Search All

The term ‘women’s empowerment’ is viewed with a certain amount of distrust by feminists in Latin America. There has been some ambiguity surrounding the term in the region and in some cases it has been appropriated to legitimize actions that may not actually empower. This paper reflects on feminist conceptualisations of empowerment and how the process is believed to unfold. It outlines two basic approaches to conceptualising empowerment: ‘liberal’ and ‘liberating’ empowerment. …

India’s economic growth will accelerate more rapidly, democratically and effectively if India invests in people and their economic potential. Investing in people, especially women and their living and working environments, is imperative for nation-building. In this chapter, Bhatt looks at SEWA and its involvement in the process of organizing poor working women since 1972, its successes and its struggles. …

The Lady Health Workers Programme is a major public sector initiative to provide reproductive health care to women in Pakistan, employing almost 100,000 women. This qualitative research study is based on interviews with LHWs and community members in four districts to explore dimensions of women’s empowerment. They are analysed in terms of how context and circumstance can positively shape the LHW experience. Four possible trajectories are illustrated based on case studies. …

This book explores the role that religion, culture and society play in the social and political positioning of women. 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. The contributors assess the current situation and provide a rallying call for progressive politics that is committed to universal values. The essays also review as well as show us the new directions that are opening up new pathways for women to traverse. …

In this article, Naila Kabeer looks at the rising global phenomenon of the female breadwinner. This phenomenon has had an impact on relations of social reproduction, family structure and size, and on global trade, which has, as a result, seen a rise in global mail-order bride services and the globalization of the sex trade. …

The different processes associated with globalisation have led to rising rates of paid work by women often in contexts where male employment is stagnant or declining. This paper explores how women and men are dealing with this feminization of labour markets in the face of the widespread prevalence of male breadwinner ideologies and the apparent threat to male authority represented by women’s earnings. Responses have varied across the world but there appears to be a remarkable resistance to changes in the domestic division of unpaid work within the household and a continuing failure on the part of policymakers to provide support for women’s care responsibilities, despite the growing importance of their breadwinning roles. Many of the services previously provided on an unpaid basis are being transferred to the paid economy but most working women continue to bear a disproportionate burden of domestic responsibility. …

For poor women paid work is not simply a pathway out of poverty, but has more deeper transformative potential, including both internal transformation (changes in women's personal and political consciousness and agency as citizens) and external transformation (changes in women's social position). Hence, measurement of women's empowerment requires identifying appropriate qualitative indicators to capture these dynamic processes of change that are not all observable. We were faced with two crucial measurement challenges: first, to estimate the magnitude and nature of women's paid work that is often unrecognised, and second, to assess a transformative process like women's empowerment. The paper describes the methods used for enumerating women's economic activity and measuring women's empowerment in the context of Bangladesh, using quantitative indicators estimated from a large household survey. …

This report in Bangla focuses on research which explored how Bangladeshi women engage with television and the meanings, choices and subjectivities they derive from it. The researchers examined the changing representations of women and female sexuality and explored how women in different sites and classes engaged with television and attached meaning to the images represented on screen. …

The Pathways Middle East Team had to scope a broad territory and probe deeply so as to ground the work of the RPC in the concerns of the region and its concerned citizens. The work of the inception phase attempted to answer three questions so as to insure the future relevance and success of the RPC on Pathways of Women’s Empowerment: 1) Why is women’s empowerment un-claimed and seemingly unpopular with grass-roots women and those who are most dis-empowered despite decades of feminist activism and of state support in most Arab countries? 2) Why is women’s empowerment perceived to be an alien import despite decades of apologia that have elaborated on the just and progressive potential of Islam, of Arab social organization and institutions? And 3) Why have the projects and programs implemented not had a transformative effect on women’s daily lives? This paper reports on the scoping workshop held from 10- 12 September 2007 in Cairo Egypt. The workshop invited a variety of activists, scholars, academics and researchers to three days of presentation and discussion to imagine an informed, evidence-based agenda for future RPC work that is liberated from stereotypes and prejudice. The report reports on each session by placing the subject matter of the session in context of the concerns and development in this hub and articulating the proceedings of the session with the planned activities of the RPC. …

This report focuses on a project which looks at resurgent Islam and its influence on the formation of female identities and sexualities. The researchers explore the ways in which women in their daily lives engage with religious tenets and observance, focusing on new forms of religious organization and the appeal it has for women of various classes. …

This report in Bangla focuses on research which compared and contrasted conceptualizations of women's empowerment used by different actors: women's organisations, development agencies, political parties and NGOs in Bangladesh. …

This report in Bangla focuses on research which considers whether and how the work done by Women Health Workers leads to changes at the individual, family and societal levels. The researchers explored how Women Health Workers are introducing new role models for women, challenging purdah, encouraging mobility, and creating pathways of empowerment. …

This paper explores how perceptions and narratives around women’s empowerment have evolved in Bangladesh from 2000 to date. It studies the concepts of women’s empowerment in public discourse and reviews the meanings and uses of the term by selected women’s organisations, donor agencies, political parties and development NGOs. By reviewing the publicly available documents of these organisations, the paper analyses the multiple discourses on women’s empowerment, showing the different concepts associated with it and how notions such as power, domains and processes of empowerment are understood by these actors. It also highlights how these different discourses have influenced each other and where they have diverged, with an emphasis on what these divergences mean in terms of advancing women’s interests in Bangladesh. …

The Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (RPC) and the Women’s Empowerment in Muslim Contexts (WEMC) RPC held a public discussion on the theme of building alliances on 13 November 2008 in Cape Town prior to the AWID Forum. The day’s programme included an introduction to the two RPCs by their respective directors, followed by inputs from the RPC members about women’s movements’ encounters with other social movements, after which there was a question and answer session. An internal meeting was held by the two RPCs for members to identify key issues of strategic relevance for building alliances as well as overcoming oppositions, and to formulate strategies for engagement across movements. …

Culture interacts with development in multiple ways. However the importance of culture within development should not be seen as translating to crystallising and solidifying its meaning or providing definitive ideas of what works. In this paper, I look at the relevance of culture to the promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment, and examine how some women’s movements in Latin America have negotiated and contested meanings around culture and as a result have re-signified gender values, attitudes and behaviours. The example of Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo questions the cultural construct of motherhood and the traditional role of the mother caring for the family within the home, and the women’s neighbourhood action based in Bahia, Brazil which I look at contests and extends the notion of that domestic space. …