International Division
As women and
men in increasing numbers of countries were drawing attention to
sex discrimination and the need to make girls and women full
participants in the development process, the Foundation was
positioning itself to encourage expanded opportunities for Third
World women. Early in the 1970s the International Division began
shifting away from a concentration on building social science
programs, academic institutions, and governmental capacity.
Increasingly, grants were made to further voluntary organizations'
work on critical problems. This readiness to consider proposals
from nongovernmental groups did not, however, lead immediately to
funding women's programs. First came lengthy discussions of whether
women's programs were justified in their own right or gained
legitimacy only insofar as they advanced general development
objectives. Some staff members also urged the Foundation to be wary
of exporting U.S. cultural values.
Where early
grant making did occur, the Foundation carefully and cautiously,
usually to support analyses of discrimination and its consequences.
In a few field offices, grants were made to new women's groups,
with the expectation that many of them would survive and constitute
a base for later programming. By the late 1970s it had become
increasingly clear that the empowerment of women was an issue of
indigenous concern in the Third World, and all field offices had
begun at least exploratory grant making.
The resulting
women's programs in the International Division focused on three
related areas: improving women's productive capacity and
opportunities for employment and earning income; promoting sex
equity in education; and understanding and reducing cultural
constraints on women's social and economic participation. Two
overall strategies emerged to address the numerous issues implied
in each of these areas. One was funding basic research to explore
and publicize the roles and status of women in developing
countries. The second addressed the paucity of women qualified to
fill professional positions.
The division's
first women's grants not only helped build a base of knowledge and
information, but also advanced the research careers of outstanding
feminist scholars and helped create the institutions that would
continue their pioneering work. For example, both female scholars
and women's concerns featured prominently in the Middle East Awards
program for population research, jointly funded by the Foundation,
the Population Council, and the International Development