In this reflective essay, Professor Scott calls for more conscious attention to the restrictions attributable to gender in the planning, management, and evaluation of interventions—and particularly the need to recognize national differences in the constraints on women. She is critical of the tendency to try pursuing this agenda, as if it were “just basic business,” without proper consideration of the concrete limits that gender norms put on women’s ability to build an enterprise: biased financial systems, restrictive property rights, limits on mobility, and, especially, the threat of violence.
This essay also addresses worrisome blind spots in program execution, such as overreliance on digital delivery systems or the failure to recognize the impact of distance when trying to reach poor rural populations. Scott challenges conventional wisdom that governments, not corporations, should be engaged with this work—while also exhorting companies to reconcile their efforts in the developing world with unequal employment practices at home.