Women, Food Security, and Development in Less-Industrialized Societies: Contributions and Challenges for the New Century

In this paper I examine the links between women, food security and development from a crossnational perspective. I find that the “proximity to gender equality” constructed from the United Nations’ human development and gender-related development indices improves development in the form of both child hunger and child mortality. Extending these results, other forms of female empowerment including female contraceptive prevalence significantly improve development outcomes in less-industrialized societies. Findings are net of theoretical controls for economic development, population pressure, globalization, democratization, and region, further strengthening the importance of gender considerations. Countries that incorporate gender into policy and program considerations benefit from such inclusion in the form of social and economic development outcomes. Findings are an important crossnational extension of existing research, utilizing new measures that capture the important development dynamic.