This paper describes work underway to enrich the present tools to measure women's empowerment -- particularly the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The authors are developing an African Gender and Development Index (AGDI) on behalf of the Economic Commission for Africa, which is to be launched in 2004. The paper begins with a discussion of gender and power concepts, and then introduces a Women' s Empowerment Matrix as a tool to help link socio-cultural, religious, political, legal, and economic spheres. It then raises some of the difficulties related to the calculation of the GDI and GEM, which the authors are taking into account in the AGDI.Gender, Monitoring, Measurement, Human Development Index, Gender-related Development Index, Gender Empowerment Measure,
This article looks at the empowerment approach in relation to issues of women and development. After explaining why this is currently the most fruitful perspective in the field of gender planning, it then goes on to explore two central problems of the empowerment approach. The first problem is the conceptualization of women's gender interests. The distinction between women's practical and strategic gender interests was introduced by Molyneux and popularized by Moser. It is argued here that this distinction is theoretically unfounded and empirically untenable. Secondly, gender planners tend towards a preference for simplified tools and quantifiable targets. Here it is argued that women's realities should not be bent into this planning framework but that instead planners, working from an empowerment perspective, should demonstrate flexibility and theoretical grounding, and be aware of the political dimensions of their work.
Scholars have suggested that Indonesia's former president Suharto's New Order state legitimated itself by destroying the Partai Komunis Indonesia (Communist Party of Indonesia, PKI). In this article, the author points to the sexual politics underlying this process of legitimation that have been largely ignored in earlier analyses. She focuses on the military's orchestrated campaign of slander and sexual innuendo against the PKI's women's organization Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indonesian Women's Movement). This campaign was pursued for more than 30 years since the 1 October 1965 putsch in Indonesia that eventually brought Suharto to power. It embodied a powerful, supportive logic by which Suharto's rule was sustained until mid-1998, creating a particular form of national, militarized identity. Another consequence of the sexual accusations Gerwani endured was the destruction of what was at the time one of the most powerful women's movements in the world. Not only was Gerwani banned and destroyed, but the remaining women's organizations were also brought under strict government control. The state even set up its own mass women's organizations, under the umbrella of Dharma Wanita (Women's Duty), which were intended to re-subordinate rather than emancipate women.
A renewed global emphasis on ‘traditional culture’ threatens progress in women's and sexual rights. This article focuses on Indonesia, where concepts such as ‘gender harmony’ and ‘the happy (Muslim) family’ have become state policy and where neo-Salafism is gaining ground. Indonesia's first President, Sukarno, who managed to balance the army, Communism and Islam, was swept away during the period of mass murder in 1965–67 in which the Communist Party was destroyed. The struggle for women's rights, as represented by the Communist-affiliated mass women's organization Gerwani, became associated with sexual licentiousness through the slander campaign waged against the organization by the army. During the military dictatorship of Suharto, political Islam was allowed to grow. After the fall of Suharto, which introduced the so-called Reformasi period (from 1998), conservative Muslim forces gained control over important institutions. They strengthened a backward interpretation of women's position in society. While a discourse of women's rights prevailed after 1998, this has since been replaced by a heteronormative discourse on the ‘harmonious family’, in which women are assigned a subordinate position. The Ministry of Women's Empowerment and Children's Protection actively promotes this concept (at the global level too), asserting that it aims to reduce domestic violence. With the help of a discourse analysis of some key official documents, the passionate aesthetics underlying this emphasis on the reintroduction of patriarchal heteronormativity in Indonesia are exposed. Regrettably, the United Nations Population Fund supports the Indonesian Ministry on this path.
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