In 1975, the United Nations held the first World Conference on Women in Mexico City. Planned to coincide with the U.N.’s International Women’s Year, the gathering triggered an explosion in research on gender around the globe, with poverty featuring prominently.
Four decades later, the task set out for us as the editors of the recently published four volume Routledge major works collection "Gender, Poverty and Development" was no small one, and it came at a timely moment. As we get closer to the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, development practitioners, policymakers and researchers worldwide have been debating the successes and failures of the poverty reduction framework set out in the MDGs.
For gender advocates, one of the main critiques of the MDGs was that gender was not fully integrated throughout each of the eight goals, and that, as a result, the focus on these goals caused gender to remain heavily circumscribed in poverty reduction policy and programming.