“Hooking up,” a popular type of sexual behavior among college students, has become a pathway to dating relationships. Based on open-ended narratives written by 273 undergraduates, we analyze how students interpreted a vignette describing a heterosexual hookup followed by a sexless first date. In contrast to the sexual script which holds that women want relationships more than sex and men care about sex more than relationships, students generally accorded women sexual agency and desire in the hookup and validated men’s post-hookup relationship interest. However, in explaining the sexless date, students typically reasoned the woman was being chaste and withholding sex to redeem her reputation whereas they often characterized the man’s abstinence in terms of a pity date. The findings underscore the tenacity of gendered sexual scripts around heterosexual dates and hookups but also reveal fissures and contradictions that suggest some changes to the sexual double standard.

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In the context of a growing campaign to focus more international development efforts on women and girls, this article presents a pathways model of multigenerational global human development through an examination of gender and women as agents of development in the context of motherhood. As the vast majority of the world's women are mothers, issues related to motherhood are fundamental to addressing gender and development. Based on the United Nations' concept of human development and a review of the literature, we explore how women are uniquely effective development agents in that increases in women's access to income, education, and health often have higher potential payoffs compared with men in terms of the next generation and beyond. A human development paradigm that does not fully include women is both an injustice to half of the world's population and a missed opportunity for maximizing human development for both men and women in generations to come. Gender and development policies must consider the enhancement of human capacities for long-term improved quality of life, and they must address structural barriers to equality to not only allow women more opportunities in the public sphere but also to transform gender relations in the domestic sphere.