Gender Awareness in Modeling Structural Adjustment

The macroeconomic models underpinning the design of structural adjustment programs are gender-blind. This paper discusses strategies for introducing gender analysis into these models and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the models from a gender perspective. It concludes that besides being blind to gender, the models are also blind to the waste of resources and impoverishment that stems from deficient aggregate demand, undemocratic decision making and directly unproductive expenditures that buttress male power. This waste is, however, likely to be diminished by moves to more egalitarian systems of gender relations, entailing changes in the structure of entitlements and the social matrix in which macroeconomic processes are embedded.