The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Women In Development

The rapid economic growth of the third world over the last 50 years has not only excluded woman from experiencing the benefits of development, but according to some has even put woman at a greater disadvantage relative to men then they experienced before. The statistics are well documented and speak volumes as to the depth of the problem. Of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty, it is estimated that 70% are woman, 66% of literate adults are woman, and 99% of al maternal deaths are in the developing word. There has been considerable intellectual debate as to the causes and solutions to this issue, and the Woman in Development (WID) perspective was one of the first to articulate a clear solution. WID essentially argues that the problem was …show more content…
Sub-Saharan Africa was characterized as the great global area of female farming systems in which women, using traditional hoe technology, assumed a substantial responsibility for food production. Moreover, Boserup posited a positive correlation between the role women played in agricultural production and their status vis-a-vis men. Boserup’s critique of colonial and post-colonial agricultural policies was that through their productivity-enhancing interventions and dominant Western notions about what constituted appropriate female tasks, they had facilitated men’s monopoly over new technologies and cash crops and undermined women’s traditional roles in agriculture, thereby heralding the demise of the female farming systems. This, according to Boserup, was creating a dichotomy in the African countryside where men were associated with the modern, cash-cropping sector and women with traditional, subsistence agriculture. Relegated to the subsistence sector, women lost income, status and power relative to men. More importantly, their essential contribution to agricultural production became invisible. By arguing that in the recent past women were not only equal in status to men, but also equally productive, Boserup challenged the conventional wisdom that women were less productive and therefore unentitled to a share of scarce development resources. Woman are …show more content…
WID merely attempts to make an economic argument for improving women’s absolute economic condition through specifically targeted development programs, but it ignores the larger issue, which is women’s relative status to men. It is in this sense that Gender and Development is a superior theory for analyzing the cycle of poverty and underdevelopment that many women in the third world seem to be stuck