Abstract Book of the 4th World Conference on Gender Equality
Year: 2026
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What Accounts for Gender Inequalities in “Developing” Countries?
Gloria Pia Malandra
ABSTRACT:
This paper interrogates the enduring structures of gender inequality in so-called “developing” countries, questioning why, despite decades of international commitments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, CEDAW, and the Sustainable Development Goals, parity remains a distant aspiration. It argues that gender disparities cannot be adequately explained through developmental metrics alone but must be situated within the interlocking systems of patriarchy, (neo)colonialism, and neoliberal global governance. The discussion unfolds in three stages. First, drawing on Western feminist analyses of patriarchal social orders, it examines how entrenched gender norms restrict women’s access to education, health, economic autonomy, and political participation. Second, it turns to postcolonial feminist scholarship to critique the universalising tendencies of Western feminism and to expose how colonial histories have inscribed gendered hierarchies into the very fabric of development. Third, it analyses how neoliberal structural adjustment programs (imposed through Western, global financial institutions) have intensified gendered precarity and deepened women’s unpaid and informal labour burdens. Synthesising these perspectives, the paper contends that the global persistence of gender inequality is inseparable from a world-system structured by colonial continuities and capitalist imperatives. It calls for a decolonial rethinking of “development”—one that centres intersectional, locally grounded feminist epistemologies as both critique and praxis.
Keywords: Gender Inequality, Feminist Theory, Patriarchy, Postcolonial Feminism, Neoliberalism, Development, Global South, Structural Adjustment, Decolonial Feminism, Global Political Economy