Gender and Development: Back to Basics Continued Relevance of Marcal’s Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner

Abstract

Taking the Discipline of Economics as base, this paper demonstrates how and why macro-economic policies centrally anchored in the Discipline of conventional Economics cannot accommodate gender concerns; thereafter, it provides a brief overview of the shifts in “gender and development” literature emphasising in particular the contribution of feminist economists. Feminists’ continued efforts to move towards transformation of society to achieve gender equity finds articulation in the manner in which the Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030 have been formulated. We discuss briefly this movement from MDGs to SDGs highlighting the specific contribution of feminist economists. Next, using the Telangana Social Development Report, 2018, the paper not only demonstrates what a “gender” reading of secondary data can reveal but also the fact that the findings of the report are in sync with the concerns raised by feminists over the various Sustainable Development Goals and Targets of Agenda 2030. The paper ends by supporting the framework that feminists have laid out for a transformative agenda using three of the concepts that underpin the human rights framework, namely accountability, inclusion and non-discrimination.