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This research project looked at a small number of cases of local, national or regional initiatives on sexual rights and women’s empowerment that have succeeded in creating spaces for challenging repressive social norms concerning female sexuality. It looked at the interactions with international influences, including religious and development institutions. …

This project researched the reforms that have been taking place in Egyptian personal status laws since 2000. The aim was to examine the unfolding reform story and what it entailed in terms of successes and challenges for women's rights activists in their pursuit of justice and equality in marriage and divorce rights, and for Egyptian women at large who seek legal redress in family courts. The focus of the study was on two aspects of the reform story: 1) the process of mobilising for the new laws, building alliances, choosing strategies, and making concessions, and 2) the implementation of the legal reforms in the new family courts that were introduced in 2004. …

The collection of essays in the book aims to capture the variety of policies, discourses, debates and interventions that have influenced the lives of women in South Asia and to identify those that have led to greater empowerment of women. …

This bulletin is devoted to exploring what empowerment means in the everyday lives of women in different situations and circumstances. …

This pack of 20 vibrantly drawn cards provides a clear and very accessible entry into some of Pathways’ research findings and recommendations. The cards feature research from Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Pakistan, Palestine, and Sierra Leone, across the four Pathways themes of: conceptualising empowerment, empowering work, building constituencies and changing narratives of sexuality.  …

This bulletin is devoted to exploring what the quota has meant as a motorway to women's accession to political power. It draws on research findings from Pathways, as well as presentations given at a special seminar held in the Brazilian National Congress. The bulletin raises the questions of who are the women who are best positioned to benefit from the quota as a fast track option, what are they enabled to do once in office via the quota seats, and what kind of gender agendas does the critical mass of women who have come to power via the quota espouse and advocate? …

This project links talented young documentary filmmakers with academics from the Pathways consortium to collaborate on a series of shorts broadly exploring concepts around women’s empowerment. …

This bulletin arises from a conference of the same title that was held at the Institute of Development Studies in July 2007 in collaboration with Birkbeck College. It sets out to provoke reflection on the now ubiquitous notions of 'empowerment' and 'agency' within neoliberal development discourses on gender. It also seeks to raise broader questions about the politics and political economy of Gender and Development. …

This research investigated the conceptions of security, peace and empowerment among the Hill women of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The research explored the Hill women's actual and perceived role in security and peace building, the role of Hill women's organisations and their movements, major obstacles faced by Hill women and their strategies for overcoming these. …

Using topical life stories, focus groups, data and discourse analysis, this project explored the experiential diversity and thematic commonalities in the lives of Palestinian unmarried women, in the context of a society experiencing prolonged warlike conditions, political crisis, and social disruption. In particular, the researchers examined the dynamics of choice, embodiment, responsibility, and survival, as well as attempted to identify structural, social, political and economic factors shaping Palestine’s rather unique pattern of early, but not universal marriage, with a relatively high proportion of never-married women (but not men) over time. …

This bulletin highlights the profound inequities of access both globally and nationally to safe abortion, and the importance of global and national movements for reform to address this. Contributions focus in particular on policy reform and what can be learned from struggles in different parts of the world to obtain or retain safe abortion services. …

This project explored how Bangladeshi women engage with television and the meanings, choices and subjectivities they derive from it. Researchers examined changing representations of women and female sexuality and explored how women in different sites and classes engage with television and attach meaning to the images that are represented on screen. They enquired whether and where there are possibilities of empowerment that open up through women's engagement, pleasure, and learning from the media. …

This research considered whether and how the work done by Women Health Workers leads to changes at the individual, family and societal levels. Researchers explored how Women Health Workers are introducing new role models for women, challenging purdah, encouraging mobility, and creating pathways of empowerment. The study compared public (government) women health workers with non-government women health workers. …

This project investigated the enabling conditions for women’s participation in local governance and its influence on women’s empowerment. The objectives for this study were to explore the challenges faced by women councillors, how they negotiate these challenges, their own interpretation of their engagement patterns and processes, and whether new gender norms and roles are being created for women in the public domain. …

This research project explored how paid work can change women’s lives in terms of dealing with the public sphere and institutions, accessing services, commodities, resources, information, reducing isolation, increasing negotiation/bargaining skills, ability to protect themselves, etc. The context under which work can be empowering and the kinds of work that change lives was compared through comparisons of similar research undertaken by the West Africa and Middle East Pathways regional hubs in Ghana and Egypt. …