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This article provides information about the impact of development on women:
It is not possible to be indifferent to social implications of biology and the physical constraints it puts for women. Women and development is a theme that raises issues of equality and justice for women’s experience of development as mediated by both their biology and the social construction of it.
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Gender inequality tends to lower productivity and efficiency of labour at all levels of the economy, not just the household, and intensifies unequal distribution of resources. Lack of security, opportunity and empowerment also imply the lowering of quality of life for both men and women.
Even when women and girls may bear the direct costs of gender inequality it needs to be recognised that the ultimate costs of lack of development and poverty have to be borne by people across the society. Women’s development is therefore simultaneously a gender and a developmental issue, and the developmental planners need to be cognizant of women’s subordination for centuries that has controlled women’s mobility, their labour, sexuality and fertility.
Development has had mixed gains for women while it has widened their opportunities and opened up the public sphere to those hitherto confined to the private sphere of family life by tradition and superstitious beliefs, yet evidence from large parts of the world also show that women still face disparity in opportunities and often development for women has meant the widening of the gap between the incomes of men and women and increased strain on their time and energies.
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Women are unfavourably represented in very large numbers in the unorganised sector where they work under oppressive and exploitative conditions but find themselves restricted due to their biological and social responsibilities as well as the low status they enjoy in society.
In fact women lose twice as the development planners have been unable to recognise the dual roles of women whereby they bear children and at the same time carry out economic activities and have in their shortsighted definitions of women as mothers ignored and downgraded their economic functions so as to classify them as economically dependents. On the one hand, the exclusive burden of childcare makes women’s access to the market limited, and then the market itself excludes prestigious and well paying jobs from them, doubting their ability to hold such jobs and perform in equal capacity to men.
Also, the prevalent definitions of work as work when performed for money and work as work in the modern sector have also contributed to making women’s economic contributions invisible. These definitions for instance exclude women who work in the agricultural sector as members of a family living off farm land products women engaged in exchange labour, household work, childcare and many such activities that are not paid.
Stereotypes of sex roles have resulted in a situation where even developmental interventions aimed at modernising farming systems have only exacerbated the problem by targeting only men for inputs such as training, loans and resources such as seeds, land and
so on. In case of the green revolution wherein there is high capitalisation involved, better harvesting systems have meant focus on good variety of seeds and fertilizers and such mechanisation that means less of labourers required; thus unemployment. It is women who lose again their traditional economic employment in farms and any alternative employment planned is done only for men.
This has widened the gap between men and women, reducing the status of women. Subsistence economies with little specialisation have been more equalitarian and just to women with little differentiation between the status of men and women. Civilisation has created more functional specialisations to the benefit of men and increasingly led to women being reduced to a dependency status as they separated from their erstwhile food production functions.
Women, as they lost these functions in civilised societies, increasingly became economic liabilities, and vulnerable to a host of patriarchal controls. Anthropological evidence shows that civilisation’s influence on subsistence economies has meant decreased involvement of men in child rearing roles and in other household tasks. Development being largely defined in terms of economic activities has thus focused on men, ignoring women’s traditional economic roles.
Education is widely regarded as one of the most important developmental initiatives to reduce gender disparity and there are several researches which show positive links between girl’s education and economic productivity, maternal and infant mortality, fertility rates and health prospects of future generations. If are analysed it is found that education and modernisation and its effects on women, the elite nature of education in most of the erstwhile colonial nations has meant that education has not reached rural populations, particularly women.
There is still a wide gap between male and female literacy figures in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Lack of education was itself not a big problem when women engaged in traditional pursuits, however, with development and accompanying changes wherein traditional occupations of women are being superseded, it becomes difficult for poorly educated women to move into the new sectors.
In the markets women come to be in a disadvantaged position because of their lack of knowledge and training making for exploitative conditions of work and their inability to compete with more favourably disposed men. Lack of education severely limits ability to take credit, innovate and earn independent income through economic enterprise. In case of migration to cities, rural women often find themselves in less paying jobs as domestic servants, shop assistants and even prostitutes.
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Education has all the same opened up a host of occupations for the middle and upper classes and women of these classes have found representation in services like teachers, nurses and doctors. New job opportunities in computers and information technology have bid many a middle class woman to substantially paying jobs. However, it must be remembered that by and large women’s economic activities are permitted to them only in situations of family crisis, when women are required to earn an additional income without changing the distribution of work at home.
In countries like India educated women often enter prestigious services due to several factors working in their favour of which a supportive family structure that takes pride in their education and employment and the availability of cheap labour for taking care of household jobs, are very important.
At the same time women’s work outside the confines of the house is not without its problems; divorce, separations and increase in the number of women- headed households may have a link with the increased hostility between men and women, for while women are required to work double shift, men continue to keep off the home sphere.
A related issue of concern is the contemporary increase in violence and crime against women which plays its function in maintaining women’s subordination by restricting them from free and full participation in development initiatives.
It is found after analysing the development and its impact on the environment that the destruction of the previous balance of nature through unbridled pursuit of man’s capitalist interests have affected women more severely than it has men, as they struggle and search for fuel, carry water over long distances and spend unduly long hours processing food. Women’s overwhelming involvement in subsistence related
activities has meant that environmental degradation translates into special hardships for them for the ready access to natural resources they enjoyed earlier is replaced by working harder to get access to them, often having to pay for what was otherwise communally owned.