Gender and Development

I. WHAT’S
DEVELOPMENT?
• Development is about attaining a
full and satisfying life for all

• Attaining a full and satisfying life

for
all is a shared responsibility
- of everyone- regardless of age, sex, religion,
ethnicity or class
- of all individuals and entities who benefit from
development or are affected by the lack of it
What underlies the performance
of this responsibility?
 The capacity to do means -
ability or power

• to do productive and satisfying work

• to have control over one’s income

and benefit from it
• to enjoy nature and the natural
environment
 • to procreate and rear children

• to care for others

• to travel in search for

opportunities
 The capacity to be means-
a right and opportunity

• to be knowledgeable and skillful

• to be well-nourished

• to be confident of own abilities

• to be comfortable with achievements,

independence and power
II. WHAT’S GENDER?
 Activity

Gender Sex
1. Women give birth to babies, men do not

2. Little girls are gentle, boys are tough

3. Women have larger breasts than men

4. Men’s voice break at puberty, women do not

5. A man cannot get pregnant

6. Women are natural child bearers

7. Women menstruate, men dont

8. A girl cannot propose marriage to a boy

9. It is not the job of the father to change diapers

10. Women can breastfeed babies, men can bottle feed

babies ASIST Gender &
A good starting point is, therefore,
to conceptually differentiate SEX
and GENDER
 SEX GENDER
BORN WITH SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED

CANNOT BE CHANGED CHANGEABLE

- Gender attributes are

-identifies the biological shaped by the economy,
differences between by religion, culture and
women and men traditional values
- Natural. Born. Fixed. - It is social and cultural
- Gender attributes differ
from society to society
and change over time
11
• physical differences between men and women
WHAT’S GENDER
AND
DEVELOPMENT?
GAD was developed in the 1980’s as
an alternative to the Women in
Development Approach

Unlike WID, GAD is not concerned only

with women but with the way society
assign roles and responsibilities to both
men and women
 GAD or Gender and Development

• focuses on the differences between

men and women

• emphasizes the need to challenge

existing gender roles and relations
GAD is about being faithful to the
principle that

Fairness and equity demands that

everyone in society, whether male of
female, has the right to the same
opportunities to achieve a full and
satisfying life.
There is a need to empower women
because women are half of the
country’s population. As such, they

• are half of the producers of economic

goods and services

but
• they are in the invisible and
marginalized sector or the so-called
non-money economy
- bearing and raising children
- domestic and unpaid economic
labor
- subsistence agriculture
Second, they are already in the
money economy
• informal sector

• wage employment
• trading
Third, women have unique stakes,
roles and insights to share in order to
attain development objectives,
such as in:
• sustaining the environment
• managing population growth
• imparting values that have
profound impacts on human
progress and economic
development
 Why us?

Everyone who believes in the vision of

attaining a full and satisfying life for all
has an obligation to help pursue GAD

We are custodians of peoples’ trust and

resources. We have the power,
knowledge, skills and resources to make
development work for everybody