Gender And Citizenship

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The concept of gender refers to the roles and responsibilities ascribed for men and women in the family, society and cultural setting. These roles and responsibilities are socially constructed and learned and can change overtime. Gender roles are culturally determined, it determines the appropriate behaviors men(male) and women (female), that is how they think, speak, dress and interact within the context of society and gender relation are some of the power relation that affects women. ‘Is citizenship gendered?’ The answer to this question, posed by (Sylvia Walby, 1994 in Lister1998) has to be a resounding ‘yes’. Citizenship has always been gendered in the sense that women and men have stood in a different relationship to it, to the disadvantage …show more content…

Women have limited access to power and control of resources, has influence on their being discriminated on in all institutional sphere. Kabeer, (1996) as cited in Reeves and Baden,( 2000) notes that “Not all women are poor and not all poor people are women but all women suffer from discrimination” this has brought about the feminists idea of removing discrimination against women and getting them opportunities that allows them to achieve equal status to men. There has been a struggle by women’s activists and feminist for gender equality that works to redress the imbalance in power relations and resources allocation between women and men. This can be done through questioning and challenging the role of citizenship. Citizenship can be dynamic concept incorporating negotiations over membership, exclusion, roles, values, power and equality. (Meer and Sever, 2004) Interconnection of Gender and Citizenship to Development …show more content…

This has brought about several shifts in development thinking which have contributed to the rise to Gender and Citizenship as an emerging area of debate in development studies. These concerns arose from the growing realization that conventional development efforts championed by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other donor agencies had failed to achieve the desired goals to reduce or eliminate poverty and inequality as well as promoting respect for human rights .This knowledge has been brought to bear in both development thought and

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