Gender and Discrimination

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW 1979)

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW 1979)

Gender Mainstreaming

• The organizational policy process of assessing the distinct gendered implications of any planned legislative, policy, or programmatic development action at all levels, ensuring that women’s and men’s concerns are an integral dimension of design, implementation, and evaluation.

Gender Division of Labor

• The structural distribution of tasks and responsibilities between men and women across societies, characterized by the concentration of women in low-wage labor and unpaid domestic care work, while men disproportionately occupy paid, formal, and decision-making roles.

A "Neat" Category

• A post-colonial feminist critique targeting early Western development models that treated "women" as a simple, static, and easily categorizable target group without accounting for internal differences.

Homogenization

The problematic practice of treating women in the Global South as a monolithic group with identical needs ("the fallacy of global sisterhood"), ignoring how race, class, ethnicity, and geography shape individual realities.

Sanctity of Culture (Nilsson)

A term highlighted by Patricia Nilsson (drawing on Naila Kabeer) describing how patriarchal or conservative leaders invoke "cultural tradition" or "sacred values" as an unassailable excuse to resist feminist reforms and human rights standards

Grameen Bank Model

A microcredit banking model pioneered in Bangladesh that provides small, collateral-free loans directly to poor rural women to start home-based micro-enterprises.

Muhammad Yunus

• Bangladeshi economist, founder of the Grameen Bank, and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who championed microcredit as a capitalist "bootstrap" model to empower poor women.

Productivity-Based Empowerment

• A neoliberal development framework that measures women's empowerment primarily through economic utility, wage labor, and market productivity, often ignoring structural legal barriers, domestic violence, and unpaid care work.

Poor Women Are Bankable” (Yunus)

Muhammad Yunus's core assertion that poor rural women are financially reliable borrowers who maintain higher repayment rates and utilize credit responsibly for household well-being compared to men.

Microfinance

The provision of small-scale financial services—including micro-loans, savings accounts, and insurance—to low-income populations excluded from formal banking systems.

Lamia Karim and Her Main Arguments

Anthropologist and author of Microfinance and Its Discontents who demonstrates that microfinance operates as an instrument of neoliberal governmentality, using rural social structures to extract loan repayments while shifting financial risk onto vulnerable women.

Shadow State (NGOs Under Neoliberalism)

The structural phenomenon where donor-funded NGOs step in to provide microcredit, health, and welfare services as the neoliberal state retreats from public spending, governing rural populations without democratic state accountability

The Economy of Shame

Lamia Karim's theoretical concept explaining how microfinance NGOs operationalize rural codes of female honor and modesty; when a default occurs, NGOs deploy peer groups to publicly shame the defaulting borrower to enforce repayment.

“High Repayment Rate” and Gaps

The celebrated ~98% loan repayment rate touted by microfinance institutions. Critics highlight that this rate conceals severe structural gaps—such as women taking secondary high-interest loans, handing loan money over to male relatives, or facing severe domestic stress to meet weekly deadlines.

Social Collateral

• The mechanism used by microcredit NGOs to substitute physical property with peer pressure, community reputation, and female social networks to guarantee loan repayment.