Abstract
Development as an industry has failed to improve women’s conditions coherently or consistently despite its professed intentions. This failure in part rests on an assertion of women’s roles in problematic gendered stereotypes, without recognition of gendered power dynamics. Avoiding gender as a conceptualizing framework in programs for or with women builds on a neoliberal approach to development, in which empowerment becomes operationalized in ways that perpetuate global conditions that accentuate inequities. Yet if we are to be accountable in a socially significant way, we need to advocate for gender justice. It is this sense of accountability, not to a single donor or particular intervention, but to the central cause for concern, that offers hope.