Devaki Jain

Her discovery of women’s studies and movements starts in the 1970s when she is asked to write a book on ‘the Indian woman’. Through an extensive elaboration of essays, Jain upturns her inherited knowledge and nurtures a concern for inequality between women and men. This new interest leads her to establish the Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST) for facilitating data collection and fieldwork on inequality and poverty alleviation with a special focus on women’s economic roles. Devaki Jain travels across the whole of India discovering the collective and empowering initiatives women created. In her book ‘The Journey of a Southern Feminist’, Jain explains that “this power of women to work together across the various strong boundaries in society and the economy [..] revealed the potential for transforming the approach to economic development, and the reasoning driving it, from that of giving ‘handouts’ to supporting women’s own organisational strength and goals” (Jain 2018).


In this sense, Jain believes women’s vision and capabilities could help to rebuild the global economic order. She initiates a network of women from the Global South that could rethink development policy frameworks reflecting the real conditions of women in the South. In Bangalore in 1984, the network met and began to define macro-areas within which women’s experience could be contextualized. These being the food crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa, the debt crisis in Latin America, the situation of poverty and militarism of Pacific Asia, and the cultural crisis in North Africa and the Middle East. Since then, the network began to be known as Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN).
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As an economist, Jain contributes to the field by rethinking the concepts of poverty and development. She critiques the perception of poverty that fails to recognize the different barriers women and men face within it. In this regard, she introduces the term ‘feminization of poverty’ for describing that “women have a higher incidence of poverty than men, that women’s poverty is more severe than that of men, that a trend toward greater poverty among women is associated with rising rates of female-headed households” (Jain, 2005). She also explains how the traditional vocabulary of development and the use of Gross Domestic Product as a measure of its success has entailed dramatic environmental and social degradation. Along these lines, she advocates for a more extensive understanding of inequality and exploitation, along with higher involvement of feminists from the Global South in shaping innovative development theories and policy frameworks.

Another important contribution relates to the measurement of women’s participation in the labor force. Jain studies the time use of women in several rural Indian villages showing how time itself could constitute a measure for evaluating work. Through this work and many others, Jain highlights the inadequacies in the composition of indices used by international organizations in evaluating development and gender empowerment.
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In short, Devaki Jain is known for being “intuitively intersectional, emphasizing the dialectic between diversity and unity” (Folbre, 2020). Alternating between fieldwork in rural areas of the Global South with interventions in international conferences, such as the UN World Conferences on Women, she supports and encourages women to determine their own emancipation. With Gandhian philosophy and a feminist practice, Devaki Jain devotes her life to feminist issues of the Global South, challenging traditional economic theories and development policy frameworks.


Further Reading
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Jain, D. (2018). The Journey of a Southern Feminist. SAGE Publishing India.
Jain, D. (2005). Women, development, and the UN: A sixty-year quest for equality and justice. Indiana University Press.
Folbre, N. (2020). The Journey of a Southern Feminist; Close Encounters of Another Kind: Women and Development Economics. Feminist Economics, 26(3), 227-229.
Jain, Devaki. Close Encounters of Another Kind: Women and Development Economics. SAGE Publishing India, 2018.