Male Bias in the Development Process an Overview

Male Bias

Until the 1970s and 1980s, women were largely ignored by policy makers on the national and internal levels, while neoclassical economic models assumed that the aggregate income of households would be shared equally between men and women. More recent research has proven these assumptions to be false, and that the conflict model of household economics is more the norm in reality. Economists and government statisticians also failed to recognize the value of women's unpaid labor in domestic and reproductive work, or that Structural Adjustment Programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund had a disproportionately negative effect on women. In addition, even in the formal sectors of the economy, women's labor was generally low-paid, unskilled and insecure compared to men. Feminist theorists have demonstrated that gender relations are "socially determined" (Elson 1) and that development issues cannot be considered apart from these. For this reasons, economists and social planners need to address questions of differences in power relations, since "women are less powerful than men of similar economic and social position" (Elson 2). They are also in greater danger of sexual violence and physical abuse regardless of social class, although women of different social classes do not share the same social and economic interests. A gender relations approach that takes subordination and power differences into consideration does not necessarily mean that "all men are biased against women" or that some women do not cooperate in their own oppression, only that women are usually more willing to combat it than men (Elson 3).

Male Bias in Development Outcomes

Neoclassical economists played down gender bias in their research and did not seem to be aware of power differentials within households. They also ignored factors of culture and socialization that trained women to perform purely unpaid, domestic and reproductive tasks, denied them adequate nutrition and educational opportunities. Nor did they pay attention to patriarchal family and community structures that made it impossible for women to even express their own individual choices and preferences (Elson 5). In the 20th Century, women may have obtained voting rights and legal equality in the formal sense, but inequality has remained the norm in social and economic life. In many countries, even land ownership is still reserved for male heads of households, while labor, social welfare and minimum wage laws do not apply to the informal sector where the majority of women are employed. Male bias in development continues to exist because "women enjoy fewer and more circumscribed capabilities than do men" (Elson 5). Female-headed households are overwhelmingly poor in every region of the world, which is yet another indication of male bias. Like racial, ethnic and regional biases, it also lowers female output and productivity and makes the achievement all overall development objectives far more difficult.

Causes of Male Bias in Development

Male bias exists at all levels of development, including actions and attitudes in everyday life, public policy, and the theoretical reasoning of development economists. In daily life, such biases may even be unconscious "perceptions and habits, the result of oversight, faulty assumptions, a failure to ask questions" (Elson 7). Women's labor and contributions to family income and living standards go unpaid and unrecognized almost everywhere. Their wages and incomes are lower than those of men in almost every country in the world, while in childhood, they are often denied adequate nutrition because sons are more highly valued. Women's contribution to agricultural production is largely unknown to official statisticians or simply aggregated as part of household and family incomes. Until very recently, economic and social development policies simply were not formulated with women in mind at all, and "women were largely invisible to policy-makers" (Elson 11). Moreover, women almost always have a double burden of unpaid productive and domestic work that does not appear in official records. Nor is household income shared equally between women and men, but mostly under the control of males to spend on their own needs.

Specific Examples of Male Bias in Development

Delia Davis studied gender relations in Chinese peasant households in the 1980s, during the period when the village communes were being broken up in favor of individual households. This had resulted in greater malnutrition levels for women and girls and higher survival levels for boys, particularly because the one child per family policy had reinforced the bias in favor of sons -- the so-called 'little emperors'. None of the gender implications had even been considered by the government when it put this new household responsibility system in place (Elson 17). In rural Zimbabwe, the legacy of colonialism was still having a negative impact on women, given that whites owned the land and Africans were confined to Reserves. In this situation, women's work also went unpaid as men sought employment in the white townships. Even in the new Resettlement areas created by the government at the end of white rule, women were not permitted to own land unless they were widowed or divorced. Although their work was less and violence was decreased, women still "wanted independent incomes and sexual autonomy, not just 'good husbands'" (Elson 19). Carline Dennis found that Yoruba women in Nigeria, who were mostly self-employed as petty traders and vendors, generally lacked access to capital and education and operated very small enterprises with minimal profit margins. Upper class women had access to real capital and "lucrative contracts to supply the public sector with imported goods," which were not available to the majority of women (Elson 19). Alison MacEwan Scott studied women in Lima, Peru and found that in both the formal and informal sectors, women were mostly confined to low-paying, unskilled, dead-end jobs with little security or opportunity for advancement. Nor did they access to the capital, education or influence in the public sphere that would have allowed them to open their own businesses (Elson 22). In the Mexican border factories, Ruth Pearson found the same pattern of women being confined to insecure, low-paying and unskilled jobs, with the higher quality positions going to men (Elson 22).