ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the history of gender and development policy of foreign aid agencies with a focus on Asian countries as both recipients and donors. While international agencies may have advanced their theoretical understanding of gender issues, this has tended to be ghettoized in women's units and women's sections in government and NGO aid organizations. Most development policy on gender continues to focus on women's economic roles and is grounded on neoliberal social and economic frameworks. Policy tends to avoid the structural causes of discrimination and the marginalization of women, and how these causes intersect with patriarchy, religion, ethnicity, disability, sexual identity, and other compounding factors. International Women's Year activities of 1975 and the associated UN Conference on Women in Mexico City, brought the issue of women's rights to a much broader global audience, setting in train a series of processes that led to gender and women's rights as ostensibly a central plank in development.
