Gender and Development

The aim of this book is to explore some of the implications of the shift from the ‘women in development’ to the ‘dender and development’ approach for the analysis of health and health care issues in general. Health policies and programmes have focused on biological aspects of diagnosis, treatment and prevention. Likewise, when considering the differences between women and men, there is a tendency to emphasis biological or sex differences as explanatory factors of well-being and illness. A gender approach in health, while not excluding biological factors, considers the critical roles that social and cultural factors and power relations between cultural factors and power relations between women and men play in promoting and protecting or impeding health. While gender interacts with other kinds of inequalities in health, such as social class, race and ethnicity, the focus of the book is on gender and heath. Although it was not a specific topic on gender and health a “gender perspective” on the key elements necessary to the participation of rural women. This book examines the changing role of women in developing countries and calls for a new approach to empowerment. An approach that adopts a more nuanced, feminist interpretation of power and empowerment, recognizes that local empowerment is always embedded in regional, national and global econtexts, pays attention to institutional structures and politics and acknowledges that empowerment is both a process an outcome. This book also ranges across contemporary debated in the study of gender and development. It situates differing gender-based theories in the context of wider political and historical processes such as colonialism, post-colonialism, cold war politics, the new world order, globalization and democratization. It concludes by reflecting on the way men and women are coping with the challenges of globaliation and argues that women’s movements need to re-establish the link between the recognition of difference and the redistribution of economic and social resources if they are to maintain their redical edge. This will be essential reading for undergraduates and graduates in politics, development studies and gender studies.