Publication

This paper outlines how the policy environment for women has changed over the period since the Fourth World Conference on Women (the “Beijing conference”). The author finds that the record of achievement regarding gender equality is more ambivalent, and the causal influences more diverse and less unidirectional than is sometimes assumed. It is also argued that development policies and democratization processes have an important role to play in securing positive outcomes, and that the first phase of the structural reforms (dating from the early 1980s) was in many respects negative for women.