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But you cannot eradicate domestic violence and food insecurity without tackling the policy space.
In particular, without tackling macroeconomic, trade and financial policy, or seeing the interlink between them,
and how they promote, intensify and exacerbate the factors that create domestic violence, create food insecurity.
Particularly the financial crisis - a dramatic example of a finance-driven search
for safer assets where a more performing asset can lead to
a rise in food prices.
When the crisis hits, in general it is very often the women who bear the brunt.
This is why this is a critical time to focus on promoting women's status in the world of work.
I argue that this is an important game shift.
In fact I've called my paper "Time for a Game Shift".
Moving us away from what has become a universal mantra at UN meetings
that is the goal of gender equality as the main platform for feminist advocacy.
But I want to suggest that gendered analysis of development policy, of growth theory
can provide the values with change in direction
and substance which would enable the goals of policy itself
apart from getting us gender equality.
I've come to the view that we have emphasised, despite all our denials,
issues, ideas, demands arising out of a bodily difference.
Biologically and socially defined.
In my view, even goals like gender equality,
basically continue the old game of catching up with men.
Revealing the discrimination, asking for justice.
We ask for greater recognition of our difference,
care work, unpaid work, drawing attention to our separated selves.
What I am arguing for is that we need to engage with thought.
We have to develop ideas out of our intellectual as well as our grassroots experience.
Amartya Sen has a brilliant quote on this.
He says: "Not to see us as patients, but to see us as agents of change".
Another key element of women's management and leadership
is the intellectual point of departure/stimulation
in terms of the emphasis on the household
as the site of production and reproduction,
advanced thinking and analysis about gender roles
gaps, biases and their significance in economic performance
and embedding social content to macroeconomic and financial policies.
These ideas like Keynes or Raul Prebisch, when they come with an idea,
the whole world catches it, we all talk of Keynesian economics,
we talk of Prebisch and trade - we even of Marx in our ideological discourses -
but we don't talk of a theory developed by women.
We have theories in other departments but not in economics.
So this bubbling up theory of growth
is broadly accepted as the way women would like to see growth happen from the bottom up.
It has to be put into proper economic reasoning.
It should be a theory which if we write a book and publish it,
should say "Here is a new theory we can grasp on".
We feminists have ghettoed ourselves;
our knowledge of lived experience as well as research has not crossed the barriers.
We are locked, or have locked ourselves into the women's state.
I think that one of the challenges
of strengthening the present voice of feminist and public policy debate
is the invisibility that Devaki spoke to,
but also the fragmentation of the approaches.
There's not a strong sense that feminists have practical answers
that are applicable to many issues and yet they are.
The most well-known practical thing that most people know feminists for are gender budgets.
But actually, feminists have very practical, operational things to say
about fiscal, monetary and trade policy - about all the policies.
But it's fragmented and not cohesively brought together in any one place.