Gender mainstreaming in poverty eradication and the Millennium Development Goals

This book explores the issue of gender inequality through the lens of the Millennium Development Goals, particularly the first one of halving world poverty by 2015. It explains that gender equality merits specific attention from policymakers, practitioners and researchers because it is a feature of social relations in most societies, is pervasive across different groups within societies, and it structures the relations of production and reproduction in different societies.

The book argues that efforts to promote the productivity of the poor are largely targeted to men while women are expected to carry on contributing to household livelihoods and caring for the family with little or no recognition or support for their efforts. If households had been the egalitarian institutions portrayed in conventional economics and in the imagination of many policy-makers, the preoccupation with ‘the male breadwinner’ would have mattered less.

It demonstrates that a redistribution of resources and responsibilities among family members would have prevented the emergence, or exacerbation of inequalities in the household. It further demonstrates that inequalities in the domestic domain intersect with inequalities in purportedly gender-neutral institutions of markets, state and community to make gender inequality a society-wide phenomenon.

Chapters:

• 1: provides a brief history of the changing policy discourse and the processes that led to the greater visibility of both poverty reduction and gender equality
• 2: charts the gradual evolution of macroeconomic analysis from its earlier gender-blindness to current attempts to make it more gender aware
• 3: sketches out an ‘institutional framework’ for the analysis of gender inequality within the economy and explores its variation across the world
• 4: offers a more detailed examination of the relationship between gender inequality and poverty at regional and national levels, drawing on findings from three different approaches to poverty analysis: the poverty line approach; the capabilities approach (using human development indicators); and participatory poverty assessments
• 5: considers women’s role as economic actors and its critical importance to the livelihoods of the poor across the world
• 6: focuses on the human development concerns of the MDGs
• 7: reinforces the critical importance of certain resources to women’s capacity to exercise agency, but this time focuses on forms of agency that are in the interests of women themselves, in other words, those that serve the goals of women’s empowerment and gender justice
• 8: attempts to draw out the implications of the relationship between gender equality and pro-poor growth for policy efforts to achieve the MDGs and provides a gender audit of PRSPs