Global economic integration, driven by the economic engines of liberalization, privatization and de(re)regulation, sometimes called neo-liberalization, is presenting a host of new challenges to seeking economic and social justice for women. Many of the advances women made during the 1970s and 1980s have been stalled or reversed. It is no longer adequate to simple critique the negative impact on neo-liberalism on women and advocate that they be better integrated into the economy. The very model of economic integration needs to be challenged.

This challenge is being carried forward at the theoretical level by feminist economists and at the political level by social movements and human rights advocates.

Additional Resources

• A Feminist Political Economy Framework (Maria Riley, OP - March, 2008)
  Feminist political economy is one among several heterodox economies that challenge the reigning orthodox neo-liberal economic model which emphasizes the market economy with growth and accumulation as its primary goals. FPE, in contrast, focuses on the provisioning of human needs and human well-being. It employs gender as a defining category and focuses on the actual lived experience of women, men and families and what it means to be a human person.

• Women's Economic and Social Rights
  Expansion of market liberalization and privatization since 1994, has not only failed to further the human rights agenda, but may in fact be responsible for the violations of economic and social rights of populations worldwide.

• Economic Rights and Economic Justice Theory
  Economic, social and cultural rights have proven rather difficult to define, implement, and successfully advocate for. This marginalization is closely tied to the economic model which currently dominates economic discourse and the popular understanding of markets.

• Why do Gender Issues Remain Problematic to Development Agencies? (Maria Riley, OP - February, 2007)
  Women worldwide, as individuals and through the Women's Movement, have expended enormous personal and professional energy to ensure that the issues of women in development were addressed in major institutions, such as the World Bank, the UN and all its agencies, and in development organizations both governmental and private. However, some 35 years after the publication of Ester Boserup's exciting work, a kind of gender fatigue has set in among many advocates and institutions, which prompts the central question of this article: Why has gender remained such a difficult issue in the international NGO development community?