"Labouring Women tackles the key empirical puzzle of why attenuated, market-driven approaches to women’s empowerment persist and grow, despite the plethora of scholarship and activism that proves they do not work and indeed, increase women’s burdens. As many scholars have observed, this contradiction has driven processes of co-optation and resistance. This book explains how this co-optation has happened: through the uneven political opportunities for feminists, resulting in the contortion of their agenda, and via structural inequalities for women’s labour that has seen the ‘efficiency argument’ for women’s empowerment become a kind of fundamentalist commonsense.
Combining careful work with the feminist canon to recover radical roots with a feminist revisioning of Southeast Asia’s economic development, Labouring Women offers historically grounded evidence for scholars and practitioners doing the difficult work of structural gender transformation. But more than that, through its careful emphasis on gender experts’ voices and agency, the book documents how this fundamentalist commonsense is being overturned."
Melissa Johnston, University of Queensland

"After two decades of ‘smart economics’ and ‘gender mainstreaming,' a rigorous reckoning is well and truly overdue, and this book delivers it with clarity and astuteness. Labouring Women offers a detailed and insightful account of the achievements and limitations of both these approaches, cutting through a seemingly crowded field to identify what are actually glaring gaps and silences. Using a systematic analysis of the evolution of gender equality in development programming, and by centring the priorities, expertise, and resistances of gender specialists themselves, Gerard makes a powerful intervention in feminist political economy and gender and development debates. Crucially, it goes beyond critique, offering insights into how dominant models can be disrupted."
Susan Engel, University of Wollongong

★ The author, Kelly Gerard—a Senior Lecturer in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Western Australia, and recipient of both an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award and a Cheung Kong Endeavour Award—specializes in the political economy of aid and development policy. Her extensive research focuses on Southeast Asia and gender issues, offering insights that bridge grounded fieldwork with institutional analysis.
★ The book confronts the paradox of how "women’s empowerment" has been co-opted by market logic. It reveals how aid programs, corporations, and development agencies have transformed radical feminism into a doctrine of "efficiency"—a shift that ultimately increases the burden on women. The work provides robust empirical evidence drawn from the labor experiences and micropolitics of women in Southeast Asia.
★ It offers a de-dogmatized analytical framework for gender studies scholars, development practitioners, and policymakers. By documenting the voices and agency of gender experts, the book also identifies spaces for resistance and potential pathways toward structural change within empowerment initiatives.

Offering a powerful critique of contemporary visions of women’s empowerment, this book traces the shift from its radical feminist roots to a market-driven model of inclusion.
Focusing on Southeast Asia, where women’s labour has long underpinned economic growth, it examines how empowerment projects intersect with the privatization of development and the rise of gender expertise. Once a collective agenda to support women in exerting greater control over their lives, empowerment is now framed as integrating women into markets. Backed by donors, corporations and development institutions, this model has only persisted and expanded, despite extensive scholarship highlighting its limits.
Through extensive analysis of interventions, funders and the micropolitics of aid and corporate actors, the book demonstrates how gender programming can simultaneously disempower and create space for resistance.

Kelly Gerard
Senior Lecturer and Head of the Politics and International Relations discipline at the University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on the political economy of aid and development policy.
Kelly is a recipient of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Award and the Endeavour Cheung Kong Award—an educational exchange program funded through a partnership between the Australian government and the Cheung Kong Group, designed to support the mobility of students and researchers, as well as cultural exchange, between Australia and Asian nations (primarily Hong Kong and mainland China). She has held postdoctoral research positions at the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University and the Southeast Asia Research Centre at the City University of Hong Kong.
Her work has been published in journals such as *Review of International Political Economy*, *The Pacific Review*, and *Globalizations*. Kelly has previously delivered keynote addresses at ASEAN forums. She also contributes to platforms including *New Mandala*, *Disruptive Asia*, *The Mandarin*, and *East Asia Forum*, covering topics such as the limitations of microfinance and how Southeast Asia might "build back better" with a focus on gender equality in the post-pandemic era.
She co-edited *The Political Economy of Public Policy* (Palgrave Macmillan) with Toby Carroll and has authored or co-authored over 20 publications, including the highly acclaimed *The Political Economy of Southeast Asia*.
A native English speaker, she also possesses intermediate-level proficiency in spoken and written Chinese.

1. The Rise and Rise of a Big Idea
2. The Business of Development
3. Constructing Knowledge on Women’s Empowerment
4. Locating Women’s Labour in Southeast Asian Development
5. Funding Women’s Empowerment in Southeast Asia
6. Valuing Women’s Empowerment in Southeast Asia
7. Gender Experts and the Repurposing of Women’s Empowerment
8. Leverage and Resistance