CSS Gender Studies Gender and Development Syllabus

What is the difference between the 'condition' and the 'position' of women?

'Condition' refers to women's immediate material state (workload, lack of resources); 'position' refers to women's social and economic standing relative to men. Meeting practical needs improves condition; meeting strategic needs improves position.

What are the five WID/GAD policy approaches identified by Caroline Moser?

Welfare, Equity, Anti-poverty, Efficiency, and Empowerment.

What is the 'efficiency approach' in gender and development policy?

The most popular approach post-1980s (linked to structural adjustment), it relies on women's economic contribution and unpaid labor to make development more efficient and cost-effective, often increasing women's workload without addressing inequality.

What is the 'empowerment approach' to gender and development?

An approach (rooted in Third World feminism, e.g., DAWN) that seeks to increase women's self-reliance and internal power to transform structures of subordination through bottom-up mobilization, rather than top-down resource provision.

What does 'gender mainstreaming' mean as a development strategy?

Integrating a gender equality perspective into all policies, programs, and institutions at every stage (design, implementation, evaluation), formally adopted at the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women.

What is the difference between gender 'equality' and gender 'equity'?

Equality means equal treatment, rights, and opportunities for women and men; equity means fairness, providing resources and treatment according to needs to correct historical disadvantages, and is a means toward achieving equality.

What were Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs)?

Loan-conditionality programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank from the 1980s on indebted developing countries, requiring market liberalization, privatization, currency devaluation, trade openness, and cuts in public spending.

List the main policy components of Structural Adjustment Programmes.

Cuts in public/social spending, privatization of state enterprises, trade and financial liberalization, currency devaluation, removal of subsidies, deregulation, and export-led growth promotion.

Why are Structural Adjustment Policies said to have a disproportionate negative impact on women?

Cuts in health, education, and food subsidies shift the burden of care and provisioning onto women's unpaid labor, while job losses, falling real wages, and rising prices hit women hardest as primary household managers and low-paid workers.

How do SAPs intensify women's unpaid labor (the 'reproductive squeeze')?

When the state withdraws social services, women absorb the gap by increasing unpaid care work (nursing the sick, fetching water, stretching food budgets), assuming their labor is infinitely elastic.

What is the feminist critique that SAPs treat women's labor as 'infinitely elastic'?

SAPs assume women can absorb unlimited additional unpaid work to compensate for cuts in public services, ignoring the limits on women's time and energy and the resulting costs to their health and well-being.

Which feminist economist is well known for analyzing the gendered effects of structural adjustment, and what concept did she advance?

Diane Elson, who analyzed 'male bias' in the development process and argued that macroeconomic policy is not gender-neutral but rests on women's unpaid reproductive labor.

What is meant by the 'male bias' in macroeconomic policy (Diane Elson)?

The hidden assumption in economic models that ignores unpaid reproductive labor and treats labor as costless, thereby systematically disadvantaging women when designing policies like SAPs.

How did SAPs affect women's employment in export sectors?

Export-led growth under SAPs expanded female employment in export-processing zones and labor-intensive industries, but in low-wage, insecure, non-unionized jobs with poor conditions ('cheap and docile' female labor).

What does 'globalization' mean in the context of gender and development?

The increasing integration of economies, markets, cultures, and labor across borders through trade, capital flows, technology, and migration, which reshapes gender relations and the gendered division of labor worldwide.

What is the 'global care chain'?

A series of personal links between people across the globe based on paid or unpaid care work, in which women from poorer countries migrate to do care/domestic work in richer countries, leaving care gaps filled by even poorer women back home.

How has globalization led to the 'feminization of migration'?

Growing numbers of women migrate independently as labor migrants—especially into domestic work, care work, nursing, and the service and garment sectors—rather than only as dependents of male migrants.

What are Export Processing Zones (EPZs) and their significance for gender?

Special industrial zones offering tax and regulatory incentives to attract foreign investment in export manufacturing; they employ predominantly young women in low-wage, labor-intensive assembly work, central to the global feminization of labor.

What is the 'race to the bottom' in the context of globalization and gender?

The competitive lowering of wages, labor standards, and worker protections by countries seeking foreign investment, which disproportionately affects women workers concentrated in flexible, low-wage export industries.

What is the 'global assembly line' and women's place in it?

The international fragmentation of production across countries; women, especially in the Global South, are concentrated at the low-paid, labor-intensive assembly end of global value chains.

Name two ways globalization can positively affect women.

It can expand paid employment and income-earning opportunities (increasing economic independence and bargaining power), and it can spread ideas, information technology, and transnational feminist networks supporting women's rights.

Name two ways globalization can negatively affect women.

It exploits women as cheap, flexible labor with poor conditions and job insecurity, and it can deepen inequalities, increase unpaid care burdens, and expose women to trafficking and exploitation.

What is DAWN, and what is its significance in gender and development?

Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era—a network of Third World feminists/researchers formed in 1984 that articulated the empowerment approach and a Southern feminist critique of mainstream development.

What is the 'gendered division of labor'?

The socially constructed allocation of different tasks, roles, and responsibilities to men and women—typically assigning productive/public work to men and reproductive/domestic work to women—which is not natural but learned and variable across cultures.

What does 'patriarchy' mean in gender and development analysis?

A social system of male dominance in which men hold power over women in the family, economy, and politics; in development analysis it is a structural cause of women's subordination that policies must address to achieve transformation.

What is the difference between 'sex' and 'gender'?

Sex refers to biological differences between males and females; gender refers to the socially and culturally constructed roles, behaviors, and expectations attached to being male or female, which vary over time and place.

What is the Gender-related Development Index (GDI), and what does it measure?

A UNDP index that adjusts the Human Development Index (HDI) for gender inequalities in health (life expectancy), education, and income, capturing disparities in human development between women and men.

What is the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) and what does it assess?

A UNDP composite index measuring gender inequality in three areas of empowerment: political participation (parliamentary seats), economic participation/decision-making (professional and managerial positions), and power over economic resources (income).

What is the Gender Inequality Index (GII), introduced by UNDP in 2010?

A composite measure of gender-based disadvantage across three dimensions—reproductive health (maternal mortality, adolescent births), empowerment (parliamentary seats, secondary education), and labor market participation—where a higher value indicates greater inequality.

Contrast the modernization theory and dependency theory views on gender and development.

Modernization theory (underlying WID) holds that integrating women into market-led growth advances equality; dependency theory (underlying WAD) holds that global capitalism structurally exploits the periphery and women within it, so integration on existing terms reproduces inequality.

What is the central transformative goal of the GAD approach compared to simply 'adding women' to development?

Rather than adding women into unchanged structures, GAD seeks to transform unequal gender power relations, redistribute resources and responsibilities between men and women, and dismantle patriarchal structures so development itself becomes equitable.