In the report on the conference published in this IDS Bulletin issue, as in the papers prepared for the conference by members of the IDS Subordination of Women Workshop, a number of assumptions are made and a somewhat specialised language is used. Both call for some explanation.
Initially the workshop was set up to develop conceptual tools which would lead to more sophisticated analyses of the impact of social change, whether planned or unplanned, on the position of women in society. These tools were to be tested not only in the work of the workshop’s members (most of whom have had experience of policy evaluation in the Third World), but also were to be passed on to
people involved in policymaking who are associated with IDS. The workshop discussions all started from a number of assumptions which are relatively commonly held by feminists, but perhaps less well known in other circles.