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In preparing for the twenty-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action on women’s economic empowerment, both formal policy documents and media coverage in developed countries such as the Netherlands resonate with the rhetoric of choice between work and care. In this article, my central argument is that framing the combination of work and care as a matter of personal choice stands in the way of economically empowering women. For policy makers to take responsibility in these matters, both policy documents and media coverage should promote win-win instead of zero sum solutions in combining work and care, for both men and women. …

This article offers some reflections on how the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) theme of women and decision making power came to be translated into a set of policy directions, and what their implementation suggests in terms of their potential to challenge power hierarchies. The article draws on work from the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment programme on voice and constituency building. The article argues that the policy focus of the BPfA, after the introduction of MDG 3 in particular, became one of redressing gender disparities in representation in legislatures. Twenty years later, we are at a critical juncture in which we need to ask ourselves whether we need to go beyond numbers in parliament as a proxy for political empowerment, and probe into: what kind of politics, through which pathways, in relation to whom, to achieve what? …

The paper seeks to intervene in debates about the role of crisis in Post Washington Consensus (PWC) policymaking. Gender and, especially, sexuality are largely absent from that debate. My paper asks: What do experiences of crisis reveal about the inter-connections between crisis, gender, and sexuality? In concrete crisis conditions, which common sense groundworks of the present (Nikolas Rose) get unsettled, which get re-entrenched, and what is the role of the development industry in this process? Using policy texts, interviews with Bank policymakers, and fieldwork on a family strengthening loan in Argentina, I argue that the denaturalization of free markets in the PWC is articulated, in part, through the re-naturalization of monogamous heterosexual couplehood. With the injuries of neoliberalism framed as injuries to loving couplehood, the Bank and its allies resolve to (re)generate intimate partnership as defining feature of the post-crisis era, raising crucial questions about the new regimes of heteronormativity under construction in contemporary development practice. …

This bulletin arises from a conference of the same title that was held at the Institute of Development Studies in July 2007 in collaboration with Birkbeck College. It sets out to provoke reflection on the now ubiquitous notions of 'empowerment' and 'agency' within neoliberal development discourses on gender. It also seeks to raise broader questions about the politics and political economy of Gender and Development. …

Focusing only on numbers of women getting into politics without taking account of the factors that hinder their political participation risks being exclusionary in terms of the types of women who succeed, argues Mariz Tadros in a new issue of Contestations. She cites case studies from the new Women in Politics book in which the issue of unpaid care emerges as one of the strongest predictors of age and class in profiling women in politics. …

The Center for Gender and Social Transformation (CGST) based at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University is organising a photo exhibition at the Dhaka Art Center in Dhanmandi from 23-28 August 2014 as part of their work on unpaid care. Organised in partnership with Actionaid Bangladesh and the Dhaka Art Center, entitled 'Bhinno Rupe Purush' (Images of Caring Men), the photo exhibition is the first of its kind in Bangladesh.  …