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Patti O’Neill talks with Rosalind Eyben about being a feminist bureaucrat at the OECD. …

Hania Sholkamy examines the disempowering aspects of women’s work and calls for a more progressive agenda to empower work and re-position it not only as an income generating activity, but as a social role, an ideal, and political engagement. …

Presentation on the Pathways of Women's Empowerment and meanings around conceptualising empowerment. Translated by Cecilia Sardenberg into Portuguese. …

This 6 minute film explores the story behind the innovative Chapeu de Palha Mulher programme in Pernambuco, Brazil. The programme run by the Women's Secretariat helps to empower female sugar cane plantation workers.  …

In as much as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be ‘path dependent’. They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change. The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts. This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilisation organisations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh. …

On the 29-30 May 2014 a group of feminist scholars, activists, and media and communications professionals met at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex to celebrate and interrogate learning from the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Consortium (Pathways). This was an opportunity to look at the trajectory that the consortium had taken since its early days in 2005, consider how Pathways research could shape the post-2015 development agenda, and strategise about future directions in work on women’s empowerment. …

The paper will examine some of the critical issues raised by the women's movement in India on the violence experienced by women both within the family and through modes of development initiated by the state in India and the manner in which the state has sought to both counter feminist critiques as well as co-opt them through state initiated policies. It will particularly examine literacy and micro-credit programmes to argue that the rhetoric of empowerment functions as a new 'mantra' which does little to even dent the violence of women's everyday lives especially when they are poor and located on the social margins. …

This chapter attempts to give an overview of the trends in research, thinking and programmes in Pakistan from 1975 onwards in the area of women’s empowerment and bodily integrity in order to understand what makes change happen. It also identifies drivers of change and enabling factors, and discusses what women in Pakistan have done to establish their rights and the implications of this. Secondly, it seeks to identify areas that need to be explored through further research. The author considers the concept of empowerment, the definition of bodily integrity, and examines the social constructions of the woman’s body in Pakistan. …

This case study presents the events and outcomes of a workshop on Media, Gender and Representation which was organised by the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (RPC), based at the BRAC Development Institute of BRAC University in Dhaka from 11th to 15th November, 2007. The purpose of the workshop was to equip researchers, practitioners, journalists and students to develop a conceptual framework to analyse media as well as equip them with practical tools to decipher its many meanings. …

McFadden argues that societies in the South have been approached from a particular research gaze that is derived from a liberal epistemology that focuses on the individual; it simplifies women’s lives and is both methodologically and politically inadequate and deeply problematic. Empowerment as a notion is, too, embedded in liberal and neo-liberal worldviews and is ideologically flawed. With this liberal and neo-liberal development discourse in mind, McFadden looks at empowerment, MDGs, gender and human rights, and citizenship, entitlement and rights and analyses how they are embedded in this ideology. …

This paper, presented to 'Pathways: What are we Learning?' Analysis Conference held in Cairo, 20-24 January 2009, seeks to interrogate the extent to which change has occurred in the lives of three generations of Ghanaian women. This is to assess the extent of changes and continuities in the lives of women as a social group. Change here is being used as an indirect indicator of empowerment when it involves improvements. The significance of the various indicators in the lives of the different generations of women will also be explored. …

In moving away from prescriptive one-way communications exercises, participatory development communications use better strategies to engage communities and capture nuance. This article examines a communications case study in Egypt: a photography competition aimed at understanding how local photographers depict women and empowerment in their images. Opportunities for discussion and self-reflection provide cultural producers the space to delve into how they see women and how they then choose to represent them. This type of communications initiative actively courts a richer understanding of empowerment, leaving room for the complexities this might entail. …

This concept paper focuses on the politics of sexuality. Its focus is on the normative construction of heterosexuality in mainstream narratives of sexuality produced by institutions such as the media, the law, religion and the development industry; by cultural arenas such as popular music and soap operas, as well as for counter narratives produced by women themselves. Foregrounding concepts of heterosexualty, sexuality and gender, the paper explores the connections between them and connections to norms that reinforce compulsory heterosexuality and male supremacy, and the implications for the workings of power and privilege. Narratives of sexuality serve both to affirm and also to challenge these norms. …

Popular music plays a significant part in the everyday lives of people across age, class, religion, ethnicity and social occasion. In Africa, musicians are frequently powerful public figures capable of conveying ideologies through their lyrical and verbal pronouncements. Many popular songs portray women as sex objects and convey misogynistic constructions of women. At the same time, however, other songs hail women as perfect lovers and sacrificial mothers. …

This article maps the multiple methods used to bring scholar-activists, music producers and music consumers together in a conversation that culminated in the creation of three winning ‘empowering songs’ from the ‘Changing representations of women in popular music’ project. This project explores the gendered stereotypes of women in popular music, and seeks to contribute to reflection on, and creation of, alternative (empowering) narratives about women through song. The article discusses this marriage of research and advocacy and reflects on some of the outcomes from ‘corporate’ reflections – all of which generated a lot of passion about the tensions and possibilities around women’s representations and roles. The authors conclude that for research findings to have practical and policy value and legitimacy, what, how, when and where we communicate our messages is extremely important. …