The 2020s have seen the rise of significant challenges to gender equality. Funding for ‘anti-gender’ movements has increased as their influence has grown. United Nations forums are frequently used as avenues for ‘norm spoiling’ by organised movements to ‘rollback’ women’s rights. In this troubling era, what can the core ideas of Gender and Development, first popularised in the 1990s, offer us? How do the ideas of tackling global gender inequality through the United Nations and intergovernmental forums stand up in this era? In this presentation, we address these questions and argue that while there are still substantive actors working for gender equality, many of the messages and core ideas have become neutered to a minimalist and neoliberal focus on ‘smart economics’. Instead of addressing gender equality more holistically, smart economics focuses on boosting women’s economic empowerment only – frequently through instrumental ways that aim also to create economic growth. Drawing on global empirical data, we argue that this limited version of women’s empowerment hollows out meaningful versions of gender equality and does little to counter the rise of the anti-rights movement.
Co-authored: Annabel Dulhunty and Sharon Bessell
