Exploring Perspectives on Women and Development

For most of the 20th century, development policy treated women as passive recipients – mothers to be fed, households to be managed, poverty statistics to be reduced. It took decades of scholarship, activism, and hard evidence to shift that view. Today, there are distinct theoretical frameworks – Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD), and Gender and Development (GAD) – each offering a different explanation for why women remain disadvantaged and what needs to change. Understanding these perspectives isn’t just academic; it shapes how governments, NGOs, and international bodies design programmes that affect hundreds of millions of lives.

The turning point: Boserup and the birth of WID 🔗

The conversation about women and development in its modern form began with a single book. In 1970, Danish economist Ester Boserup published Woman’s Role in Economic Development, the first systematic investigation into what happens to women as economies modernise. Boserup demonstrated that development did not benefit men and women equally – in fact, it frequently worsened women’s relative position. As new agricultural technologies were introduced, they were directed at men. As formal industrial sectors grew, women were pushed into the lowest-paid, most monotonous work. Her data made visible something policymakers had chosen not to see: women’s economic labour was vast, varied, and almost entirely unacknowledged.

Boserup’s work is widely credited as a motivation behind the United Nations Decade for Women from 1975 to 1985, and it provided the intellectual foundation for what became known as the Women in Development framework. Before Boserup, development aid agencies operated on a “trickle-down” assumption – improve the economy and everyone benefits. Her evidence demolished that assumption for women.

Women in Development (WID): getting women into the picture 🔗

The WID framework began to be articulated by American liberal feminists in the early 1970s, emerging from a recognition that modernisation was affecting men and women in fundamentally different ways. Its core argument was practical: development programmes were failing because they ignored half the population. The solution was to integrate women into existing development processes – bring them into the workforce, extend education and credit to them, include them in policy decisions.

This approach had real institutional impact. In 1973, the US Congress passed the Percy Amendment, requiring USAID to integrate women into development programmes. WID challenged development programmes to recognise women as economic actors rather than passive welfare recipients – a significant shift in official language and funding priorities.

The limits of WID 🔗

But WID had a fundamental blind spot. The WID model did not question modernisation, and it placed the responsibility for development on women’s economic capacity without confronting the power disparities between men and women. It was, in effect, a “non-confrontational approach” – it sought to insert women into a system without asking whether that system was itself the problem. Critics also noted that WID focused almost exclusively on women’s productive (paid) work while ignoring reproductive labour – the unpaid domestic and caregiving work that underpins entire economies. It also tended to treat women as a homogeneous category, applying a Western, Global North lens to the vastly different realities of women in the Global South.

Women and Development (WAD): questioning the system 🔗

The Women and Development approach originated in 1975 in Mexico City as a framework rooted in neo-Marxist and dependency theory. WAD made a crucial conceptual move: rather than asking how to better integrate women into development, it asked why development itself systematically disadvantaged women. Its answer pointed to the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism – two interlocking structures that together exploited women’s labour.

WAD’s central insight was that women have always been integrated into their societies and economies – the issue is that this integration primarily serves to sustain existing structures of inequality, not to advance women’s own interests. WAD pushed for women-only development projects as a way of removing women from the patriarchal dynamics that arise when men and women participate together in development under unequal conditions.

Where WAD fell short 🔗

Despite its more critical edge, WAD carried significant limitations. WAD was criticised for its singular preoccupation with the productive side of women’s work while ignoring reproductive aspects of their lives. Like WID, it tended to concentrate on income-generating activities without accounting for the additional time burdens placed on women. It also failed to dig deeply into the social relations of gender within classes – focusing on international and class inequalities while leaving the ideology of patriarchy largely unexamined. WAD’s narrow focus on working-class women also excluded those not in formal employment, limiting the scope of any political coalition it could build.

Gender and Development (GAD): shifting the lens entirely 🔗

The GAD approach originated in the 1980s from socialist feminism and can be traced to the Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) network, first initiated in India. GAD represented a fundamental reorientation. Instead of focusing on women as a separate category to be “added” to development, it shifted attention to gender relations – the socially constructed roles, responsibilities, and power dynamics between men and women that shape both their lives.

GAD’s key contributions were threefold. First, it recognised that women may be involved in development but not necessarily benefit from it, and therefore sought to ensure equal participation and control over outcomes. Second, it brought the private sphere – the household, domestic labour, violence within families – into the development conversation, an area both WID and WAD had largely avoided. Third, and most importantly, it included men as necessary participants in any genuine effort to change gender relations. If men are not included in development interventions, gender relations differences can remain an obstacle to eliminating inequality.

GAD and the “triple role” of women 🔗

One of GAD’s analytical contributions – developed through Caroline Moser’s Gender Planning Framework – is the concept of women’s triple role: reproductive work (childbearing and caregiving), productive work (paid employment and income generation), and community-managing activities. Recognising all three simultaneously was a direct challenge to development programmes that counted only paid work as economically meaningful. The Moser framework also distinguished between practical gender needs (immediate needs that help women in their current roles) and strategic gender needs (changes that would transform the balance of power between men and women). Addressing practical needs alone does not achieve equality; strategic needs must also be tackled.

Five practical approaches to women’s development 🔗

Alongside these three theoretical frameworks, Caroline Moser identified five policy approaches to women’s development: welfare, equity, anti-poverty, efficiency, and empowerment. These approaches are not mutually exclusive and have coexisted at different points in development history.

Welfare 🔗

The earliest and most enduring approach, welfare treats women primarily as mothers and caregivers. It provides top-down assistance – food aid, maternal health programmes, family planning – without questioning traditional gender roles. Moser noted that welfare remains popular in development practice partly because it is “politically safe” – it does not challenge or seek to change existing arrangements. This is precisely its weakness: it addresses symptoms without touching causes.

Equity 🔗

The equity approach, rooted in liberal feminism, argues that women’s disadvantages stem from legal and institutional discrimination. The equity approach is rooted in a vision of justice where women, men, girls and boys are valued equally as partners in sustainable development, and it relies on legal reform to achieve this. It was the original WID approach but was considered too confrontational and was progressively scaled back in mainstream policy.

Anti-poverty 🔗

The anti-poverty approach acknowledges that women are disproportionately represented among the poor and focuses on expanding their economic access – particularly to employment, credit, and markets. It accepts women’s existing roles but seeks to improve their material conditions within those roles. Unlike the equity approach, it frames the issue as poverty rather than subordination, which made it more politically palatable – and therefore more widely implemented, though also more limited in ambition.

Efficiency 🔗

The efficiency approach, which became dominant through the structural adjustment era of the 1980s and 1990s, argues that investing in women is smart economics. It frames gender equality as a means to development ends rather than an end in itself. The efficiency approach relies on all three roles of women and an elastic concept of women’s time, essentially adding to women’s burdens without a structural reduction in their overall load. Its critics argue it instrumentalises women – treating them as a development resource rather than as rights-bearing individuals.

Empowerment 🔗

The empowerment approach is the most transformative of the five. The Longwe Women Empowerment Framework, adopted by the United Nations, identifies five dimensions of empowerment: welfare, access, conscientisation, participation, and control – with each level representing a deeper degree of genuine power. Unlike the efficiency approach, empowerment is not about making women useful to development; it is about enabling women to define and pursue their own goals. It connects personal autonomy to collective action and structural change, recognising that individual progress is unsustainable without shifts in broader power relations.

Where theory meets reality 🔗

In practice, WID, WAD, and GAD are not mutually exclusive and do not follow any neat, logical progression. Development agencies frequently use the language of GAD while continuing to fund WID-style programmes. Gender mainstreaming – the policy commitment to embedding gender equality across all sectors – was formally adopted at the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in 1995, and it remains the dominant institutional strategy today. Yet evidence consistently shows that mainstreaming is often implemented superficially, with the structural power imbalances that GAD was designed to address remaining largely intact.

The persistent challenge is that no single framework, applied in isolation, is sufficient. Women’s subordination is simultaneously economic, cultural, legal, and relational. Addressing it requires approaches that are responsive to context – aware of class, caste, race, and geography – and that treat women not as homogeneous beneficiaries of development, but as diverse agents who define their own needs and interests. The discourse on development has traditionally constructed women as beneficiaries rather than as key players in building an equitable society, and reversing that construction remains the central task of all these perspectives combined.

What do you think? Development frameworks have moved from welfare handouts to empowerment strategies over the past 50 years – but has the actual lived experience of women in the Global South kept pace with these theoretical shifts? And given that GAD explicitly requires men’s participation to transform gender relations, why do so many development programmes still treat gender equality as a “women’s issue” alone?

References

1. https://academic.oup.com/erae/article-abstract/35/4/598/513051
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ester_Boserup
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_and_development
4. https://gender.study/issues-of-gender-and-development/ester-boserup-feminist-development-theory/
5. https://medium.com/@DevonOMatthews/wid-wad-gad-or-what-9242552bb67e
6. https://cn2collins.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/the-wid-wad-gad-approach-on-gender-development/
7. https://www.studocu.com/row/document/fourah-bay-college/gender-and-development-studies/feminist-perspective-of-wid-wad-and-gad/82633757
8. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Solomon-Mwije/publication/367479768_A_PARADIGM_SHIFT_FROM_WOMEN_IN_DEVELOPMENT_WID_TO_GENDER_AND_DEVELOPMENT_GAD_Examining_why_there_was_a_paradigm_shift_from_WID_-_WAD_to_GAD_in_an_Effort_to_Address_Gender_Inequalities/links/63d44d31c465a873a262b18a/A-PARADIGM-SHIFT-FROM-WOMEN-IN-DEVELOPMENT-WID-TO-GENDER-AND-DEVELOPMENT-GAD-Examining-why-there-was-a-paradigm-shift-from-WID-WAD-to-GAD-in-an-Effort-to-Address-Gender-Inequalities.pdf
9. https://www.developmenteducation.ie/media/documents/women_gender_dev.pdf
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moser_Gender_Planning_Framework
11. https://www.oefse.at/fileadmin/content/Downloads/Publikationen/Foren/Forum32.pdf
12. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/43934/1/MPRA_paper_43934.pdf
13. https://mau.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1482519/FULLTEXT01.pdf
14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_empowerment
15. https://www.fao.org/4/am314e/am314e00.pdf
16. https://www.academia.edu/35217841/development_approach_to_women_docx