ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, the changing status and roles of women combined with the rise of modern feminism have promoted a dramatic increase in concern with the meaning and explanation of gender. Several years of feminist scholarship and women-in-development (WID) research has led to the consensus that gender is a fundamental organizing principle in human societies. Gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power (Scott 1986) and constructing hierarchies. Gender (like class and ethnicity as well) is not a homogenous category; it is internally differentiated and elaborated by class, race/ethnicity, age, region, education.
