ABSTRACT
Inasmuch 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 mobilization organizations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh. It draws on their narratives to explore the collective strategies through which these organizations sought to empower the women and how they in turn drew on their newly established ‘communities of practice’ to navigate their own pathways to wider social change. It concludes that while the value attached to social affiliations by the women in the study is clearly a product of the societies in which they have grown up, it may be no more context‐specific than the apparently universal value attached to individual autonomy by many feminists.
Macroeconometric studies generally find fairly robust evidence that gender equality has a positive impact on economic growth, but reverse findings relating to the impact of economic growth on gender ...equality are far less consistent. The high level of aggregation at which these studies are carried out makes it difficult to ascertain the causal pathways that might explain this asymmetry in impacts. Using a feminist institutional framework, this contribution explores studies carried out at lower levels of analysis for insights into the pathways likely to be driving these two sets of relationships and a possible explanation for their asymmetry.
This paper sets out to explore economic pathways to women's empowerment and active citizenship in Bangladesh, a country where the denial of economic resources to women, and their resulting status as ...lifelong dependents on men, has long been seen as foundational to their subordinate status. While empowerment entails change in the lives of individual women and their interpersonal relations, the concept of active citizenship draws attention to women's capacity to participate in the public life of their community. The paper draws on the existing literature on women's access to various forms of paid work both to assess their impact in terms of empowerment and citizenship and to understand better the processes by which these changes might occur.
The 2019 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to three scholars on the grounds that their pioneering use of randomized control trials (RCTs) was innovative methodologically and contributed to ...development policy and the emergence of a new development economics. Using a critical feminist lens, this article challenges that conclusion by interrogating the storytelling practices deployed by "randomista" economists through a critical reading of a widely cited essay by Esther Duflo, one of the 2019 Nobel recipients, on the relationship between women's empowerment and economic development. The paper argues that the limitations of randomista economics have given rise to a particular way of thinking characterized by piecemeal analysis, ad hoc resort to theory, indifference to history and context, and methodological fundamentalism. It concludes that the randomista argument that broad-based economic development alone - without focused attention to women's rights - will lead to gender equality has not been borne out by recent data.
HIGHLIGHTS
Despite claims of impartiality, Duflo's interpretations of evidence and the language she uses indicate that the randomista method and narrative is not objective or impartial.
The randomistas' treatment of preferences as random and idiosyncratic ignores what feminists have long espoused: that the formation of preferences derives from entrenched social constructions.
The randomistas' claims to methodological superiority result in a discounting or dismissal of findings from nonexperimental studies in favor of experimental studies that report the same findings.
Duflo's main argument discussed in this paper is that while gender equality is desirable in its own right, it is better achieved through gender-neutral policies because gender-affirmative policies "distort" the allocative process and lead to efficiency costs.
Yet, these so-called distortions stem from historical structures that have curtailed women's productive potential and protected male privilege.
In other words, patriarchal discrimination introduces structural costs that are unlikely to be visible when the focus is on individual economic actors.
This paper argues that the theoretical model of causal inference underpinning RCTs is frequently undermined by the failure of different actors involved in their implementation to behave in ways ...required by the model. This is not a problem unique to RCTs, but it poses a greater challenge to them because it undercuts their claims to methodological superiority based on the ‘clean identification’ of causal effects.
This paper sets out to synthesize key lessons from studies using alternative methodologies to impact assessment. Drawing on Sen's capability approach as a conceptual framework, it analyses two pairs ...of impact assessments which were carried out in West Bengal and Sindh around the same time and within close proximity to each other. Each pair consisted of a randomized control trial and a qualitative assessment of attempts to pilot BRAC's approach to transferring assets to women in extreme poverty. The paper reports on the findings of these studies, their strategies for establishing their claims about causality and the information base they drew on to establish these claims. It finds that not only did the RCTs fail to meet their own criteria for establishing causality, but they also provided very limited explanation for the patterns of outcomes observed. Such information formed the substance of the qualitative studies. The paper concludes that greater use of mixed methods could help to offset some of limitations of RCTs and to place their findings on much firmer ground.
This article discusses the third Millennium Development Goal (MDG), on gender equality and women's empowerment. It explores the concept of women's empowerment and highlights ways in which the ...indicators associated with this Goal - on education, employment, and political participation - can contribute to it. Reprinted by permission of Oxfam GB
Recent research in Bangladesh highlights an interesting paradox: impressive development outcomes combined with extremely poor quality of governance. The country’s active development NGO sector has ...been credited with some of the more positive development achievements. The question that this paper sets out to address is why the sector has not made an equivalent contribution on the governance front. It draws on primary survey data to explore the hypothesis that the problem lies in the increasing homogenization of NGOs around the delivery of services, primarily microfinance services, and its shift away from social mobilization organizations.
•This paper re-focuses attention on the big picture question of the persistently low level of female labour force participation in India.•We show how attention on a binary indicator (in the labour ...force or out of it) misses a crucial aspect of women’s economic/productive work.•We suggest that women’s work in developing countries should be viewed in terms of at least three categories.•We find that the social norm that places the responsibility of domestic chores exclusively on women is primarily responsible for women’s inability to participate in paid work.•We demonstrate the existence of ‘virtuous cycles’ within families: a history of working women in the family increases the probability of the woman being in paid work.
Based on primary data from a large household survey in seven districts in West Bengal in India, this paper analyses the reasons underlying low labor force participation of women. In developing countries, women who are engaged in unpaid economic work in family enterprises are often not counted as workers, whereas the men are. We show that for women, not being in paid work is not synonymous with not being in the labour force. Women are often involved in expenditure saving activities i.e. productive work within the family, over and above domestic chores and care work. We document the fuzziness of the boundary between domestic work and unpaid (and therefore invisible) productive work that leads to mismeasurement of women’s work and suggest methods to improve measurement. Counting women’s expenditure-saving activities yields a substantially higher estimate of women’s participation in economic work. On social norms, we show that religion and visible markers such as veiling are not significant determinants of the probability of being in paid work. We find that being primarily responsible for domestic chores lowers the probability of “working”, after accounting for all the conventional factors. Our data shows substantial unmet demand for paid work. Given that women are primarily responsible for domestic chores, we find that women express a demand for work that would be compatible with household chores. We demonstrate the existence of ‘virtuous cycles’ within families: a history of working women in the family (mother or mother-in-law ever worked) increases the probability of being in paid work between 18 and 21 percentage points. This suggests that the positive effects of increasing women’s labour force participation today are likely to have positive multiplier effects on the prospects for work in future generations of women.
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