DEVELOPMENT: Gender Perspective Missing

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MEXICO CITY, Oct 1 1999 (IPS) - Women leafing through the World Bank’s World Development Report for 1999/2000, released worldwide two weeks ago, soon raised queries – such as “Where are the women in the picture? How many of them work in agriculture? How many of them are urban dwellers?”

Such questions – and others – are of concern to women in their quest to make the Bank more gender sensitive.

If the annual Development report was to pass such a gender test, then all the tables relating to people would, on the one hand, have to contain “sex-disaggregated” data. On the other, it would have to include the number of women involved in the informal economy, like street markets and home-based workers, and the number of women affected by the Bank’s policy to cut social spending.

“How else can they design accurate public policy?” asks Laura Frade, the regional coordinator here for the organisation “Women’s Eyes on the World Bank.” “It is necessary…to stop women from getting a raw deal all the time.”

The battle over the “numbers game” has gathered momentum since the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, in 1995. besides the World Bank, delegates at that conference called on other international institutions and government bodies to change the traditional way of presenting information on people to reflect the role of women in society.

T-shirts, badges, and postcards blossomed with such messages as “Women Count – Count Women’s Work,” as women’s groups began a major effort to make all countries more gender-sensitive on producing information, statistics and data generally.

As one group proclaimed in Beijing: “Not valuing women’s work leads to devaluing women’s and girls’ lives.”

According to Simel Esim, a Turkish economist for the Washington- based International Centre for Research on Women, “sex- disaggregated data, especially on productive work, is crucial.”

She says there are large number of women who are informally employed in paid or unpaid work in the agricultural sector, in street markets, in home-based activities or subcontracting work whose labour is not factored into labour statistics, or national accounts.

By way of example, Esim points to the sub-Saharan and South Asian regions, where more than half the economically active women are self-employed in the informal sector.

In Latin American countries, between 30 to 70 percent of women workers are employed in the informal sector. “They are the piece-workers in the home, migrant workers on assembly lines in export zones like the maquiladoras, and vegetable and food vendors in urban markets,” she says.

But such “invisible women” do more than that for their national economies. Esim refers to their efforts in the “care economy” – the domestic burdens these women shoulder throughout their lives.

“They cook, clean for their families, raise the children, take care of the elderly and the sick while they are also being productive for the market,” Esim says. “Yet, research has shown, their contributions have remained ‘invisible” – why?”

Esim argues such women should be the focus of government public expenditure reviews and World Bank World Development Reports; “only then will they become visible.”

Clearly, women like Esim and Frade are disappointed with what this year’s Development Report has to offer.

When it comes to numbers “sex-disaggregated” data, the only tables that have columns for women deal with adult illiteracy, the formal labour force, years of schooling and education, and contraceptive prevalence rate and fertility rate.

Women are invisible in statistics dealing with people below the poverty line, distribution of income or consumption, access to safe water and sanitation and in such high-paying professional jobs as scientists and engineers in research and development, for instance.

Even when the Report talks about “rapid changes in urban demographics” or turns the spotlight to specific countries as Brazil, for instance, to reveal the social indicators, the gender factor has been obscured.

This is despite such statements that “social projects are more likely to succeed if they emphasize beneficiary participation and are responsive to gender concerns,” and “gender disparities have narrowed.”

Furthermore, women studying the World development report from a gender perspective also did not take too kindly to the Bank’s hosannas over more structural adjustment policies, thus liberalizing economies of the world, and privatizing such areas as education.

Late last year, an India economist produced a study that exposed the extent to which women have suffered as a result of structural adjustment in Asia.

“There is a distinct need for designing macroeconomic policies in Asia that are sensitive to the needs of women and which do not put the main burden of adjustment on this already disadvantaged group,” said Jayati Gosh of the Centre of Economic Studies and Planning at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Regarding the expected cuts in education, Frade makes the point that it will be girls who will suffer. “Families will choose the boys if they have little money and cannot afford schooling fees for all their children,” she declares.

It is a scenario that Essim finds ironic. The Bank has been promoting policies and programmes for increased enrollment for girls over the years, “yet they do not seem to make the link between their privatization policies in this sector and the negative impacts on girls’ enrollment rates,” she says.

The same holds true for the poor women who have become victims of cuts in public social spending initiated by the Bank and implemented by governments in developing countries.

According to Esim, “women in poor households have suffered disproportionately as a result of these cuts” and the Bank should be held accountable “for the impact of its policies…”

Still, Esim and Frade concede that the Bank has made some progress over the last few years to become more gender sensitive.

“The Bank has taken important steps in the last five years on gender mainstreaming,” says Esim. “The gender unit is based in the most powerful network on the Bank – Poverty Reduction and Economic Management.”