7. Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: International Development Research Centre

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7. Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment

Document(s) 10 of 13

Introduction

‘Gender equality and women’s empowerment’ is the third of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (see Table 1.1). It is therefore explicitly valued as an end in itself and not just as an instrument for achieving other goals. The indicators to monitor progress in achieving this goal are:

closing the gender gap in education at all levels;
increasing women’s share of wage employment in the non-agricultural sector; and
increasing the proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments.

Just as there is no explicit mention of gender in the MDG relating to poverty reduction, so there is no explicit mention of poverty in the goal relating to gender equality and women’s empowerment. There is, of course, a poverty sub-text to the first two indicators noted above. Increasing the number of women in national parliaments, on the other hand, has no proven link to poverty reduction, although it is critical for the promotion of gender equality in its wider sense. To some extent, therefore, the reduction of poverty and the promotion of gender equality are independent goals. However, in line with the rest of the book, this chapter will focus on the goal of women’s empowerment in the context of poverty reduction.

Poverty manifests itself as material deprivation, but its causes can be found in the power relations that govern how valued resources – material and symbolic – are distributed in a society. These relations position poor men, women and children as subordinate to, and dependent on, those with privileged access to these resources. Along with material deprivation, therefore, the poor lack power. The empowerment of poor women must clearly be part of an agenda that addresses the

empowerment of the poor in general. At the same time, however, poor women are generally subordinate to poor men. The reduction of poverty thus has to take account of gender inequalities among the poor, including inequalities of power.

The discussion in this chapter is organised around the three ‘resources’ suggested by the indicators for achieving the goal of gender equality and women’s empowerment: education, employment and political participation. Each of these resources has the potential to bring about positive changes in women’s lives. In each case, however, the social relationships that govern access to the resource in question will determine the extent to which this potential is realised.

Conceptualising Empowerment: Agency, Resources and Achievement

It is important to clarify how ‘empowerment’ is being used here. One way of thinking about power is in terms of the ability to make choices. Using the concept of ‘Human Poverty’ to describe the Human Development Index (HDI), UNDP noted that this “does not focus on what people do or do not have, but on what they can or cannot do”. The HDI is thus “not a measure of well-being. Nor is it a measure of happiness. Instead, it is a measure of empowerment” (see Chapter 4). The opposite of empowerment is disempowerment. To be disempowered implies to be denied choice, while empowerment refers to the processes by which those who have been denied the ability to make choices acquire such an ability. In other words, empowerment entails a process of change. People who exercise a great deal of choice in their lives may be very powerful, but they are not empowered because they were never disempowered in the first place.

However, for there to be a real choice:

(a) There must be alternatives, the ability to choose something different. Poverty and disempowerment thus go hand in hand because an inability to meet one’s basic needs – and the resulting dependence on powerful others to do so – rules out the capacity for meaningful choice. This absence of choice is likely to affect women and men differently because gender-related inequalities often intensify the effects of poverty.

(b) Alternatives must not only exist, they must also be seen to exist. Power relations are most effective when they not perceived as such. Gender often operates through the unquestioned acceptance of power. Thus women who, for example, internalise their lesser claim on household resources or accept violence at the hands of their husbands do so because to behave otherwise is considered outside the realm of possibility. These forms of behaviour could be said to reflect ‘choice’ but are really based on the absence of choice.

Not all choices are equally relevant to the definition of power. Some have greater significance than others in terms of their consequences for people’s lives. Strategic life choices include where to live, whether and who to marry, whether to have children, how many children to have, who has custody over children and freedom of movement and association. These help frame other choices that may be important for the quality of one’s life but do not constitute its defining parameters.

The concept of empowerment can be explored through three closely inter-related dimensions: agency, resources and achievements. Agency is how choice is put into effect and hence is central to the processes of empowerment, resources are the medium through which agency is exercised and achievements refer to the outcomes of agency. Each will be considered in turn and also their inter-relationship in the context of empowerment.

Agency

Agency encompasses both observable action in the exercise of choice – decision-making, protest, bargaining and negotiation – as well as the meaning, motivation and purpose that individuals bring to their actions, their sense of agency. This in turn is critically bound up with how they are seen by those around them and by their society. Agency has both positive and negative connotations.

Its positive sense – the ‘power to’ – refers to people’s ability to make and act on their own life-choices, even in the face of others’ opposition.
Its negative sense – the ‘power over’ – refers to the capacity of some actors to override the agency of others through, for example, the exercise of authority or the use of violence and other forms of coercion.

However, as noted above, power is at its most effective when it denies choice, and hence agency, without appearing to do so. Institutional bias can constrain people’s ability to make strategic life choices by ruling out the possibility of certain choices. Cultural or ideological norms may deny either that inequalities of power exist or that such inequalities are unjust. Subordinate groups are likely to accept, and even collude with, their lot in society if the alternative either does not appear possible or else carries heavy personal and social costs.

Agency in relation to empowerment implies not only actively exercising choice, but also doing this in ways that challenge power relations. Because of the significance of beliefs and values in legitimating inequality, the process of empowerment often begins from within. It involves changes in how people see themselves (their sense of self-worth) and their capacity for action.

Resources

Agency, however, is not exercised in the abstract but through the mobilisation of resources. Resources are the medium of power. They are distributed through the various institutions and relationships in a society. As was discussed in Chapter 3, institutions are rarely egalitarian. Certain actors have a privileged position over others concerning how institutional rules, norms and conventions are interpreted as well as how they are put into effect. Heads of households, chiefs of tribes, directors of firms, managers of organisations and elites within a community all have decision-making authority in particular institutions by virtue of their position. The way resources are distributed thus depends on the ability to define priorities and enforce claims.

The terms on which people gain access to resources are as important in processes of empowerment as the resources themselves. Thus the reason why access to paid work might improve women’s agency within the family is that it provides them with an independent source of income and hence a stronger ‘fall-back’ position from which to bargain. The terms of access to paid work also matter. The greater its public visibility, the

value of its returns and its independence from familial structures of authority, the stronger its effects on women’s fall-back position.

Achievements

Resources and agency make up people’s capabilities, their potential for living the lives they want. Their achievements refer to the extent to which this potential is realised or fails to be realised, i.e. the outcomes of their efforts. In relation to empowerment, achievements have to be looked at in terms of both the agency exercised and their consequences. For example, taking up waged work would be regarded by the MDGs as evidence of progress in women’s empowerment. However, it is far more likely to actually be evidence of this if work was taken up in response to a new opportunity or in search of greater self-reliance than if it represented the ‘distress sale’ of labour. It is also far more likely to be empowering if it contributes to women’s sense of independence rather than simply allowing them to survive from day to day.

Restaurant employee in South Africa
INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ORGANIZATION

The inter-relationship between agency, resources and achievements

There is a distinction, therefore, between ‘passive’ forms of agency, action taken when there is little choice, and ‘active’ agency, which reflects more purposeful behaviour. Access to resources can very often improve women’s active agency. However, there is an important distinction to be made between greater ‘effectiveness’ of agency and agency that is ‘transformative’. The former relates to women’s greater efficiency in carrying out their given roles and responsibilities while the latter relates to their ability to question, reinterpret and perhaps change these roles and responsibilities. For example, the reduction of overall child mortality associated with female literacy in India noted in the previous chapter can be interpreted as the product of ‘effective’ agency on the part of women. However, the reduction of gender disparities in under-five mortality rates associated with higher levels of female literacy and paid activity has transformative implications. It shows an exercise of agency that acts against the grain of patriarchal values. The main focus in this chapter will be on transformative forms of agency and on those achievements that suggest a greater ability on the part of poor women to question, analyse and act on the structures of patriarchal constraint in their lives. This involves looking at a range of different questions:

How do women perceive themselves and how are they perceived by intimate as well as distant others in society?
How do they treat themselves and how are they treated by others?
Are they able to make key decisions about matters relating to themselves (their own well-being) and to their children, particularly their daughters?
What kind of say do they have in other aspects of decision-making within the family?
Do they have any influence in matters relating to the community and society in which they live and is this influence decisive or merely symbolic?

It also involves looking at the relationships between individual and structural change. Individual empowerment is an important starting point for processes of social transformation, but unless it leads to some form of structural change it will do little to undermine the systemic reproduction of inequality. Equally, changing the law on property may represent an important attempt by the state to challenge systemic forms of inequality, but unless women feel able to claim their rights it will remain a symbolic gain.

The three dimensions that make up the concept of empowerment can be seen as the pathways through which the processes of empowerment occur. Changes in any one dimension can lead to changes in others. What is achieved through the exercise of agency in one period becomes the expanded resource base from which further actions and achievements can be undertaken in the next. These processes of change may occur over the life course of an individual or group but also across generations as mothers seek to give their daughters the chances that they themselves never had. The reverse is also true. Inequalities in immediate benefits feed into unequal abilities of individuals or groups to take advantage of future benefits and thus sustain present inequalities into the future.

Access to Education and Women’s Empowerment

There is considerable evidence for the claim that access to education helps to empower women. However, there are also studies that suggest that the potential of education to transform can be overstated. There are lessons to be learnt from both sets of findings.

Positive effects of education

The positive findings suggest that education brings about change in a number of different ways. Firstly, it has certain effects at the level of individual cognition and behaviour. These are relevant to all marginalised groups in society because they promote agency as ‘the power to’. Secondly, it improves access to knowledge, information and new ideas as well as the ability to use these effectively. These changes apply to young

men as well as young women, but the former are more likely to also be exposed to new ideas and possibilities through their wider contacts with the world outside family and local community. The way education opens up new ideas may underlie the positive association between women’s education and family welfare noted in the previous chapter.

Education appears to improve women’s ability to process and utilise new information, although more rapidly for certain issues than others. In Nigeria, for example, less-educated women were as likely as educated ones to have their children immunised; educated women were more likely than uneducated ones to know about family planning; but only secondary-schooled women revealed an in-depth understanding of disease and prevention.

Education increases the likelihood that women will look after their own, as well as family, well-being. A study in rural Zimbabwe found that among the factors that increased the likelihood of women using contraception and accessing ante-natal care – both of which reduce maternal mortality – were education and paid work. Women with low levels of education were less likely to visit ante-natal facilities. In rural Nigeria, 96 per cent of women with secondary and higher education, 53 per cent of those with primary education and 47 per cent of those little or no education had sought post-natal care in the two years prior to the study.

There are also other effects associated with education that may have an impact on power relationships within and outside the household. It may lead to a greater role for women in decision-making and a greater willingness on their part to question male dominance in the home and community. In Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe, educated women were found to have more leverage in bargaining with their families and husbands and a greater say in spending household income than uneducated women. Education in rural Bangladesh was strongly linked to women’s control over their own earnings as well as those of their husbands, even after controlling for age, marriage patterns and husbands’ characteristics. A study in India found that better educated women scored higher than less educated women on a composite index measuring their access to and control over resources, as well as their role in economic decision-making.

Educated women also appear less likely to suffer from domestic violence. A study in India noted that educated women were better able to deal with violent husbands. A similar finding was documented in rural Bangladesh.

Limits to education as a route to empowerment

While this evidence is undoubtedly persuasive, other studies suggest that the value given to education and how it is utilised may be influenced by the wider context in which it is provided. In societies that are characterised by extreme forms of gender inequality, women’s access to education is more likely to be curtailed by various forms of restrictions on their mobility and by their limited role in the wider economy. The effects of education are also more limited. Where women’s role in society is defined purely in reproductive terms, education is seen as equipping girls to be better wives and mothers or increasing their chances of getting a suitable husband. Although these are legitimate aspirations, given the realities of the society, they do little to equip girls and women to question the world around them and the subordinate status assigned to them.

This is evident in a study that compared women’s role in decision-making in the family, their ability to move in the public domain, their control over economic resources and the incidence of domestic violence in Tamil Nadu in the south of India and Uttar Pradesh in the north. Not only did women in Tamil Nadu do better on these indicators of women’s agency than those in Uttar Pradesh but what determined their agency varied considerably. In Tamil Nadu, both female employment and, even more strongly, female education were associated with women’s exercise of agency. In Uttar Pradesh, however, it was the extent to which women conformed to patriarchal norms – the size of their dowries and the likelihood that they had borne sons – that gave women a greater role in household decision-making and greater freedom from domestic violence. In addition, while female employment had significant and positive implications for most of the empowerment indicators, education was not significant.

These findings make sense only in relation to their context. Women in Tamil Nadu are less constrained by patriarchal norms and many more of them work, hence the weaker effect

of employment. In Uttar Pradesh, conformity to patriarchal norms increased women’s status within the family. While participation in waged employment here is likely to be a response to poverty, it may signal a greater assertiveness on the part of women as well as giving them some earnings of their own. Indeed, a recent study found that higher wages for women in both northern and southern India consistently improved their mobility and decision-making authority, while male wages decreased them. Education in Uttar Pradesh, on the other hand, is a sign of prosperity rather than poverty and more likely to characterise women from better-off households. In this part of northern India, this is the social strata that is likely to be most restrictive in relation to women. Education may thus increase women’s effectiveness in the traditional roles assigned to them but is unlikely to override, and may indeed reinforce, restrictive interpretations of these roles (see box 7.1).

Box 7.1 The Socialising Function of Education
A study of social change in an agriculturally progressive village in Maharashtra, India, between 1975 and 1987 found that improvements in the standard of living had led to a decline in female wage employment and greater leisure, particularly for better-off women. However, it had also led to a reduction in their mobility in the public domain and in their control over economic resources. There had been an increase in education, with a much larger increase among women aged 15–26 than their husbands. This, however, had reinforced gender roles and traditional values concerning womanhood. It enabled girls to attract a ‘better’ husband and boys to ask for a higher dowry. Mobility had a greater effect on women’s attitudes than education.

A second set of qualifications concerning education as a route to women’s empowerment relates to its delivery, particularly in the formal educational system. The content of education can often mirror and legitimate wider social inequalities, denigrating physical labour (largely the preserve of the poor) and

domestic activities (largely the preserve of women). There is gender stereotyping in the curriculum, particularly in textbooks, where girls tend to be portrayed as passive, modest, and shy while boys are seen as assertive, brave and ambitious. This reinforces traditional gender roles in society and is a barrier to the kind of futures that girls are able to imagine for themselves. In addition, policy-makers have tended to see the benefits of educating girls and women as connected with improving family health and welfare, rather than with either economic opportunities or social transformation. Thus the design of education has often reinforced the biases of many parents that the purpose of schooling is to prepare girls for their domestic roles. Quite often, different subject choices may be made available to girls and boys (maths and science for boys; home economics for girls). This form of education leaves girls with few options in terms of earning their living, except in poorly-paid, casualised forms of work on the margins of the labour market, and limits the potential of education to transform their life chances.

Social inequalities are also reproduced through interactions within the school system. In India, for example, not only do the children of the poor and scheduled caste households go to different, and differently resourced, schools, but also different groups of children are treated differently even within the same school. Dalit children are sometimes made to sit separately from others, are verbally abused, used for running menial errands and more often physically punished. There is also evidence of widespread gender bias, with teachers showing more attention to boys and having a lower opinion of girls’ abilities. The absence, or minority presence, of female teachers is a problem in many areas. Reinforcing the male dominance of public services, it can act as a barrier to girls’ access to and completion of schooling.

Teachers in Africa also have different attitudes towards male and female students (a boy needs a career whereas a girl needs a husband). They tend to be dismissive and discouraging towards girls and give more classroom time to boys, who are usually more demanding. Even when girls are encouraged to pursue a career, they are expected to opt for the ‘caring’ professions, in other words, teaching and nursing. Moreover, the ‘hidden curriculum’ of school practice reinforces messages about girls’ inferior status on a daily basis and provides them

with negative learning experience, thus creating a culture of low self-esteem and low aspirations (see box 7.2).

Box 7.2 Problems Faced by Girls in Schools in Kenya and Zimbabwe
Girls in Kenya consistently drop out of school earlier and obtain lower test scores than boys. Teachers’ attitudes were found to be the primary obstacle to girls’ learning. They described girls as stupid and lazy and tolerated their being bullied by boys. Both male and female teachers who expressed a preference for teaching one sex or the other preferred boys. They more often allocated menial chores to girls and teaching tasks to boys. Even in schools where girls performed nearly as well in exams, teachers awarded twice as many prizes to boys. The teachers thus created a context in which the girls performed badly.
In Zimbabwe, older male students forced their attentions on young female students, demeaning and humiliating them if they were turned down. In addition, male teachers abused their positions of trust and authority to openly pursue female students and attempt to lure them into sexual relationships through offers of money and gifts. This reflected the subordinate position of girls and women in general, but poverty also made girls particularly vulnerable. Many reported that their families were unable to provide them with enough money to pay for school fees, bus fares, lunches and books.

Less attention has been paid to alternatives to formal schools as sites of education, including non-formal educational provision, vocational training and adult literacy programmes. However, there is evidence that, with a few exceptions, they tend to reproduce many of the problems of the formal system.

These limitations to education as a route to empowerment do not negate the earlier, more positive findings. However, they suggest the need for caution in assuming that effects will be uniform across all contexts. They also point to the various aspects of educational provision that militate against not only

its empowerment potential but also its ability to attract and retain women and girls, particularly those from poor backgrounds. Moreover, the design of educational curricula, whether within the formal schooling system or in later vocational training, has not yet taken account of the fact that many more women around the world play a critical role in earning household livelihoods, and increasing numbers of them head their own households.

Access to Paid Work and Women’s Empowerment

There is persuasive evidence that access to paid work can increase women’s agency in critical ways. In fact, even paid work carried out in the home can sometimes shift the balance of power in the family. For example, a study of Bangladeshi women working in home-based piecework in Britain noted that, with rising male unemployment, many had become primary breadwinners, slightly altering the balance of power between the genders. Similarly, a detailed study of women engaged in industrial homework in Mexico City noted that, particularly in households where women’s economic contribution was critical to household survival, women had been able to negotiate a greater degree of respect.

Studies of micro-credit in rural Bangladesh, where women have traditionally been excluded from the cash economy, found that women’s access to credit led to a number of changes in women’s own perceptions of themselves and their role in household decision-making. It also led to a long-term reduction in domestic violence as well as an increase in women’s assets. Such effects were, however, stronger when these loans were used to initiate or expand women’s own income-generating activities, despite the fact that these continued to be largely home-based.

However, the strongest effects of paid work in destabilising power relations, both within and outside the family, relates to women’s access to wage employment.

Waged work in the agricultural sector

As noted in Chapter 3, the rise of non-traditional agricultural exports (NTAEs) in a number of African and Latin American

countries led to a rise in wage employment for women in medium and large-scale production units. The income they earn has brought about economic improvements for themselves and their families. A number of studies also suggest that women exercise a considerable say in how this money is spent. A study in Ecuador found that more than 80 per cent of women in the flower industry managed their own wages. Among female employees in the Kenyan vegetable industry, single women managed and controlled their own wages while married women often managed their incomes jointly with husbands.

There is also significant evidence from the vegetable industries of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic and the flower industry of Mexico that women’s participation in wage employment has led to greater independence in household decision-making. In some cases, as among women working in the fresh vegetable industry in the Dominican Republic, it has allowed them to escape abusive marriages. Women working in the flower industry in Colombia reported widening their social networks in ways that would otherwise have proved difficult in rural areas. Workers in the fresh vegetable industry in Kenya not only reported greater economic independence but also new opportunities for meeting with women from other parts of the country.

Waged work in the non-agricultural sector

Evidence of changes in women’s life chances as a result of entry into waged work is even more marked when the focus is on the non-agricultural sector. This is partly because such employment is generally associated with migration by women out of rural areas and away from the patriarchal controls of kinship and community. Women workers in the garment industry in Bangladesh expressed their satisfaction at having a ‘proper’ job and regular wages compared to the casualised and poorly paid forms of employment that had previously been their only options. Many had used their new-found earning power to renegotiate their relations within marriage, others to leave abusive marriages. Women who had previously not been able to help out their ageing parents once they got married now insisted on their right to do so. Yet others used their earnings

to postpone early marriage and to challenge the practice of dowry. Among the other advantages mentioned in relation to garment work were:

access to new social networks on the factory floor;
the greater voice enjoyed in household decision-making;
the respect received from other family members, including their husbands;
an enhanced sense of self-worth and self reliance; and
greater personal freedom and autonomy.

Similarly positive evaluations are reported in a number of other studies. As in Bangladesh, women in Turkey had previously been permitted to work outside the home only if it was necessary for family survival. In a study of the clothing industry, however, many of those interviewed no longer saw their work as subordinate to their familial roles, to be abandoned when they got married or had children. Rather they saw it as a more permanent way of life. The overwhelming majority had made their own decision to enter factory work, giving as their reasons their desire to make use of their skills and to be outside the home. Forty per cent of the workers, mainly young single women, indicated their preference to work a considerable distance from home in order to escape the control exercised by their family and neighbours. They wanted to work somewhere where they could move about freely during their lunch breaks and take the opportunity to meet their friends, including their boyfriends.

In Honduras, women working in maquiladoras earned higher wages than workers elsewhere and reported improvements in household relationships and help in domestic work from male members. They were more likely to have voted in the last election and more likely to feel that they carried some weight with the government. These trends became stronger over time. This may explain why, although most workers wanted to see improvements (especially in their wages), 96 per cent reported that they were very (49%) or somewhat (47%) satisfied with their jobs. Similarly, married women workers in export-oriented manufacturing units in a number of Caribbean

countries reported improvements in household relations as a result of their greater economic contributions, with greater sharing of decision-making with male partners.

On the other hand, all of these studies also highlight the exploitative conditions of work in industries that promote flexible labour practices in order to compete internationally. Export-oriented manufacturing is associated with extremely long hours of work during busy seasons, often combined with lay-offs in the slack season, and poor conditions. There are also health hazards. Maquila workers in Honduras, for example, were more likely to report a health problem in the previous month than those who had been working elsewhere and they had less leisure.

Moreover, studies do not always report positive findings concerning women’s capacity to have greater control over their lives. Many women who leave rural areas to take up jobs in towns in order to make new friends and build a life for themselves do not have time to take up such opportunities. The division of labour in domestic chores and childcare is rarely renegotiated between the genders. Despite their increased labour input into paid work, women (particularly married women) either continue to bear the main burden of domestic work, or share it with other female members of the household, often their daughters. By and large, gender inequalities in work burdens appear to be intensified.

In addition, despite the visibility of export-oriented waged employment in agriculture and industry, the vast majority of women in low-income countries continue to work in the informal economy in various forms of economic activities that may or may not be affected by global markets but that are characterised by far worse conditions. Within this informal economy, poorer women are concentrated in the most casualised forms of waged labour and low-value own-account enterprise. It is difficult to see how earnings generated by prostitution, domestic service or daily labour on construction sites – which is where the poorest women are likely to be found – will do much to undermine women’s subordinate status at home or at work.

Voice, Participation and Women’s Empowerment

Women in national parliaments

The last of the indicators for monitoring progress on gender equality and women’s empowerment relates to the number of seats held by women in national parliaments. It moves the focus of empowerment into the arena of politics and into the struggle for representation. The right to representation is clearly central to civil and political rights. Gender equality implies 50 per cent representation by women. Such an achievement could, with certain qualifications, represent the most ambitious of the three forms of change singled out to measure progress on women’s empowerment and have the most potential for transformation. Furthermore, again with certain qualifications, it could potentially address many of the constraints that limit the life chances of poor women.

However, because these qualifications relate to the same constraints that have prevented women from all social class and groups from having a ‘strategic presence’ in national parliaments, it is also the form of social change least likely to be achieved in the near future. A review of the relevant statistics suggests that, regardless of political system, the percentage of women in national parliaments around the world is extremely low, averaging 13.8 per cent in 2000 (see Table 7.1). This is an extraordinary under-representation of women in the highest structures of governance in their countries. Various forms of bias in the institutions of civil society and the political sphere – along with conscious discrimination – operate to exclude women, including women from privileged elites.

A woman carries dried bricks to a construction site in Madagascar
UN/DPI

The structure of the political sphere makes a difference to how many women are fielded as candidates and how many win. This includes the extent to which political parties:

are institutionalised;
have clear rules about candidate selection;
identify policy concerns; and
operate in a political culture that is conducive to the promotion of women’s involvement in politics (e.g. the strength or weakness of patriarchal ideology, the existence of pluralist forms of organisation and the degree of religious opposition to gender reforms).

Table 7.1: Women in Public Life

Table 7.1: Women in Public Life (continued)

Source: The World’s Women 2000, UN Statistics Division

Electoral systems are also important. The ones more likely to bring women into political office are those:

where more than one person can represent a constituency;
that have multiple parties competing for votes; and
that practise proportional representation (PR) in party lists.

Those less likely to do so are majoritarian systems that create the incentive to field a single candidate per constituency and appeal to the majority rather than accommodating diversity. A review of 53 legislatures in 1999 found that national assemblies in PR systems had nearly 24 per cent of women compared to 11 per cent in majoritarian systems. In almost every case where women exceed 15 per cent of elected representative bodies, this has been the result of special measures that advantage female over male candidates: Mozambique has 30 per cent female parliamentarians while South Africa has 29 per cent. Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, India, Tanzania and Uganda have all reserved seats for women in national or local government.

The way that quotas are applied makes a difference to whether the presence of women is ‘token’ or a legitimate form of representation. Where, as in Bangladesh, women’s seats were filled by the party in power, they simply became an additional vote bank for the ruling regime. In South Africa, on the other hand, there have been attempts by the women’s movement to encourage members from within their ranks to enter politics. A woman MP there was active in initiating the process of examining national budgets from a gender perspective and the Women’s Budget Initiative (WBI), established in 1995, brought together women parliamentarians and NGOs (see Chapter 8).

At the same time, it should be noted that, at present, the women who enter national parliaments tend not to be drawn from the ranks of the poor in any part of the world, nor is there any guarantee that they will be more responsive to the needs and priorities of poor women than many men in parliament.

Women in local government

It is possible that greater participation and influence in local government structures may be a more relevant goal for poor women than increasing women’s seats in national parliaments. These, after all, make the decisions that most directly affect the lives of the poor. In recognition of this, a number of states in India, where there is now 33 per cent reservation of seats for women in local government, have added further inducements to local communities to encourage women’s participation. Madhya Pradesh and Kerala, for example, require that one

third of participants in the regular open village meetings be female before there is considered to be a quorum. Kerala also earmarks 10 per cent of development funds received by local councils from the state to be used for ‘women’s development’ and managed by representatives of female groups of the village assembly.

Box 7.3 Gender Priorities and Preferences in Village Councils in West Bengal
A study comparing budgetary allocations in village councils in West Bengal found that councils led by women were more likely to invest in public goods that had practical relevance to the needs of rural women (water, fuel and roads) while male-led councils were more likely to invest in education. These effects were consistent with gender differences in expressed policy priorities. However, women’s main preoccupations were also important issues for men. If both male and female expressed preferences were combined, drinking water and roads were the most important issues. While villages with female leadership were more likely to be visited by health workers, male leaders invested more in informal education centres and expressed greater concern about teacher absenteeism.
The other important finding was that other women were more likely to participate in local councils when they were led by a woman, more likely to ask a question and significantly more likely to have made a request or complaint in the past six months. Moreover, the fact that women in the reserved seats came from poorer backgrounds and smaller villages than men suggests that such efforts at the local level can help to change the gender and class/caste composition of key policy-making bodies.

Clearly, all these measures, including the reservation policy itself, are open to abuse. There has been much discussion in India about the possibility that women are merely proxies for husbands or powerful men within their family or caste, that

only supporters of parties in power attend village meetings or that women are being harassed to spend funds in ways that do not benefit poorer women. While these are valid concerns, they may also alter over time as women become more experienced in the political arena. Studies in West Bengal, for example, showed that many of the elected women were gaining self-confidence. They questioned the priorities of panchayat development programmes, emphasised issues affecting women such as fuel and water and had begun to build broad alliances among themselves (see box 7.3).

Agency and Collective Action: Building Citizenship from the Grassroots

There is clearly room for further public policy to help realise more fully the potential that these changes – in the social, economic and political arenas – have for transforming the structures of patriarchal constraint in women’s lives. It is also clear that there are likely to be powerful forces, some within the policy domain itself, that will militate against this happening. However, not all forms of public action need to be undertaken by the state or international development agencies. Indeed, it is likely that the political pressure needed to ensure these actions from above will have to come ‘from below’. It will come from various forms of agency exercised by, and on behalf of, marginalised groups seeking to claim their rights in various different arenas.

Collective action is central to social transformation. The kinds of change signalled by the MDGs help increase women’s agency, even if it is on the individual level of challenging power structures within the family or the immediate community. However, while this may be an important precondition for larger processes of transformation, it is the collective struggles of subordinated groups that drive these processes. The bottom up pressures for greater gender equity in the political sphere will therefore come from new forms of associations that bring women into the public domain to collectively challenge patriarchal power across a wide range of institutions.

There is, of course, nothing inherent in associations to make them promoters of gender equity goals, whether they are

women’s organisations or not. Many may be specifically set up to protect an elitist status quo or to promote a welfarist agenda for women. Equally, however, others can help to expand the space available for democratic activity. These groups may not necessarily operate in the political sphere, but all forms of struggle against the arbitrary exercise of power by those in a position of authority (managers, landlords, party bosses) contribute to the struggle to expand democratic space. Having a say in the way one is ruled is part of the process by which recognised procedures for participation and accountability are established. Struggles to improve the public provision of social services and make them more responsive to the needs of the poor may also be counted as a part of the process of building and strengthening citizenship identity. Thus, it is not only formally constituted political organisations that are relevant to the practice of citizenship, but all forms of organisation and interest-groups that build the conditions to enable citizens to act as citizens.

Examples of collective action and social mobilisation that have given a voice to women, as well as men, from poorer sections of the population can be found in many contexts and take many forms. In India, the formation of self-help groups of women by such organisations as the Centre for Youth and Social Development (CYSD) in Orissa have not only helped to create new affiliations for poor women where there was no ‘chosen’ group they could belong to, but have also begun to build their political participation. Women who are members of self-help groups have the social support to run for, and be elected to, different tiers of the Panchayat system. These new associations have helped to build the inner competencies that women need to participate in the democratic life of their community.

In Bangladesh, Nijera Kori has been organising groups of landless women and men for the past two decades around key livelihood issues such as land and wages. It has increasingly begun to turn its attention to making demands on the state for greater accountability to the poor. Its members seek to get potential candidates to explain their stance on poverty or else run for elections themselves. Most of the protests and struggles initiated by Nijera Kori members are not segregated by gender. Women are involved in ‘male’ issues such as resistance to

powerful land-grabbers while men are active in ‘women’s’ issues, such as rape and other forms of assault on women.

The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India has moved from organising women in the informal economy through a combination of trade union and co-operative principles to seeking to put pressure on the state government for greater responsiveness to the needs of poor women. More recently, it has been lobbying to make the International Labour Organization (ILO) less a voice for organised, predominantly male workers and more representative of the world’s informal workers. It has linked up with informal workers’ organisations and researchers from other parts of the world as a global network, Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), to promote this set of interests.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the National Union of Domestic Employees (NUDE) has struggled since the mid-1970s to be recognised under the country’s Industrial Relations Act. This allows unions and workers to represent their grievances to an Industrial Court and hold employers accountable for state employment practices. Because domestic workers are governed by the Masters and Servants Act (put in place by the British to regulate relations between employers and domestic workers after the abolition of slavery), they do not enjoy the same guarantees as other workers. NUDE has drawn on various international agreements signed by the government as well as linking up with the Wages for Housework Campaign to reinforce its demands.

In Mexico, Indian women participated in the Zapatista movement to change the oppressive situation of their community. They also presented through their leaders a revolutionary ‘programme of demands’ that sought to challenge the status given to them in their family, community and society at large. This demanded, among other things, the rights to choose their husbands, go to meetings, continue studying beyond the basic level and be elected to their community’s decision-making bodies. Research into the reactions of a cross section of Mexican women revealed the desire for an alternative political culture to the authoritarian, male-dominated model that had dominated so far. The Zapatista movement was seen as offering one such alternative.

In West Bengal, an initiative to raise awareness about AIDS among sex workers was not only successful in its own terms but also led to the setting up of an independent collective (the Durbar Women’s Co-ordination Committee) to campaign for the respect, recognition and rights that sex workers had been denied. A key strategy in the campaign was to define sex work as like any other form of work and hence entitled to the same rights as other self-employed groups. The campaign included demands for a change in the law that made sex workers vulnerable to police harassment, setting up a savings-and-credit co-operative, coming out in solidarity with ‘minority’ groups that they saw as similarly marginalised and various cultural initiatives through which they sought to exercise the right to free, open and public self-expression.

Conclusion

The discussion in this chapter makes a different set of links between production and reproduction to those in the previous chapter. It looks at how access to a variety of resources – social, economic and political – impacts on women’s agency in renegotiating their roles in production as well as reproduction in ways that have implications for the larger renegotiation of the patriarchal order. The findings discussed in this chapter have important implications for how gender relations are theorised in the context of social change.

Gender relations, like all social relations, are multi-stranded: they embody ideas, values and identities; they allocate labour between different tasks, activities and domains; they determine the distribution of resources; and they assign authority, agency and decision-making power. This means that gender inequalities are multidimensional and cannot be reduced simply to the question of material or ideological constraint. It also suggests that these relationships are not always internally cohesive. They may contain contradictions and imbalances, particularly when there have been changes in the wider socio-economic environment. Consequently, a shift in one aspect of social relations is likely to initiate a series of adjustments with unpredictable consequences.

While some of these changes are likely to leave the power

aspects of social relations unaltered, others may have intended or unintended results that open up the possibility of transformation. For example, women’s entry into paid work has had very different kinds of effects, depending on the context and nature of the work. In some cases, it has led to an increase in women’s workloads to the extent of extreme levels of exhaustion and burn-out. In other cases, it has led to some re-allocation of the domestic division of labour, either to other women or children within the home or, more rarely, to men. It may also lead to adverse changes in the division of responsibilities for the family as men withdraw their contributions to household needs, leaving women to shoulder an ever-increasing share of the burden.

However, access to paid work has also brought about changes in gender relations in other ways. It has:

altered perceptions, such as the value given to women by others within the household or community (social respect) or their own sense of self-worth (self respect);
increased the resources at women’s disposal and given them a greater say in household decision-making;
allowed women to make various strategic life choices, such as postponing the age of marriage and investing in children’s survival chances and education (often closing gender gaps in these areas);
enabled women to leave abusive husbands or re-negotiate the terms of their marriage; and
provided young women with the ability to think about their own destinies rather than having their future decided for them by dominant family members.

While individual forms of empowerment are critical, and may be a starting point for more lasting social change, this chapter has also stressed the importance of collective action to promote gender equality. This is an important route through which changes at the micro-level can be institutionalised at the social level. While these collective actions do not necessarily take place in the formal political arena, they are political in that they seek to challenge patriarchal power in their

societies. They may not achieve their chosen goals, but what is transformative about them is that they challenge ‘given’ models of gender relations and open up the possibility of looking for alternatives. They also demonstrate the fluidity of campaigns and movements around gender equality as they shift their focus from individual to social issues or from national to global campaigns. These forms of collective action will ultimately help to transform the target of expanding women’s share of seats in parliament into a genuinely empowering form of social change.