Srilatha Batliwala, WEDO’s Board Chair gave this speech at the High Level Thematic Debate on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment held during the 2007 Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).
There are some magic bullets popular in the area of women’s empowerment and gender equality: gender mainstreaming, micro-finance focused on lending rather than women’s empowerment, and quotas for women in formal political systems. All three are good ideas, indeed, they are interventions that the women’s movement itself advocated, but they have been divested of the complex transformative strategies within which they were originally embedded and reduced to formulas, rituals and mantras.
