Information Society Watch

March 2006, Maxine Molyneux and Shahra Razavi

This paper, drawing on research undertaken for the UNRISD report, 'Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World', reflects on the ambivalent record of progress achieved by women over the last decades and considers how the policy environment has changed over the period since the high point of the global women’s movements. Drawing on a number of commonly employed indicators of “women’s progress”, the paper argues that the record of achievement regarding gender equality is more ambivalent, and the causal influences more diverse and less unidirectional than is sometimes assumed. It also argues that development policies have an important role to play in securing outcomes, and that the first phase of the structural reforms (dating from the early 1980s) was in many respects negative for women. In the ten years since the Beijing Conference there have been some significant shifts in international development policy along with a growing appreciation of the need to develop gender aware policies. The paper examines how this ensemble of changing international policy and political climate over the past decade has given rise to new issues and challenges for those active in global women’s movements (Adapted from authors).

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