is a means to that end, not the end itself.

At its core, the approach focuses on three pillars:

• A long and healthy life – the freedom to live without preventable illness.
• Access to knowledge – the freedom to be educated and to apply that understanding.
• A decent standard of living – the freedom to have resources sufficient for a dignified life.

These three pillars are not abstract ideals. For women and children in particular, they translate into concrete realities: a girl completing secondary school, a mother accessing prenatal care, a woman participating in a local government meeting. Each of these is an expansion of capability – and that expansion is what development looks like at the human level.

The life cycle approach: development as a continuum 🔗

A powerful companion to the human development approach is the Life Cycle Approach, which recognizes that a person’s needs, vulnerabilities, and capacities shift dramatically across different stages of life. According to UNDP, our choices and opportunities from childhood to older age accumulate over the life course, and breaking patterns of inequality requires identifying critical intervention points – as well as the cumulative disadvantages that build up when those interventions are missed.

Consider what this means in practice. A child who lacks access to early childhood education may not learn as efficiently later. A young girl denied secondary schooling may face informal work or unemployment in adulthood. A woman who has worked fewer years at lower wages will receive a smaller pension in old age. Each stage of deprivation feeds into the next, creating cycles of poverty that are passed down across generations.

Effective development policy must therefore be designed with this continuum in mind. Key intervention priorities across the life cycle for women and girls include:

• Early childhood: Nutrition, immunization, and stimulating environments to prevent irreversible developmental damage.
• Adolescence: Quality secondary education, protection from early marriage, and access to reproductive health information.
• Working age: Equal wages, access to childcare, protection from workplace discrimination, and land and property rights.
• Old age: Expanded pension access to prevent women from falling into poverty in their final years.

This framework moves beyond one-time interventions and toward a sustained, comprehensive approach – ensuring that a vulnerability at one stage does not condemn a person or their children to a lifetime of disadvantage.

Measuring progress: HDI, GDI, and GEM 🔗

A development framework is only as useful as its ability to be measured. Three key indices were developed to track human progress in ways that go far beyond GDP.

The Human Development Index (HDI) 🔗

The Human Development Index was introduced by UNDP in 1990 and is the most widely used composite measure of national development. According to Our World in Data, the HDI combines three dimensions: a long and healthy life (measured by life expectancy at birth), knowledge (measured by expected and mean years of schooling), and a decent standard of living (measured by Gross National Income per capita). Every country receives a score between 0 and 1, enabling meaningful cross-country comparisons that go well beyond economic output alone.

The HDI was a landmark shift – explicitly designed to move the focus of development economics from national income accounting toward people-centered policies. But it has one significant blind spot: it does not account for inequality within a country, and in particular, it does not capture how development outcomes differ between men and women.

The Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) 🔗

To address this gap, the Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) was introduced in the 1995 UNDP Human Development Report. It measures gender inequalities across the same three dimensions as the HDI – health, education, and economic resources – but does so separately for women and men. The GDI is expressed as the ratio of the female HDI to the male HDI, with a value of 1 indicating gender parity. Values below 1 indicate that women fare worse than men in human development outcomes; values above 1 indicate the reverse.

The GDI is often described as a gender-sensitive extension of the HDI. It applies what is called an “inequality aversion” penalty – meaning that a country’s development score is reduced when significant gaps exist between men and women in life expectancy, education, or income. This makes the cost of gender inequality visible in a country’s overall development score, not just in targeted gender-specific statistics.

It is important to note that the GDI cannot be used in isolation. It is only meaningful when compared alongside a country’s HDI score. On its own, it does not independently measure gender inequality – a distinction often overlooked in popular usage. Additionally, the GDI has faced criticism for not accounting for unpaid care work, such as cooking, childcare, and domestic labor, which represents a substantial portion of women’s economic contribution – particularly in developing countries.

The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) 🔗

While the GDI focuses on achievements in human development, the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) focuses on agency – women’s active participation in economic and political life. Also introduced in 1995, the GEM was designed by UNDP to measure the extent of gender inequality based on women’s relative economic income, their participation in high-paying positions, and their access to professional and parliamentary roles.

The GEM looks at three specific dimensions:

• Political participation: The proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments – a direct indicator of women’s influence over policy and governance.
• Economic decision-making power: The share of women in senior legislative, official, and managerial roles.
• Control over economic resources: The estimated ratio of female to male earned income.

Research has shown that countries with higher percentages of women in parliament tend to prioritize different spending outcomes, with greater female representation correlating with increased investment in education and healthcare. The GEM, in this sense, tracks not just whether women are included, but whether they have real power to shape decisions that affect entire populations.

Both the GDI and GEM were created to rival traditional income-based measures like GDP, which often masked deep gender disparities even in countries with high aggregate economic output. Together, they provide a more textured picture of where women stand – not just in terms of survival and education, but in terms of their ability to participate fully in public and economic life.

From measurement to policy: why these indices matter 🔗

These indices do more than rank countries. They are diagnostic tools that identify where development has stalled and for whom. If a country has a strong HDI score but a significantly lower GDI score, it signals a specific failure: economic and educational progress is happening, but not reaching women equally. That gap calls for targeted policy responses – in areas like workplace discrimination, girls’ education, or access to healthcare.

Similarly, a low GEM score tells policymakers that women may be gaining education and health outcomes, but are still being locked out of the spaces where decisions are made. Closing that gap requires not just social programs, but structural reforms: gender-sensitive legislation, political quotas, and protections that enable women to hold and exercise power.

The life cycle approach further helps policymakers identify when to intervene, while the HDI, GDI, and GEM help them understand what to measure and where the gaps are largest. Together, these frameworks form a comprehensive toolkit for designing development programs that are genuinely inclusive – programs that treat the progress of women and children not as a niche concern, but as central to the holistic growth of any nation.

What do you think? If a country shows strong GDP growth but consistently low scores on the GDI and GEM, what does that reveal about the nature of its development – and what kinds of policy changes would be most effective in addressing those gaps? And given that the GDI does not account for unpaid care work performed largely by women, how might its absence distort our understanding of gender equality in developing economies?

References

1. https://hdr.undp.org/about/human-development
2. https://www.unwomen.org/en/how-we-work/un-system-coordination/gender-mainstreaming
3. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2015/02/gender-mainstreaming-issues
4. https://hdr.undp.org/content/advancing-human-development-theory-and-practice
5. https://hdr.undp.org/content/closing-gender-gaps-throughout-life-course
6. https://ourworldindata.org/human-development-index
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
8. https://hdr.undp.org/gender-development-index
9. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gender-development-index
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Empowerment_Measure
11. https://gender.study/issues-of-gender-and-development/measuring-gender-inequality-gdi-gem-indicators/