The importance of gender on IFPRI's agenda was highlighted recently by a decision to set up a taskforce to oversee research on the issue.

The new mechanism, headed by senior research fellow Ruth Meinzen-Dick, will provide support to IFPRI researchers looking not only at the more traditional areas of gender research such as welfare and intrahousehold bargaining power, but also how the issue affects resource tenure, markets, poverty reduction, and overall economic development. The taskforce will serve as a focal point, supporting analytical innovation and helping to integrate gender analysis into IFPRI research beyond the household. One such supportive effort involves a new initiative to incorporate gender into IFPRI's IMPACT model of global food supply and demand, to see what effects increasing gender equality will have on economic growth and malnutrition in different regions. The task force will also act as a liaison office, representing IFPRI on gender-policy research to interested external audiences.

IFPRI has long been a center for systematic studies of gender and development. One recent book, Household Decisions, Gender, and Development: A Synthesis of Recent Research (edited by Agnes Quisumbing), summarizes the research results and policy implications of 27 studies on the subject and promises to become a useful tool for teachers, students, practitioners working on gender and development, and general readers interested in gender studies.

In another recent publication, The Importance of Women's Status for Child Nutrition in Developing Countries Lisa C. Smith and her collaborators investigate the links between women's status and child malnutrition--an area that surprisingly has gone largely unnoticed. In their analysis, they explore answers to the Asian Enigma--the puzzle of why malnutrition is much more prevalent among children in South Asia than in Sub-Saharan Africa, even though South Asia surpasses Sub-Saharan Africa in most of the principal determinants of child nutrition. Using data from 36 countries, the research team establishes unequivocally that eradication of gender discrimination not only benefits women but also their children's nutritional well being.