Publication

This paper provides an introduction to the issue of women and development by tracing the main trends in the way women’s issues have been conceptualized in the development context. The first part of the paper explains the emergence of women in development (WID), highlighting a dominant strand of thinking within WID that seeks to make women’s issues relevant to development by showing the positive synergies between investing in women and reaping benefits in terms of economic growth. In the second part the author looks at the analytical and intellectual underpinnings of the shift from WID to GAD (gender and development) and highlights two main tensions that emerge from the different conceptualizations of gender.