Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Over the last half-century there have been different theoretical frameworks used to understand how women are located in global economic processes, and each has had a concomitant strategy to enhance women's position. In the middle of the twentieth century modernization approaches were common, but dependency theorists critiqued these strategies. By the 1970s these male-focused arguments were largely supplanted by women in development (WID) ones, and more recently by gender and development (GAD) approaches. Development refers to changes in a country that are frequently measured using a country's gross domestic product (GDP), as well as its degree of industrialization, urbanization, technological sophistication, export capability, and consumer orientation. Concerns about development are most likely to be expressed by representatives of advanced capitalist core countries of the “global North” or by international agencies when they create initiatives or generate responses to a whole range of critical problems faced by what they categorize as “developing” nations or the peripheral and semi-peripheral countries of the “global South.” On the other hand, countries of the global South tend to see development as addressing survival issues like hunger and malnutrition, refugee displacement and homelessness, unemployment and underemployment, health services and disease, the destruction of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text