Development and Gender: Historical Perspectives and Feminist Views

When we talk about development, we usually mean improvements in living standards, education, health, and income. But development has never been a gender-neutral process. The way societies grow economically and politically shapes who gets resources, who makes decisions, and who remains invisible. For decades, scholars and activists have asked a pointed question: does development automatically improve the lives of women, or does it sometimes deepen existing inequalities? Understanding this relationship requires looking at history, examining feminist theory, and studying how different states have approached women’s progress.

What development really means
Development and the anti-colonial struggle
Feminist perspectives on development
The Women in Development approach
The Marxist feminist view
Why context matters
Democracy as a safeguard for women’s rights
State-led development and women’s status
Lessons from Egypt, Tunisia, and Iraq
The gap between education and economic opportunity
Bringing the threads together

What development really means

Development is commonly understood as socio-economic progress-the movement of a society from poverty and traditional structures toward modern, industrialised systems with higher productivity and better welfare. In the mid-twentieth century, dominant theories like modernization theory viewed development as a linear movement from underdevelopment to a modern industrialised society based on a Western model.

This framing carried enormous political weight in formerly colonised nations. For the newly independent countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, development was not just an economic goal. It was a promise of dignity and self-determination after centuries of exploitation.

Development and the anti-colonial struggle

Development became central to anti-colonial movements across what was then called the Third World. National movements built their legitimacy partly on a critique of colonialism’s economic exploitation and a programme for independent economic development. Freedom from foreign rule was meant to bring not only political sovereignty but also material upliftment for ordinary people.

Within this vision, women occupied a complex position. The national movement and later the independent state imagined women in several roles at once: as agents and recipients of development, as equal political citizens, and as symbols of national culture. These roles did not always sit comfortably together. A woman could be encouraged to join the freedom struggle while still being expected to uphold traditional family values.

During the freedom movement, women mobilised in large numbers-joining demonstrations, boycotting foreign goods, and defying colonial laws. Their participation strengthened the democratic appeal of the independence movement, and in turn the movement had to acknowledge women in political life. This mutual relationship between development, nationalism, and women’s emancipation set the stage for debates that continue today.

Feminist perspectives on development

As development programmes spread through the 1950s and 1960s, feminists began to notice a troubling pattern. Economic growth was often measured in ways that ignored women entirely, and development projects frequently passed benefits to men while leaving women behind. This sparked a rich body of theory examining how gender and development interact.

The Women in Development approach

The economist Ester Boserup is widely credited with sparking serious academic attention to women’s economic roles. She argued that the survival and development of poorer nations would depend on more fully integrating women into the development process. Her work helped launch the Women in Development (WID) approach in the 1970s.

The core idea of WID was straightforward: both women and men must contribute to and benefit from development efforts. Over time, several variants emerged, including equity, anti-poverty, and efficiency approaches, alongside later frameworks like Gender and Development (GAD). The efficiency approach in particular argued that development projects work better and more effectively when women are actively involved in them.

The Marxist feminist view

One of the most influential strands of thought came from feminists who aligned with Marxist ideas. For them, development was not just about including women in existing economic systems. It was a tool that could alter the economic basis of gender relationships altogether.

Marxist feminism links women’s oppression directly to economic structures. It draws heavily on Friedrich Engels’ work, which argued that women’s oppression began with the development of private property and class society. As societies moved from communal ownership to private property, women became confined to domestic roles to ensure the inheritance of property through legitimate heirs.

From this perspective, gender inequality is not the result of biology or some universal male dominance. Instead, it is rooted in economic transformation and the material conditions of people’s lives. Marxist feminists pay close attention to unpaid domestic labour-the cooking, cleaning, and caregiving that women perform without wages. This work is essential because it sustains the capitalist economy by reproducing the workforce without direct payment.

If economic structures create gender inequality, then changing those structures could dismantle it. This is why Marxist feminists saw development-understood as a transformation of economic relations-as potentially liberating. By bringing women into productive paid work, by socialising domestic labour through state-run childcare and collective services, and by redistributing economic power, development could change the very foundations on which patriarchy rested.

Why context matters

Not all feminists agreed that Western models of development or Western feminist theory could be applied everywhere. Scholars from developing nations developed their own critiques. They argued that mainstream feminist frameworks were developed under the influence of Western feminist theory and exported context-specific visions to the rest of the world.

The scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty famously criticised how Western writing often portrayed the average woman in a developing country as leading an essentially truncated life-as poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, and victimised-in contrast to an implied image of educated, modern, autonomous Western women. This stereotype, she argued, leads to a simplistic understanding of women’s lives and limits genuine solidarity. The lesson is clear: development and gender must be understood within specific historical and cultural contexts, not through a single universal template.

Democracy as a safeguard for women’s rights

If development can transform gender relations, democratic systems are widely viewed as essential for making that transformation fair and lasting. Democracy provides the institutional channels through which women can claim rights, contest discrimination, and participate in shaping their societies.

The Indian experience illustrates this well. Women gained universal adult suffrage with the adoption of the Constitution on 26 January 1950, even though the journey began decades earlier with limited provincial voting rights. Unlike many Western nations where suffrage came after prolonged separate feminist campaigns, this path was shaped by both anti-colonial nationalism and indigenous feminist activism working together.

The women’s movement during the freedom struggle achieved concrete legal reforms that improved women’s status. These included legislation against child marriage through the Sharda Act of 1929 and the Hindu Women’s Rights to Property Act of 1937. Democratic institutions gave these demands a platform and turned them into enforceable rights.

The connection runs deeper than voting. A functioning democracy allows women to organise, to demand accountability, and to ensure that development benefits reach them. Without political voice, economic development can easily bypass women or even worsen their position by concentrating new wealth and opportunities in male hands.

State-led development and women’s status

Beyond theory, there is real evidence that deliberate, state-led development initiatives can improve women’s socio-economic position. Several countries in the Middle East and North Africa region offer instructive examples of how government action shapes women’s lives.

Lessons from Egypt, Tunisia, and Iraq

In countries like Egypt, Tunisia, and Iraq, state-led modernization and development programmes historically expanded women’s access to education, employment, and legal protection. These initiatives demonstrate that when a state actively commits to women’s advancement, measurable change follows.

Education is one of the clearest success stories. In several MENA countries, women are now more educated than ever before, with gender gaps in education almost closed, especially at the tertiary level. In some countries, women have even caught up with men in male-dominated fields like science and mathematics. This did not happen by accident-it was the product of sustained public investment.

Tunisia stands out for its targeted approach. It is the only country in its group with a specific national strategy and action plan for rural women, led by a dedicated ministry. This shows how state machinery can be directed specifically at the most vulnerable groups of women rather than treating them as an afterthought.

The gap between education and economic opportunity

State-led development has clear limits, and these examples reveal them too. Despite impressive gains in schooling, women’s academic progress has not translated into equally improved access to economic opportunity. A woman may earn a degree and still struggle to find decent work or face barriers once employed.

The economic stakes are enormous. Research suggests that if women participated in labour markets as equally as men, the region’s gross domestic product could be boosted by as much as 47 percent. This is a striking reminder that improving women’s status is not only a matter of justice-it is also central to a country’s overall development.

These cases confirm a key insight that runs through feminist development theory. Legal reform and education are necessary but not sufficient. As one analysis of the region noted, legal reform must be accompanied by determined implementation strategies to ensure real social change and greater gender equality. Changing laws is easier than changing entrenched social attitudes and economic structures.

Bringing the threads together

The relationship between development and gender is neither simple nor automatic. Development as socio-economic progress was central to anti-colonial movements, and women played a vital role in those struggles while also using them to advance their own claims to equality. Feminist theory, especially the Marxist strand, showed that development could be a powerful tool to reshape the economic foundations of gender inequality rather than merely adding women to existing systems.

At the same time, democracy provides the political framework that protects women’s rights and ensures their participation in shaping society. And real-world experiences from countries that pursued state-led development show that government action can dramatically improve women’s education and legal standing-even as a stubborn gap often remains between formal rights and lived economic reality.

The central lesson is that development must be designed with gender in mind from the start. Growth that ignores women is incomplete, and equality that ignores economic structures is fragile. Genuine progress requires both economic transformation and democratic political will, working together.

What do you think? If development can either reduce or deepen gender inequality depending on how it is designed, what should be the single most important priority for policymakers who want growth to benefit women equally? And in your view, can legal and constitutional rights meaningfully improve women’s lives without parallel changes in economic structures and social attitudes?

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Table of Contents

What development really means 🔗

Development and the anti-colonial struggle 🔗

Feminist perspectives on development 🔗

The Women in Development approach 🔗

The Marxist feminist view 🔗

Why context matters 🔗

Democracy as a safeguard for women’s rights 🔗

State-led development and women’s status 🔗

Lessons from Egypt, Tunisia, and Iraq 🔗

The gap between education and economic opportunity 🔗

Bringing the threads together 🔗