Women With Disabilities in the Developing World

Abstract

It has become standard practice to call attention to the double discrimination against both gender and disability under which women with disability labor. If women with disabilities universally find themselves at greater disadvantage because of these prejudices, their lives are often even more severely curtailed in much of the developing world, where poverty and traditionally negative attitudes toward women and disability are widely, although by no means universally, found. This paper is not intended to catalog every known variation in beliefs confronted by women with disabilities, but rather to provide an overview of some of the most prominent issues faced by women with disabilities in the developing world. It is written in the hopes that researchers from a variety of fields may become interested in some of the many areas about women with disabilities in developing nations about which we currently know so little.