Women in Development (WID): The Journey Toward Gender-Inclusive Policies

When we think about development policies today, it’s easy to take for granted that gender equality is a central concern. But this wasn’t always the case. For decades, development programs overlooked women entirely or treated them as passive beneficiaries rather than active contributors to economic growth. The Women in Development (WID) approach emerged in the 1970s as a revolutionary shift in thinking-one that recognized women’s critical role in development and sought to integrate them into economic planning. Yet, as transformative as WID was for its time, it also carried limitations that would eventually give rise to more comprehensive frameworks. Understanding the journey of WID helps us appreciate both how far we’ve come and the ongoing challenges in achieving true gender equality.

Origins of the WID approach: a response to invisible contributions 🔗

The story of WID begins with a stark realization: development policies were failing women. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the prevailing modernization theory assumed that economic growth would naturally “trickle down” to benefit everyone, including women. But research began revealing a different reality. Ester Boserup’s groundbreaking 1970 book, Women’s Role in Economic Development, documented how development interventions actually marginalized women, particularly in agriculture. She showed that women often performed more than half of agricultural work-in some cases up to 80 percent-yet development programs trained only men in modern farming techniques while women continued using traditional methods.

This evidence sparked concern among feminists and development practitioners, particularly in the United States. The term “Women in Development” was coined in the early 1970s by the Women’s Committee of the Washington chapter of the Society for International Development. Their advocacy led to concrete policy changes. In 1973, the U.S. Congress passed the Percy Amendment, which required the U.S. Agency for International Development to integrate women into national economies through specific initiatives like training and credit access. This marked the first formal policy requiring gender considerations in international development aid.

The momentum continued building on the international stage. The United Nations designated 1975 as International Women’s Year and convened the First World Conference on Women in Mexico City. This conference highlighted how development failures were particularly affecting women and proclaimed 1975-1985 as the UN Decade for Women, focused on equality, development, and peace. Follow-up conferences in Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985) continued reviewing progress, with the Nairobi conference emphasizing women’s integration into national development efforts as both agents and beneficiaries.

Key strategies and shifts in WID: from welfare to efficiency 🔗

As the WID approach evolved throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it encompassed several distinct strategies, each reflecting different priorities and assumptions about how to address women’s disadvantaged position. Understanding these shifts reveals both the adaptability of WID thinking and its persistent blind spots.

The welfare approach: women as mothers 🔗

The earliest strategy, popular during the 1950s through 1970s, was the welfare approach. This perspective saw women primarily through their reproductive role as mothers and caregivers. Programs focused on maternal and child health, nutrition education, and family planning-essentially viewing women as passive recipients of aid rather than active economic participants. While these services reduced infant mortality and provided needed health care, the top-down nature of welfare programs often created dependency rather than empowerment. The approach reinforced traditional gender roles rather than challenging them.

The equity approach: seeking legal equality 🔗

The equity approach, introduced during the UN Decade for Women, represented the original WID vision. It recognized that women’s productive and reproductive contributions to economic growth had been systematically ignored. This strategy advocated for women’s access to employment, markets, and resources through legal reforms and policy changes. The underlying assumption was that establishing equal rights would lead to equal treatment and benefits.

However, the equity approach encountered significant resistance. Many developing countries viewed it as Western feminism being imposed on their cultures. The approach also proved difficult to implement-legal equality on paper didn’t automatically translate into equal treatment in practice. Equal rights to education, for example, didn’t guarantee that girls would be schooled in the same numbers or to the same degree as boys.

The anti-poverty approach: income generation for poor women 🔗

By the late 1970s, a more pragmatic anti-poverty approach emerged. This strategy acknowledged women’s productive role and sought to increase their income through small-scale enterprises, credit schemes, and income-generating projects. It shifted emphasis from reducing inequality between men and women to reducing poverty among low-income women specifically. The approach assumed that women’s poverty resulted from underdevelopment rather than subordination.

While the anti-poverty strategy led to proliferation of micro-credit programs and women’s cooperatives, it faced criticism for treating poor women as a separate category and focusing narrowly on their productive roles. Projects often assumed women had “free time” when in reality they extended women’s already long working days, adding economic activities on top of domestic responsibilities without lightening their household burden.

The efficiency approach: maximizing women’s economic contribution 🔗

The 1980s brought the efficiency approach, which became the predominant WID strategy. Against the backdrop of structural adjustment policies imposed by international financial institutions, this approach argued that development would be more efficient if women’s economic participation was fully utilized. The logic was straightforward: half of human resources were being wasted or underutilized, and economic efficiency required maximizing women’s productive capacity.

This approach proved popular with governments and development agencies because it framed women’s participation in economic rather than equity terms. Women were valued for their ability to compensate for declining social services by extending their working hours and taking on multiple roles-productive work, reproductive responsibilities, and community management. While this recognized women’s economic contributions, it essentially asked them to do more without addressing the underlying gender inequalities or power imbalances that created their disadvantaged position in the first place.

Major criticisms of WID: what the approach missed 🔗

Despite its revolutionary impact in putting women on the development agenda, WID faced mounting criticism by the 1980s. These critiques revealed fundamental limitations in how WID conceptualized both women and development.

Failure to challenge power structures 🔗

Perhaps the most significant criticism was that WID did not challenge existing gender hierarchies. By accepting existing social structures and focusing on integrating women into current development models, WID aimed to help women participate in systems that were fundamentally designed by and for men. It sought to add women to existing frameworks rather than questioning why those frameworks disadvantaged women in the first place. This meant WID didn’t address the root causes of women’s subordination-the patriarchal power relations, unequal access to resources, and gendered divisions of labor that systematically placed women in inferior positions.

As scholars noted, WID assumed that gender relations would automatically improve once women joined the workforce and participated in development projects. This assumption proved naïve. Women’s increased economic participation often came without increased decision-making power or control over resources. In many cases, husbands or male relatives continued to control women’s earnings, or women faced hostile work environments that maintained male dominance.

Treating women as a homogeneous group 🔗

Another major flaw was WID’s tendency to treat women as a uniform category, overlooking how factors like class, race, ethnicity, age, and location created vastly different experiences among women. A wealthy urban woman and a poor rural woman faced entirely different barriers and had different needs, yet WID programs often applied one-size-fits-all solutions. This lack of intersectional analysis meant that WID failed to recognize the diverse experiences and specific challenges women faced in different contexts.

The critique became particularly sharp from women in developing countries themselves, who argued that WID reflected the concerns and assumptions of Western feminists rather than addressing the realities of women in the Global South. These critics pointed out that WID often portrayed women from developing countries as helpless victims of their own cultures, undermining their agency and failing to recognize that colonialism and post-colonial economic exploitation played major roles in their subordination.

Narrow focus on productive roles 🔗

WID’s emphasis on women’s productive economic activities came at the expense of attention to their reproductive work-childbearing, childrearing, household maintenance, and community care responsibilities. By focusing almost exclusively on getting women into paid employment and income-generating activities, WID failed to address how the gendered division of domestic labor constrained women’s economic participation. It didn’t question why women bore primary responsibility for unpaid care work, nor did it advocate for men to share these responsibilities more equally.

This omission meant that WID programs often increased women’s total workload without reducing their domestic burdens. Women were expected to contribute economically while continuing to fulfill all their traditional household roles, leading to what became known as the “double burden” or “triple burden” when community management work was included. The approach measured women’s success primarily by their economic productivity rather than their overall well-being or their autonomy in making life choices.

Limited attention to strategic versus practical needs 🔗

Feminist scholar Maxine Molyneux distinguished between women’s practical gender needs-immediate necessities like income, water, healthcare-and strategic gender needs-changes required to achieve gender equality, such as legal rights, protection from violence, and equal decision-making power. WID programs primarily addressed practical needs through projects and services but rarely tackled strategic needs that would fundamentally challenge women’s subordinate status. Without addressing strategic needs, even successful WID projects left underlying gender inequalities intact.

These accumulated criticisms led to the emergence of alternative frameworks in the 1980s, particularly the Women and Development (WAD) and Gender and Development (GAD) approaches. GAD, in particular, shifted focus from women in isolation to gender relations between women and men, arguing that true development required transforming the social structures and power relations that maintained gender inequality. Unlike WID’s goal of integrating women into existing systems, GAD sought to fundamentally restructure those systems to promote gender equity.

What do you think? How might development programs today still reflect some of the limitations of the WID approach? In what ways can we ensure that policies aimed at gender equality don’t just add women to existing structures but actually transform the underlying power dynamics that create inequality?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_development
2. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13119/1/Women_in_Development_The_Discourse_and_the_Policy.pdf
3. https://www.awid.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/the_first_twenty_years_of_awid.pdf
4. https://www.unescwa.org/sd-glossary/women-development-wid
5. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/367479768_A_PARADIGM_SHIFT_FROM_WOMEN_IN_DEVELOPMENT_WID_TO_GENDER_AND_DEVELOPMENT_GAD_Examining_why_there_was_a_paradigm_shift_from_WID_-_WAD_to_GAD_in_an_Effort_to_Address_Gender_Inequalities
6. https://gender.study/issues-of-gender-and-development/women-in-development-integrating-roles/