Incorporating Women into Development Policies

For most of the 20th century, women barely featured in formal development policies – and when they did, it was almost exclusively as mothers and caregivers. Today, gender equality is embedded in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, national policy frameworks, and international aid programmes. But getting here required decades of intellectual debate, feminist activism, and a gradual – and still incomplete – transformation in how policymakers understand women’s role in development. The journey from welfare to empowerment is not just academic history; it continues to shape how development resources are distributed and who benefits from them.

Where it all started: the welfare approach 🔗

Before the 1970s, development policy treated women almost entirely through a welfare lens. Welfare-oriented programmes focused on women’s reproductive roles – nutrition, birth control, pregnancy care – positioning women as passive recipients of state support rather than active participants in economic life. This wasn’t accidental. The underlying assumption was that development was essentially gender-neutral: if a country’s overall economy grew, the benefits would “trickle down” to all, including women.

The problem was that this assumption was demonstrably false. Women’s productive labor – whether in agriculture, informal trade, or household management – was systematically invisible in both policy and national accounting. Development projects designed without considering women often bypassed them entirely or, worse, disrupted their existing economic roles.

The Boserup moment: making women’s work visible 🔗

The turning point came in 1970, when Danish economist Ester Boserup published Woman’s Role in Economic Development. Boserup’s work is widely described as the first systematic investigation into what happens to women during economic and social growth in the developing world. Using empirical data across regions and cultures, she demonstrated that development was not only bypassing women but was often actively worsening their economic and social status.

Her findings were particularly striking on agriculture. In many African societies, women held central roles in farming – yet colonial policies had dismantled customary land rights and consolidated ownership in male hands. In parts of Asia, patriarchal structures already dominated agricultural decision-making, leaving women performing labor-intensive tasks without control over the land or the crops they produced. Boserup argued that if women had better access to education, credit, and technology, both their productivity and national development outcomes would improve significantly – linking women’s inclusion to efficiency, not just fairness.

This reframing was powerful precisely because it spoke the language of development economists. Women were not charity cases; they were an untapped economic resource. Her work is widely credited as the intellectual spark behind the UN Decade for Women (1975-1985), which pushed development agencies globally to question their gender-blind assumptions.

Women in development (WID): integration without transformation 🔗

Boserup’s work directly inspired what became known as the Women in Development (WID) approach, which gained institutional traction through the 1970s. USAID formalized the term in its policy vocabulary, with the underlying rationale that women represented an economically underutilized resource. The UN followed, establishing the Institute for Training and Research for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) in 1975 and increasing funds under what is now UN Women.

WID’s goal was straightforward: integrate women into existing development processes. The WID approach accepted existing social and economic structures in recipient countries and sought to make women more productive within them. A 1985 OECD Development Centre report surveyed development projects aimed at women and concluded that too many remained welfare-oriented, calling for future projects to focus on income-generating activities relevant to women’s actual lives.

But WID had a critical blind spot. It concentrated almost entirely on women’s productive roles – getting women into formal employment and economic activity – while completely ignoring the reproductive and care work that consumed much of their time. Encouraging women to “get a job” without questioning who would continue doing the unpaid domestic labor simply added to what became known as the “double burden.” WID tried to fit women into an unequal system without asking whether the system itself needed to change.

Women and development (WAD): a structural critique 🔗

By the late 1970s, a different strand of thinking emerged, influenced by dependency theory and Marxist political economy. Women and Development (WAD) challenged WID’s core premise. Rather than arguing that women were excluded from development, WAD argued that women had always been integrated into development – but on exploitative terms. Their unpaid labor in homes and subsistence farming was, in fact, what made formal economic development possible.

WAD directed attention to the unequal power relationships between women and men and between developed and developing nations. However, it faced its own limitations: it focused almost exclusively on women’s productive roles and largely ignored reproductive work and women’s lives outside of economic participation. It also assumed that improving international economic equity would automatically improve women’s position – an assumption critics found overly optimistic and structurally incomplete.

Gender and development (GAD): challenging the system itself 🔗

The most significant conceptual shift came with the Gender and Development (GAD) approach, which emerged in the 1980s, influenced by the writings of feminist scholars like Ann Oakley and Gayle Rubin, who had argued that women’s subordination was rooted not in biology but in socially constructed gender relations. GAD signaled three key departures from WID: it shifted focus from women to gender; it re-examined all social, political, and economic structures from the perspective of gender differentials; and it recognized that achieving gender equality required transformative change in gender relations at every level, from the household to the global.

Where WID asked “how do we include women?”, GAD asked “why are women excluded in the first place?” – and then sought to dismantle the power structures responsible. GAD sought to empower women and transform unequal gender relations rather than simply integrating women into existing, unequal systems. It also recognized that women were not a homogeneous group – the challenges facing an educated urban professional were fundamentally different from those facing a poor rural woman without land rights or access to credit.

Practical vs. strategic gender needs 🔗

A key analytical contribution to this period came from British anthropologist Caroline Moser, whose 1989 framework for gender planning in the Third World distinguished between two types of women’s needs. Practical gender needs emerge from women’s immediate living conditions – access to clean water, healthcare, childcare – and can be addressed by specific interventions without challenging underlying inequalities. Strategic gender needs, by contrast, emerge from structural inequalities themselves: inheritance rights, legal protections against domestic violence, equal political representation, control over reproductive decisions. Moser argued that effective development policy had to address both – but that genuinely transformative development required sustained attention to strategic needs, not just the practical ones.

This distinction remains one of the most useful tools in gender policy analysis. A programme that builds more water pumps meets a practical need – and is valuable. But a programme that asks why fetching water is exclusively women’s work, and fights for women’s equal representation on the water management committee, addresses a strategic need. The first makes women’s unequal lives more bearable; the second begins to change the inequality itself.

Gender mainstreaming: from theory to institutional policy 🔗

By the mid-1990s, the GAD framework had gained sufficient traction to be institutionalized at the highest level of global governance. The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing endorsed gender mainstreaming as the central strategy for achieving gender equality commitments worldwide. Two years later, the UN Economic and Social Council formally defined gender mainstreaming as the process of assessing the implications for both women and men of any planned action – including legislation, policies, and programmes – across all areas and all levels of governance.

In principle, gender mainstreaming meant that gender equality was no longer just a “women’s issue” to be handled by a specialized department. It became the responsibility of every ministry, agency, and programme. UN Women’s guidance on gender mainstreaming in development programming frames this as a long-term strategy to transform discriminatory institutions, laws, cultural norms, and community practices – including those restricting women’s access to property rights or public space.

In practice, however, implementation has been uneven. Research reviewing gender mainstreaming in international institutions since Beijing found that while most institutions adopted the language and put policies on paper, actual implementation remained inconsistent – and the impact on gender equality outcomes was largely unmeasured. Critics noted that “gender” frequently became a code word for “women,” that the approach became technocratic and depoliticized, and that it failed to account for intersecting inequalities of race, class, and geography.

Empowerment: women as agents, not objects 🔗

Running alongside and beyond these institutional frameworks is the concept of empowerment – arguably the most demanding standard of all. Empowerment moves women from being objects of development policy to being the subjects and agents of change. It is not something that can be delivered from the outside; it requires building women’s own capacity to define goals, make strategic choices, and act on them.

This involves three interconnected dimensions: access to resources (material, educational, social); agency (the ability to make meaningful decisions using those resources); and achievements (actual improvements in well-being and life outcomes). Organizations like the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh demonstrated through microfinance that when women are given financial resources and agency together, the outcomes ripple outward – into children’s education, household nutrition, and community participation. But empowerment frameworks also stress that money alone is not enough. Without addressing the social and legal structures that constrain women’s choices, economic resources can be captured by others or fail to translate into genuine agency.

Where things stand: genuine inclusivity remains unfinished work 🔗

The evolution from welfare to empowerment represents real progress – but the distance between policy language and lived reality remains wide. Many development agencies still default to WID-style interventions, integrating women into existing programmes without interrogating the power structures those programmes operate within. Gender mainstreaming, as the FAO’s analysis of gender in agriculture acknowledges, is often described as “fuzzy” – partly because the issues are genuinely complex, and partly because transformative social change is politically uncomfortable for institutions that depend on state cooperation.

Genuine inclusivity in development demands more than checking a “women’s participation” box. It requires designing policies with women – particularly the most marginalized women – not merely for them. It means recognizing that a rural woman without land rights, a woman from a marginalized ethnic community, and an urban professional navigating workplace discrimination all face structurally different forms of gender inequality. And it means holding development institutions accountable not just for the policies they adopt, but for the equality outcomes they actually produce.

What do you think? Development policies have shifted from treating women as welfare recipients to recognizing them as economic actors – but does integrating women into existing economic systems actually challenge the inequalities those systems produce? And in your view, what would it look like for a development programme to genuinely address women’s strategic gender needs rather than just their practical ones?

References

1. https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal5
2. https://gender.study/issues-of-gender-and-development/welfare-to-women-in-development-evolution/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ester_Boserup
4. https://gender.study/issues-of-gender-and-development/ester-boserup-feminist-development-theory/
5. https://www.usaid.gov/gender-equality-and-womens-empowerment
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_development
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_and_development
8. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13119/1/Women_in_Development_The_Discourse_and_the_Policy.pdf
9. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/367479768
10. https://www.academia.edu/24738395/Gender_planning_in_the_third_world_Meeting_practical_and_strategic_gender_needs
11. https://www.unwomen.org/en/how-we-work/un-system-coordination/gender-mainstreaming
12. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2015/02/gender-mainstreaming-issues
13. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249028207_Gender_Mainstreaming_Since_Beijing_A_Review_of_Success_and_Limitations_in_International_Institutions
14. https://www.grameen.com
15. https://www.fao.org/4/am314e/am314e00.pdf