School of Politics and International Relations

Dr Sophie Harman, Big infrastructure: getting gender and the needs of women wrong

6 July 2015

Infrastructural investment in developing countries is back but gender is still being sidelined in development, says Dr Sophie Harman. “Gender is seen as an area of human development that has little relevance to big infrastructure programmes… This policy of omission reinforces the primacy of men in developing countries and cements the role of women as one which is primarily concerned with drudgery and household based tasks. Put simply, gender-blind infrastructure often empowers men but reinforces the existing, narrow roles of women in the informal, unpaid sector,” she writes.
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Click here to read Dr Harman’s full paper