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Brazil’s Maria da Penha Law was put in place to prevent and combat domestic and family violence against women. A project, backed by the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC, called the Maria da Penha Law Observatory Consortium (OBSERVE), was launched in order to ensure the adequate and efficient implementation of the law. This case study briefly describes the research that the OBSERVE team undertook and the preliminary research findings which indicated that a number of problems obstruct the desired application of the law. …

Grown discusses her work on the Gender Analysis Programme on Economics at American University and its connection between teaching and research. She elaborates on her project with colleagues to conduct a household survey to gather sex- disaggregated information on physical and financial asset ownership and control, and to develop for designers and implementers of household surveys a parsimonious set of questions that can be added to every single household survey. The survey will show that this information can be collected at low cost and that it is important for public policy. She hopes that the survey will show that women own more assets than is commonly perceived to be the case, although ownership on its own is not enough for true empowerment. …

This article introduces an issue of writing on the ways in which religion enters cultural and social life. The papers in this issue concentrate on the way that Islam impacts on the everyday aspects of the lives of people in Muslim societies or communities where Islam plays a part. This issue emerged from a panel presentation on ‘Women Negotiating Islam’, about how women cope with the ways that religion enters their lives, and brings out the cultural aspects behind women’s negotiations of the positions made available to them and their struggle to carve their own spaces. The issue aims to show how women, culture and religion form a difficult and complex terrain in which our political and social lives are lived. …

In this article, Harcourt argues that conventional development approaches to gender and empowerment are constraining and unimaginative, and do not foster lively, authentic debate. Instead, in development, people tend to limit their definitions of gender and empowerment to acceptable terms to avoid conflict or funding cuts. She looks at pop culture that celebrates and sells images of empowered women (Lady Gaga in particular) and compares this to the depoliticized notion of ‘empowerment’ in development, and suggests that development practitioners need to reach out further than the constraining environment of development and in the process change development itself. Harcourt points to new media and communications technologies that can be harnessed to create spaces and engage a variety of people with development debates and to make development more adventurous and creative, arguing that doing so would do much to help us get out of discourses of professionalism that create institutions afraid to open up because they fear argument and difference. …

Education has long been seen as crucial to women's empowerment. Increasingly, however, scholars such as Stromquist have questioned our faith in the power of education to empower women. Drawing on a survey of 600 women of three age groups in three regions of Ghana and 36 intergenerational interviews, this chapter makes the case that the benefits of education for women in context specific, for example when decent work in the public sector is available. …

Education has long been seen as crucial to women's empowerment. Increasingly, however, scholars such as Stromquist have questioned our faith in the power of education to empower women. Drawing on a survey of 600 women of three age groups in three regions of Ghana and 36 intergenerational interviews, this article makes the case that the benefits of education for women is context specific, for example when decent work in the public sector is available. This study shows that more than twice as many women aged 18–29 have had some form of education compared with those above 50. …

A significant new law was passed by Egyptian legislators in 2004 introducing family courts to arbitrate family conflict in an effort to promote non-adversarial legal mechanisms. The aim of this paper is to examine how this new legal system is working for female plaintiffs. Through an analysis of court practices in a number of divorce and maintenance cases, this essay will make two central arguments: First, I will argue that the benefits family courts are currently providing to female plaintiffs are limited due to a number of gaps and shortcomings in the legislation, mechanisms of implementation, resources, and the capacity and the training of court personnel. In addition, the legal process in the new courts as well as the substantive family laws that are being implemented continue to reflect gender inequality and biases against women. …

In 2000 a new divorce law, called khul, was passed in Egypt. Khul gave Egyptian women the right to unilaterally petition for an end to their marriages. The court automatically grants them divorce, but as long as they relinquish any post divorce financial rights from their spouses. This case study – which shares Marwa’s story – of the reforms in Egyptian personal status laws, shares the findings of Pathways’ research, that while khul has provided a real and beneficial legal option to Egyptian women, gender justice has not yet been served in the unfolding story of Egyptian family law reform, and presents action points based on the research. …

The Egyptian family law system regulates matters such as family property, marriage and divorce, alimony, child custody, and paternity disputes. Until the introduction of a new legal framework which came into effect in 2000 and 2004 women attending the country’s law courts were offered no guarantee of their civil rights or human dignity. This new legislation was a real advance, but as with any attempt to bring about social change through legal reforms the new system has had complex and multidimensional effects. In this light, Mulki Al-Sharmani examines here one aspect of the reform package - mediation-based family courts - in order to assess how far Egypt’s women have travelled in achieving “empowerment through law”. …

This chapter is a tale of women reaching the height of political activism and the pit of their political representation all in one year (January 2011-January 2012). It is a year that began with women and men rising in revolt against the thirty year dictatorship of President Mubarak and ended with the parliamentary elections a year later that brought an Islamist-majority bloc to the Egyptian parliament. …

In February 2010, Pathways launched four Bangla-language research reports at the Ekushey Book Fair – Bangladesh’s most important cultural and literary annual festival. The reports were written in simple, accessible language in order to disseminate the information to the widest possible audience, so that the most number of people can be informed about aspects of women’s work, women’s engagement with religion and media, and the movement building strategies of women’s organisations so that women’s experiences and relationships are better understood. The reports published in Bangla are: ‘Media in the Eyes of Women: New Possibilities?’ by Aanmona Priyadarshini; ‘Women at Work: Aspirations and Limitations’ by Sakiba Tasneem; ‘Women and Religion: A Changing Relationship’ by Sahida Islam Khondaker and Samia Huq; and ‘Women’s Movements and Constituency Building: An Analysis’ by Sohela Nazneen and Maheen Sultan. …

In this reflection on ‘empowerment’, Taylor looks at how development proponents have instrumentalised women’s role in development and poverty reduction, arguing that development should be about access to rights and freedoms. She points out that empowerment as a concept needs to be rethought – that real change needs to start with a democracy and human rights culture, a foundation of equal access to all the amenities of public life. Women’s visibility in work and politics is good, but is not the structural change that is needed because it doesn’t address power. She looks at human development as a valuable approach for women’s empowerment, and argues that the realization of women’s human rights into reality is necessary for empowerment. …

This paper was presented at the XIII Bahian Researchers Symposium on Women and Gender Relations held at NEIM/UFBA in Salvador from 4-7 November 2008. The purpose of the study was to identify and analyse changes in women's lives in Salvador, Bahia over three successive generations, and how these changes relate to processes of women's empowerment. …

Brazil has 9. 1 million domestic workers. 95% of them are women, 60% are black. Many earn less than five dollars a day. …

For generations of workers in the sugar cane plantations of north-eastern Brazil, the long months between harvests have been a time of hunger. Sugar cane cutting is hard labour. Women workers rise in the early hours to prepare food for their families and leave for work before dawn, working long hours in the scorching sun. Alternatives are limited. …