Gender and Development: Challenging Patriarchy and Capitalism

For decades, development planners treated women as a problem to be solved: add women to existing projects, give them access to loans or training, and inequality would supposedly fade. The Gender and Development (GAD) framework rejected this thinking entirely. Emerging in the 1980s out of socialist feminist debates, GAD shifted the conversation away from “women in isolation” and toward the social relations between men and women. It argued that women’s subordination is not an accident of biology or a gap in policy, but a structural feature of how both patriarchy and capitalism organise work, power, and care. Understanding GAD means understanding why genuine equality requires changing systems, not just including individuals.

From women in development to gender and development
The socialist feminist foundations of GAD
Gender is social, not biological
Why this reframing is powerful
Social reproduction and the invisible economy
The cost of the care burden
From analysis to action: gender planning
What GAD demands: structural reform and state support
Empowerment as the end goal
Limitations and ongoing debates

From women in development to gender and development

To grasp what makes GAD distinctive, it helps to see what came before it. The earlier Women in Development (WID) approach evolved in the early 1970s from a liberal feminist framework. Its goal was practical: integrate women, who were seen as passive beneficiaries, into the development process. WID assumed that the main obstacle was exclusion. If women could just be brought into economic activity, development would reach them.

A second approach, Women and Development (WAD), drew on neo-Marxist ideas and emphasised that women had always been part of economic systems, just on unequal terms. But it still framed solutions largely around women’s access to the productive sector.

GAD broke from both. According to development scholars, the GAD approach emerged in the 1980s with a shift from efficiency to equity, aiming at the empowerment of women and focusing squarely on the unequal power relations between men and women. The key intellectual move was to stop asking “how do we add women?” and start asking “why are gender relations structured this way in the first place?”

The socialist feminist foundations of GAD

GAD did not appear from nowhere. Its roots lie in socialist feminism, which itself grew out of a critique of classical Marxism. Traditional Marxist theory explained exploitation almost entirely through paid labour in the marketplace. Socialist feminists argued this missed something enormous: the unpaid work that keeps the entire system running.

The early GAD theorists were mainly socialist feminists who were, as one analysis notes, highly critical of the economic growth model of development and identified the social construction of production and reproduction as the basis of women’s oppression. In other words, they pointed out that women’s “double day” of paid employment plus unpaid domestic work benefited both capital and male workers.

This is why GAD is described as a framework that challenges both patriarchy and capitalism at once. Patriarchy assigns women the role of caregiver and homemaker. Capitalism then quietly relies on that unpaid care work to produce and sustain the workforce it needs, without ever paying for it. Feminists in the 1970s had already made this argument prominent through the international “wages for housework” campaign, which insisted that female housework was both unpaid and a necessary condition for the capitalist production process.

A central claim of GAD is that the differences in what men and women are expected to do are produced by society and culture, not nature. The sexual division of labour, where women cook, clean, and raise children while men work for wages, is treated in many societies as natural. GAD insists it is learned, assigned, and reinforced.

This distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender owes much to scholars like Ann Oakley and Gayle Rubin. As one overview of the field explains, GAD argued that social relationships between men and women have systematically subordinated women throughout history, that gender relations are fundamentally power relations, and crucially, that structural changes in gender roles are possible. That last point matters most. If subordination were biological, nothing could change it. Because it is social, it can be unmade.

Why this reframing is powerful

By treating gender as a relationship rather than a category, GAD made men part of the analysis and part of the solution. You cannot change women’s position without changing men’s roles and expectations too. This is a sharp departure from approaches that designed small “women-only” projects while leaving the surrounding social structure untouched.

Perhaps GAD’s most important contribution is its focus on social reproduction: the daily and generational work of sustaining human life. This includes giving birth, raising children, cooking, cleaning, caring for the sick and the elderly, and maintaining the relationships that hold families and communities together.

Feminist economists argue that this work is the hidden foundation of the entire economy. Without unpaid work, paid work would be impossible, yet caring labour is treated as a private family matter rather than economic activity. As feminist analysis puts it, caring labor is a large part of social reproduction and involves creating new workers by raising children, maintaining adult workers through daily care, and looking after those unable to work.

The numbers in India make this concrete. The National Statistical Office’s Time Use Survey found that the time spent by Indian women on unpaid domestic and care work was, as the Observer Research Foundation reports, more than eight times that of men and higher than most other countries. This is not a minor imbalance. It is a structural constraint that shapes whether women can study, take paid jobs, or participate in public life at all.

The cost of the care burden

This unpaid burden directly limits women’s economic autonomy. Research on Indian time-use data shows that women in paid employment still take on roughly six times more unpaid care work than employed men, a clear sign of the double burden falling unfairly on women. Strikingly, women with higher education or their own incomes do not spend any less time on this work, which tells us the cause is gender norms, not a lack of opportunity. Studies further find that an additional hour of caregiving reduces women’s probability of labour market participation by 20 percentage points, while having far smaller or no negative effects for men.

From analysis to action: gender planning

GAD is not only a theory; it became a tool for policy. The most influential figure here is Caroline Moser, who developed a gender planning framework in the 1980s at the University of London’s Development Planning Unit. Moser argued that women were not the problem, but the socially constructed roles between women and men, and that addressing this required gender mainstreaming across all policies, not just small women-focused projects.

Her framework rests on a few key ideas. First, the triple role of women: reproductive work, productive work, and community-managing activities, all of which women juggle simultaneously. Second, the distinction between two kinds of needs. As described in gender planning literature, practical gender needs emerge from women’s existing living conditions, such as access to clean water or healthcare, while strategic gender needs arise from structural inequalities like the gender division of labour, legal rights, and control over one’s own body.

Meeting practical needs makes daily life easier. Meeting strategic needs actually transforms the balance of power between men and women. GAD pushes planners to address both, with the deeper goal of dismantling subordination rather than merely easing its symptoms.

What GAD demands: structural reform and state support

Because GAD locates the problem in social structures, its proposed solutions are structural. It calls for the state to support social reproduction directly, rather than leaving care work to fall silently on women within households.

Concrete measures long advocated within this tradition include provision of crèches and nurseries, maternity and parental leave, eldercare services, shorter and more flexible working hours, and the equal sharing of domestic labour between men and women. Researchers analysing Indian time-use data point to similar interventions, noting that subsidised housing, electricity, running water, and sanitation can reduce the domestic work burden on women. The logic is consistent: if care work is essential to society, society as a whole, through the state, should share its cost.

Countries that have successfully raised women’s workforce participation tend to confirm this. Commentary on India’s situation notes that nations expanding women’s economic participation have done so by investing in care systems, accessible childcare, eldercare services, and supportive labour market policies. Care, in the GAD view, is not a private favour but a matter of economic and public policy.

Empowerment as the end goal

Finally, GAD positions women as active agents of change, not passive recipients of aid. It emphasises organising for political voice and recognises that patriarchy oppresses women across class lines. The framework stresses gender relations in both the productive and reproductive spheres, addressing all facets of women’s lives rather than treating paid work and home life as separate worlds.

Limitations and ongoing debates

GAD is not without critics. Even sympathetic observers note that while it represented major theoretical progress, implementation proved challenging, with development agencies often adopting GAD language while continuing WID practices in reality. Others have questioned whether the neat distinction between practical and strategic needs holds up in messy real-world situations. These debates do not undo GAD’s core insight, but they remind us that translating a transformative framework into actual policy is difficult and political work.

What endures is GAD’s fundamental shift in perspective. It moved the question of gender inequality away from “fixing women” and toward redesigning the social and economic structures that produce inequality in the first place, structures rooted in both patriarchy and capitalism.

What do you think? If unpaid care work were properly counted as part of the economy, how might that change the way governments design budgets and welfare policies? And in your own observations, what would it actually take to redistribute care work more equally between men and women?

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Table of Contents

From women in development to gender and development 🔗

The socialist feminist foundations of GAD 🔗

Gender is social, not biological 🔗

Why this reframing is powerful 🔗

Social reproduction and the invisible economy 🔗

The cost of the care burden 🔗

From analysis to action: gender planning 🔗

What GAD demands: structural reform and state support 🔗

Empowerment as the end goal 🔗

Limitations and ongoing debates 🔗

References

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