Globalization, Women's Empowerment and Sustainable Growth: Development Theory with a Vagina

Through a gendered lens, this paper seeks to explore certain social realities and their effect on the global economic climate. Many across the globe are subjugated, actively oppressed and even murdered simply because they are female. While this can easily be seen as a human rights issue, it is also arguably an important economic factor that has yet to be adequately incorporated into development discourse. For example, gender equality is one of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), however, the connection between women’s rights and all of the other MDGs is inextricable. Further, key to the realization of gender equality is one of the most difficult pieces to the development puzzle—personal empowerment, which is not something that an outside force can easily influence. Applying these concepts to a case study of Sri Lanka illustrates the difficulty in measuring gender equity and the complexities in understanding the effect that gender relations has on development.