Gender, Development, And Development

Women’s struggle for equality will remain relevant in the future as a global issue because every country today still struggles to obtain successful women’s equality. Women today are determined to fight for their rights, rights that are detrimental to the success of society. The struggle for women’s equality is something that has plagued women for centuries. Societies throughout history have been ruled by the iron fist of men, in royal families, the working class, and even within the households. This is something that is most common in todays underdeveloped countries, women are treated as being less than men and therefore do not deserve the same rights. This however is something that women have recognized as a problem and are unwavering in their fight to establish equal rights, whether it be in the United States or even Africa, the cry for equality is the same.

Since the beginning of time gender inequality has been an obstacle towards the human development of countries around the world. The Human Development Index was created to showcase the average achievement of males and females. However, females have been oppressed of their opportunities throughout time, which contradicts the main idea of the Human Development Index. To understand the difference between developed and developing countries and the reason for the gender gap between males and females there need to be an understanding of the indicators that are addressed through the key dimensions of Gender Inequality which include reproductive health, education and political representation. Through the use of the indicators, gender inequality demonstrates that there are variations within developed nations such as Norway and a developing nation such as Cameroon. Although gender inequality is present in both countries, the Human Development Index indicates that the developed country Norway is more advanced in regards of gender inequality then the developing country Cameroon. The development of a country does not completely reflect the position of gender inequality; but it is evident through the indicators of life expectancy, birth rate, education and economic status that a more developed country is more advanced in reducing gender equality.

The gender roles for women have traditionally been to cook, clean, and feed the kids. In the document, From Wealth and Poverty written by George Gilder, he indicates that men put more effort in the work force than women. Therefore, married men, in his eyes, are seen to work twice as harder than women regardless of their firm household responsibilities (Gilder, p.123) The document Equal to What? written by Third World Women’s Alliance, states the rise of feminism groups and the newly formed non-white women’s liberation committee’s. These committees supported women’s rights for descendent of Asian, African, and Latin American backgrounds. Gilder and Third World Women’s Alliance recognizes the unfairness of women in the workforce and their unrecognized

Equality, gender roles, and restrictions are important topics that many activists, leaders, and speakers have worked towards in order to provide to the world. The society we have now has been created in part by the determination and perseverance of their actions, speeches, and rallies. The world was a different place about 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and even more than 50 years ago. Associating women with household work and children, and men with difficult jobs and hard work, were can be observed throughout time that were previously set in past centuries. Both women and men have changed in associations, as we can currently observe in today’s society. Gender roles have switched, and new decrees have enabled individuals to have their equality

The experiences of African women differ greatly throughout the continent. However, African societies have generally tended to be largely patriarchal. Women have held subordinate status to males in their communities. Authors such as Aje-Ori Agbese, Mariama Ba, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie concur on the prevalence of patriarchy and general oppression of women throughout African society, past and present, each placing emphases on the aspirations for greater equality for women on the continent.

Effectively, many women were left disenfranchised to live a life of poverty and inequity. Several others did not want to go back to their limited domestic positions with this new awareness. Despite this, the reality was that these social, economic, and political changes were somewhat

Gender is the characteristics of people as females and males. During preschool years, children begin to fall into their cultures gender roles. Gender roles are the expectations that society has in regards to how females and males should think, act, and feel. Two social theories that are central to children’s gender development are psychoanalytic theory of gender and social cognitive theory of gender. Freud proposed in the psychoanalytic theory of gender that children develop a sexual attraction to their opposite-sex parent, but eventually loses this attraction causing them to identify with their same-sex parent. In the social cognitive theory of gender, children’s gender develops through the rewards and punishments from their parents for gender-appropriate behavior. Both theories rely heavily on the influence of parents. Moreover, children in both theories learn about gender roles through observation. They adopt the sources characteristics and imitate what they see. In contrast, social cognitive theory contains other sources from which children learn gender roles such as culture, school, peers, etc. Also, psychoanalytic theory believes that children are aware of their gender much earlier, while social cognitive believes that children become aware through the negative or positive experiences they encounter. Bandura believed in reinforcement, while Freud took a biological approach.

Gender inequality is a massive problem for women and girls and development has begun to take place to over come this injustice to the female population in North Africa and the Middle East. Gender inequality has become an important and visible issue for economies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). I have researched on how women of North Africa are deprived from many opportunities as well as being under educated. The female population has suffered immensely in Africa. Presently, women of Africa, like many women in third world countries have not been included as equal and effective stakeholders in processes that determine their lives.

Conceability to access to power is very limited and stiffed, but they still try to choose paths or achieve their goals within masculine society (Laura, 2009). On the other hand, agriculturalists women in Sub-Saharan Africa suffer from unequally in the distribution of lands and resources although they should contribute in the household expenses while they get less than men do, and they work the same as men do. For the classical system their issues is more about society role, but in Sub-Saharan Africa, women could have economic challenges out of that inequality. “According to sex role theory, we acquire our gender identity through socialization, and afterward, we are socialized to behave in masculine or feminine ways. It is thus the task of

According to the World Bank, women make up 70% of the world’s poor and their wages world wide are on average 50% to 80% of men’s. One third of all households word wide are headed by women, they are responsible for half the world’s food production, and yet they own just one per cent of the world’s property. The majority of workers in sweatshops are women and the majority of unpaid labour is done by women in every region of the world. Further, women make up two-thirds of the one billion people who are illiterate and 60% of the 100 million who have no access to primary education.

While some human development theorists contend that gender inequality is not seen as an area of concern in developing countries due to the improvement of rights, on the other hand some human development theorists contradict these statements as women are still beaten and killed in the third world countries, like Afghanistan, and women in the first world countries, like America, still fight for gender equality today.

Global Women is an eye-opening book that describes the reality of what women in the developing world do to survive the brutal capitalistic world. When I first started reading this book, I assumed it to be filled with theoretical and statistics-filled information like many other books I have read. However, it was not only informational but also very provoking and surprisingly first-hand. It definitely help the readers to be engaged into the issues and to understand the global patterns of relationships among women struggling to survive in the domestic service sector and in the sex trade.

Amongst societies, there is a great variety of means of survival, all of which are dependent upon factors influencing the community—geographical location and structure of authority, to name a few. Such factors and the community’s ways of survival create the underlying basis of other complex issues, including the relationship between the sexes. Many anthropological papers that concentrate on the modes of production of specific groups of people have shown a connection between the modes of production and the presence or absence of gender inequality. Futhermore, there is also evidence of a further causality between the two: as a society adopts a more complex mode of

This article addresses four main points. First, at the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the significance of women’s contribution was emphasized by the World Bank. However, according to the authors, the perception of women as goods was strengthened by the World Bank because of its emphasis on economic outcomes and its consequent failure to pay attention to the meaning of women’s empowerment and gender equality. Second, the World Bank, UN agencies and other institutions were observed to value only young women and girls, thus completely ignoring men’s role . Third, despite the existence of programs encouraging women empowerment such as microfinance and conditional cash transfers, women are forced to work for their livelihood coupled with the burden of housework. The authors also cast doubt on the notion that investing in young women and girls leads to the promotion of women’s empowerment and gender equality, or actually improves the economy as they are often unconsciously regarded as cheaper labor . Therefore, they underscored that while smart economics might

Baserup (1970) suggested that women needed to reduce the work loads they had so that they take part in education, projects which will also extend their power in the economy. In addition, Baserup pointed out that women have to receive credit facilities for greater economic projects. For example, Baserup echoed the mechanization of “female farming’ in African women farmers and revolutionarize traditional forms of agriculture for productive efficiency extracted from Schech and Haggis (2000). Rogers (1980) also suggested for a complete overhand of male attitudes against women. Rogers explicitly challenged this in her survey of the FAO institutional arrangement. She concluded that no women were found in field officers in technical division. Rogers (1980) therefore, concluded that women were not only excluded from planning and decision making but were being ignored and overlooked. Furthermore, households were assumed to be male headed which also generalized women as housewives (Rogers 1980:66 in Schech and Haggis, 2000). This shows that women’s work was regarded as non- work due to male bias. However, the WID approach agitated for equity, empowerment, efficiency and equal participation of women in existing structures.