Gender, Development, and Diversity

Each one of us lives life as a carrier of multiple identities — including gender, race, class, and age. All these add up to determine our opportunities in life, to empower or disempower us, depending on our context.

This collection of articles focuses on the implications that this has for development goals of poverty alleviation and human rights. In particular, critiques from Southern women challenge development organizations for inadequate and inappropriate policy and practice. Development has addressed gender inequality as a key concern, but most organizations have yet to understand how other aspects of difference cross-cut gender, to unite and divide groups of women from each other.

Improving development policy and practice means understanding inequality in a complex way, and developing ways of working that acknowledge difference, rather than suppressing it. It means practicing as we preach, by transforming our own organizational cultures. This entails confronting issues of power and inequality, acknowledging racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, and making development organizations a comfortable place to be for all.

Contributors to this issue include Ranjani K Murthy, Everjoice Win, and Dorine Plantenga. Case studies come from India, Zimbabwe, Latin America and the U.K.