Human Capital in Gender and Development

Sydney Calkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315522074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Human Capital in Gender and Development addresses timely feminist debates about the relationship between feminism, neoliberalism, and international development. The book engages with human capital theory, a labour economics theory associated with the Chicago School that now animates a wide range of political and economic governance. The book argues that human capital theory has been instrumental in constructing an economistic vision of gender equality as a tool for economic growth, and girls and women of the global South as the quintessential entrepreneurs of the post-global financial crisis era.

The book's critique of human capital theory and its role in Gender and Development gives insights into the kinds of development interventions that typify the 'Gender Equality as Smart Economics' agenda of the World Bank and other international development institutions. From the World Bank, to NGOs, and private businesses, discourses about the economic benefits of gender equality and women's empowerment underpin a range of development interventions that aim to unlock the 'untapped' potential of the world's women. Its implications are both conceptual and material, producing more interventionist forms of development governance, increased power by private sector actors in development, and de-politicization of gender equality issues.

Human Capital in Gender and Development will be of particular interest to feminist scholars in Politics, International Relations, Development Studies, and Human Geography. It will also be a useful resource for teaching key debates about feminism, neoliberalism, and international development.

1 Feminism, Neoliberalism, and Development

Introduction

Is feminism a victim of its own success? Has it been co-opted by conservative and neoliberal forces? This debate has been provoked by a profound sense of alienation from the kind of nominally “feminist” successes we see today in politics, economics, and culture. It is provoked by the worry that feminism has been taken up in service of some unrecognizable conservative agenda. It is driven by the perception that the language of feminism has been adopted to give legitimacy to a set of profoundly anti-feminist policies and people. These anxieties are encapsulated in the concept of empowerment: while empowerment once referred to a grassroots movement for collective political action through Consciousness Raising, today it provides products with a fuzzy feminist glow to appeal to female consumers. Journalist Andi Zeisler captures this ambivalence in her book We Were Feminists Once, in which she laments the rise of “market feminism” in pop culture and advertising:

“Over the past two decades, a partial list of everything that has been deemed empowering by advertising campaigns, pop culture products, and feminist rhetoric includes the following: High heels. Flats. Cosmetic surgery. Embracing your wrinkles. Having children. Not having children. Natural childbirth. Having an epidural. Embracing fat positivity. Embracing anorexia. Housework. Living like a slob. Being butch. Being femme. Learning self-defence. Buying a gun. Driving a truck. Riding a motorcycle. Riding a bike. Walking. Running. Yoga. Pole dancing classes …”

(2016: 169–170)

The coupling of supposedly “empowering” opposites here shows the ubiquity and meaninglessness of pseudo-feminist rhetoric in advertising, but it also signals wider tensions. It relates to much broader feminist debates and anxieties about co-optation, revolving around the question of the relationship between feminism and various conservative ideologies. Co-optation is a process in which the “initial meaning” of a concept is “transformed and used in the policy discourse for a different purpose than the original one,” although the initial meaning is not rejected outright (Stratigaki 2004: 36). Anxieties about the co-optation of feminism are frequently revived by political discourses that purport to embrace feminism in service of economic neoliberalism, militarism, white supremacy, and beyond. Rhetorical appeals to gender equality have become a favourite tool for legitimizing various political projects, whether that means George W. Bush re-labelling American military interventions in the Middle East as battles for women’s rights, or right wing, racist and anti-immigrant political forces claiming to defend women’s rights by opposing the re-settlement of Muslim refugees. Central to this book is a similar ongoing debate about the re-purposing of feminist rhetoric to legitimize neoliberal economic policies in Gender and Development. This debate asks whether feminism has been employed as a rhetorical façade for a range of economic policies that have widened wealth inequality, entrenched gender inequalities, and reproduced neo-colonial power relations.

This chapter provides an introduction to the debates around feminism, neoliberalism, and co-optation in Gender and Development today, in order to lay out the conceptual framework for the remainder of the book. In doing so, it argues against the prevalent notion that feminism has been fully co-opted by neoliberalism: the chapter argues that the co-optation debate traps us in a circular mode of discussion, engaged in the futile task of trying to determine what is authentic feminism while ignoring some of the most important political and economic trends of the current era. It demonstrates that co-optation critiques have contributed essential criticisms of economic neoliberalism and convincingly shown us the way that pseudo-feminist rhetoric has been taken up in service of exploitative and harmful policy agendas. Yet, it shows that co-optation narratives have limited usefulness for understanding more complex dimensions of ideological neoliberalism, insofar as it aims to shape subjectivities and modes of conduct. The policy agenda of “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” that currently dominates the field of Gender and Development should not be understood as an example of feminist co-optation, but as a governance strategy that authorizes a range of interventions to govern girls and women. The chapter argues that we require a post-structural account of power and governance in order to understand how neoliberalism works through gender equality governance; to this end, it advocates for the use of Foucauldian conceptual tools in a feminist analysis of Gender and Development.

From “Women in Development” to “Gender Equality as Smart Economics”

Debates about feminism’s co-optation are not new to the movement: before neoliberalism was the primary suspect, there was imperialism, capitalism, or statism. Debate about feminism’s relationship to institutions and ideologies is an ever-present feature of its discourse. This is not a criticism of the movement, but a reflection of its position in broader social structures. The issue of feminism’s relationship to other social structures has been at the center of decades-long debates: can we speak of women as a single group? Do women in the global South share more in common with the men in their own communities than they do with wealthy women in the global North? Can feminism claim to work as a singular movement or are women’s interests too diverse? Feminism has always been constituted in relation to other institutions or movements, rather than sustaining itself as a fully-fledged movement linked only to female solidarity: it is “constantly vexed by its desire for the autonomous” (Grewal quoted in Roy 2017: 255). As such, is important to situate debates about feminism, neoliberalism, and development in a brief historical context. Although gender equality is the headlining feature in development discourse today, this has not always been the case. For decades, women were considered marginal actors in the development process, either as victims of “underdeveloped” cultures, passive recipients of aid, or vessels for overpopulation and its Malthusian consequences. The discursive process by which women have become visible actors in development spans decades and demonstrates the shifting (and overlapping) subject positions they have occupied: oppressed wife, dutiful mother, empowered entrepreneur. The shifting visibility of women in development discourses– and the process by which they moved from margin to center – provides essential context for understanding the salience of particular narratives that dominate in the current moment of the “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” agenda.

At its inception, the set of institutions, policies, and discourses that we know as international development were understood as a value-neutral, gender-neutral, and technical enterprise delivering economic expertise to countries in the global South. Within this enterprise, the concept of gender was seen as irrelevant, and women as marginal to development economics. Women were largely invisible to early development planners of the 1950s and 60s and, when made visible, discussed largely in passive, welfarist terms (Kabeer 1994). Representations of women were characterized by passivity and based in the assumption that while women could not contribute to growth, once growth was achieved, they too would progress along the trajectory of modernization towards a Western model of womanhood, thereby identifying gender oppression in outmoded and traditional forms of pre-development (Escobar 1995). Early development models, centered around relief work and “welfarism”, primarily envisioned a role for women as the recipients of aid (Moser 1993; Rai 2002). These efforts focused on traditionally “feminine” areas closely related to the reproductive sphere (health, nutrition, family planning) with a focus on social welfare. Women first became visible as targets of development interventions in terms of their biological reproductivity. Beginning in the mid-1970s, international efforts to cut population growth through family planning acknowledged the centrality of women to any effective policy (Pietila and Vickers 1990; Joachim 2007). Efforts to curb population growth formed part of an overall economic growth strategy that identified a “conceptual link” between women, development, and economic growth (Kabeer 1994: 4). The agency ascribed to women during this early phase of development interventions was heavily circumscribed as it was limited to their involvement in biological and social reproduction, and was therefore largely negative or preventative. This included violent and coercive interventions to curb women’s fertility through enforced birth control or sterilization on women across the global South (Wilson 2012). Broadly, women’s visibility in development discourses as instruments of biological reproduction prompted greater efforts to engage them for child and family welfare, though not in terms of women’s own rights, choices, or capabilities.

Early feminist gains were consolidated during the 1970s, when feminist economists working in development institutions designed the Women in Development (WID) framework. The first generation of WID analysis began in 1970 with Esther Boserup’s groundbreaking work Women in Economic Development. Boserup’s study focused on the mechanisms by which women’s productivity could be mobilized for more modernized and “productive” work than the typically feminine sectors to which they were confined: she argued that women’s labor was generally underreported and therefore invisible to policy planners, drawing on a comparative analysis of women’s agricultural work. WID marked an important turning point in the place that women occupied in development policy makers’ minds and ushered in the (still dominant) emphasis on women as resources to be utilized for better development outcomes. Where once women had been understood as potential beneficiaries of development – but peripheral to the process itself – they were now conceptualized as an important and under-utilized resource whose integration was essential to the success of the development enterprise. WID advocates and practitioners strategically seized on efficiency arguments to advance their cause within gender-skeptic institutions (Tinker 1990). WID advocates created a powerful and influential liberal feminist paradigm that continues to influence development policy, not least because it was underpinned by the claim that women could improve the function of existing development models and institutions (Kabeer 1994; Razavi and Miller 1995; Rai 2002). WID frameworks, although introducing critical new analysis into development studies, operated largely within the development-as-economic growth paradigm that characterized the field. Women’s development “problem” was identified as a lack of productive capacity within capitalism, rather than gendered capitalist relations that depended upon women’s subordination.

For WID’s critics, its modernization framework endorsed an unproblematic association between improvements in women’s status and economic growth, without considering structural critique of harmful gendered implications of capitalism (Benería and Sen 1981; Jaquette 1990; Sen and Grown 1985). Women’s status could not be transformed within a capitalist system, socialist feminists argued, because their subordination is so integral to the working of capitalist regimes of accumulation (Sen and Grown 1985; Benería and Sen 1981).

These critiques gave rise to a new iteration of the policy framework called Gender and Development (GAD), advocated by grassroots women’s groups in the global South, which sought to introduce a more critical and relational approach. Central to GAD is the shift from a focus on women (and women’s group interests) to gender, meaning both gender as a social construction and gender relations between men and women. Derived from socialist and Third World feminist perspectives, GAD contested the premise that women were excluded from development and should be integrated into its structures. Women’s subordination, GAD proponents argued, is inbuilt and naturalized within capitalist growth models where unequal distribution of power makes substantive equality impossible. GAD cast a focus on the gendered division of labor within the household, differential access to and inequality within wage work, access to and control over resources, and the social status of men and women (Rai 2002: 71). It therefore sought to move beyond a focus on women’s absolute status (i.e. access to paid work and the status accorded to that work) towards an appreciation of their relative state (i.e. social status in the household, work, and community) and the gendered structures that enabled and constrained transformation (Ibid.). In the short term, GAD sought to promote women’s education, access to credit, and improved access to the legal system; in the long term it focused on transformative challenges to gender ideologies and institutions that reproduced subordination, embodied in dominant norms and structures of development governance (Parpart 1995).

The Gender and Development framework was itself subject to criticism, particularly in terms of its implementation in the form of Gender Mainstreaming inside institutions. Critiques of GAD comprise two main strands: the first reflects a debate among feminists about the relative merits of a woman or gender focus, given the difficulties of articulating a unified set of “women’s interests” and the likelihood that introducing “gender” concerns will shift focus onto men. The second reflects ongoing concerns about rhetorical co-optation and the suspicion that, regardless of the specific terms employed, feminist language will be appropriated for other purposes (see Prügl 2009; Moser and Moser 2005; Rao and Kelleher 2005). Overall, feminist appraisal of GAD has recognized its potentially transformative elements but noted that it has largely been embraced in terminology but not in policy terms; instead of instituting a new development paradigm, GAD language has been used interchangeably with WID (Rai 2002: 73; see also Baden and Goetz 1997). “Gender” might have replaced “women,” but familiar policy agendas persisted. Gender discourse has been, in many ways, “overtaken by its own success” as donors are eager to present their own gender sensitivity and gender focused programs, though this often results in the uptake of language that has been stripped of critical focus on power relations between groups (Porter and Verghese 1999: 132). The policy frameworks outlined here, the critiques levelled at them, and the debate between proponents of various approaches is by no means a historical debate confined to the literature. The themes outlined here continue to animate development policy and have enormous significance for feminist action.

The “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” policy agenda today represents the dominant iteration of Gender and Development in mainstream institutions. Broadly it, advances the case that the goal of gender equality should be embraced by development institutions because gender equality has beneficial economic results, like increased GDP and productivity. Gender equality, the story goes, is not only the right thing to do, but it is also the “smart thing”. The political salience of the Smart Economics agenda can be directly attributed to the legacy of efficiency narratives that began in WID policy discourses. The WID-GAD debate still strongly resonates here because, although its two main positions were staked out years ago, they have been broadly institutionalized in powerful development and global governance institutions (WID) and feminist development and political economy research and activism (GAD). Smart Economics claims are underpinned by an efficiency rationale, rather than an equality rationale, although the intrinsic importance of gender equality is more frequently acknowledged than in the past. Much of this centers on arguing that women are uniquely suited to advance development goals. Where WID aimed to show the under-recognized economic potential of women to contribute to their local economies when given appropriate training, Smart Economics similarly advances the argument that women could be made more productive if their unpaid contributions were recognized (and better managed). Their role as mothers, for instance, is held up as a development good. Smart Economics proposes that we re-interpret women’s role in development, holding up female values of care and cooperation as fundamental to development goals, rather than inimical to them (Bergeron 2016). Human capital theory plays a central role here, because it has provided an appealing cross-sector rationale for investment in women (discussed in Chapters 2–3). Just as WID sought to show that women were development agents, not passive recipients of development benefits, so too Smart Economics depends on the idea that women possess uniquely cooperative characters that can be translated into greater productivity. WID’s legacy is clear here, and so too is the ongoing debate with GAD-oriented advocates who endorse a much more critical account of gender inequality in relation to neoliberal capitalism, rather than gender equality in service of capitalist goals.

The “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” agenda has emerged since the mid-1990s and is linked to an expanding range of international development and financial institutions, NGOs, and governments. Sylvia Chant attributes the origins of the Smart Economics agenda origins to the 1995 United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing, where the language of the “pay-offs to investing in women” first crystallized (2012: 200). Since then, it has spread widely cross public and private sector discourses: for example, it is deployed by governments to highlight the returns on investment available to firms who empower women, global institutions advising investors to see women as an “untapped development resources” (UN Women 2011) and by private firms like Goldman Sachs whose “Womenomics” research assesses the economic gains of female employment. Box 1.1 demonstrates the widespread use of Smart Economics messages across public and governmental bodies, international financial institutions, corporations, and civil society organizations.

Box 1.1 “The Spread of Smart Economics”

“The business case for investing in [Millennium Development Goal 3 on gender equality] is strong – it is nothing more than smart economics.”

(World Bank 2007: 145)

“Women may well be the dominant source of economic growth in the near future – and organizations that are able to capitalize on the roles women play as economic actors will most likely have a competitive advantage as the world pulls out of the global recession.”

(Deloitte 2011)

“The [World Economic Forum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Feminism, Neoliberalism, and Development
• 2. A Feminist Critique of Human Capital Theory
• 3. Gender, Development and Smart Economics at the World Bank
• 4. Unlocking Female Resources
• 5. Girl Effects
• 6. Human Capital, Private Profit
• Conclusion
• Index