ABSTRACT
Having effectively excluded women from the economic base, by oversight or by reducing them to fractional ‘man-units’, planners can quite logically argue that women, who have certain moral or ‘social’ claims, be given special consideration over and above the economic projects of the mainstream. Thus, the question may be put how planners can incorporate a ‘women’s element’ into costbenefit analyses.1 At the operational level, women are often allocated a special section of a development institution, and a special set of programs tailored to the ‘social’ role assigned to them by the planners. This tendency becomes more pronounced as demands for the ‘integration of women into development’ become more urgent, as has generally been the case since International Women’s Year in 1975. Many Third World countries and international development agencies have set up special offices to take care of women’s concerns, in line with such arguments as those put forward in a resolution of the International Labour Conference in 1964, which requested all member states to consider establishing a central unit for co-ordinating activities for women workers. Since then many countries have set up women’s bureaux, or women’s departments within Ministries of labour, social welfare or social security.2
