Gendering Development: The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, 1981–2000

Abstract

This chapter examines the OECD’s response to the rising interest in gender equality generated by the first UN Conference on Women and the launching of the UN Decade for Women (1976–1985), as this became embroiled in North-South and East-West tensions. Based on original sources, it argues that the Expert Group on Women in Development, composed of aid femocrats staffing the “Women in Development” units within donor agencies, seized the opening created to establish their own space within the DAC, and used it to push for the gendering of development assistance and, in the 1990s, to join the forces contesting the premises of the Washington Consensus.