What Accounts for Gender Inequalities in “Developing” Countries? A Decolonial Feminist Analysis of Patriarchy, Coloniality, and Neoliberalism

Abstract

Despite decades of international gender equality frameworks, substantial gender disparities persist in the Global South, where progress toward parity remains over a century away at current rates. This paper argues that these inequalities cannot be adequately explained by cultural or developmental factors alone; they are the product of three historically and structurally interrelated forces. Drawing primarily on evidence and case studies from Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, it contends that gender inequality in these contexts is produced by: entrenched patriarchal norms that marginalise women across education, labour markets, healthcare, and political participation; colonial interventions that did not merely encounter pre-existing patriarchies but actively reconfigured and intensified gender hierarchies, embedding racialised and gendered systems of domination that persist today; and neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that perpetuate these inequalities by privileging market production while invisibilising and overburdening women's unpaid reproductive labour. By integrating postcolonial feminist critique with structural economic analysis, the paper offers a multi-causal framework that moves beyond single-axis accounts of gender inequality. It argues that meaningful progress requires dismantling not only cultural norms but the global economic architecture that continues to reproduce women’s marginalisation.