Introduction
Despite rising modernization and urbanization levels all around the world, women are consistently and considerably behind men with respect to access to resources, standards of living, and personal and political freedoms. Overall, women have access to a narrower variety of jobs, get paid less than men in same sector jobs, and have higher unemployment rates than men in all educational background categories.1 Throughout the globe, men overwhelmingly dominate economic decision-making bodies such as corporate boards and central banks, while women are typically excluded from these positions. Furthermore, women continue to constitute less than 20 percent of the members of legislative assemblies, almost 130 years after women first achieved suffrage.2
Lack of female empowerment leads to unfair political, economic, and social conditions for women, as well as under-utilization of the full potential of the whole society. Hence, it is very important to grasp the societal and institutional dynamics behind female empowerment. Among other political and socioeconomic factors, urbanization stands as a potentially crucial determinant of women’s empowerment.
It is true that urbanization transforms the social fabric of societies both at the individual and the macro level. While it leads to more emancipation and economic affluence for many, it also creates new challenges or reinforces already extant economic and social inequalities. This paper focuses on the impact of urbanization on women’s empowerment, particularly in the areas of education, economy, and politics, while also bearing in mind the effects of democratic political institutions and economic development.
Modernization theory asserts that economic development accompanied by urbanization and industrialization shall affect both men and women positively.3 This assertion has been supported by some later scholarly works,4 whereas others oppose such a view.5 For instance, Chaudhuri states that unlike the prevailing notion in modernization theory, which states that modernization, industrialization, and urbanization would automatically make everyone better off, women’s status in many countries have worsened in many aspects.6 In a similar vein, other experts maintain that increased pressures of globalization, especially in today’s world, has led to a deterioration of women’s economic and social rights.7
In the contemporary era, globalization and neoliberalism bring new opportunities and prospects for many (including women) but also make many women’s lives more vulnerable.8On the one hand, relevant and recent literature on feminist studies and globalization shows that revolutionary changes emanating from economic restructuring via urbanization and globalization catalyze women in many countries to organize collectively so as to respond to the local effects of globalization.9 On the other hand, while the new neoliberal, global world order expects individuals to be self-sufficient and self-governing in the face of the dismantling of the social state, women in many patriarchal societies also assume most (in many cases all) of the burdens of the household work, such as child and elderly care.10 In many corners of the world, sociological changes such as urbanization and modernization simply reproduce gender power hierarchies and unequal gender order.11 Hence, it is crucial to both conceptualize and contextualize women’s empowerment and agency in relation to the ‘entrenched power hierarchies’ in the socioeconomic transformation of all societies around the world in the face of urbanization, modernization, and globalization.12
This article aims to test the aforementioned claims regarding the effect of urbanization on female empowerment. It analytically divides female empowerment into its political, economic, and educational dimensions to find out in which particular realms urbanization leads to betterment or deterioration in women’s life standards. It argues that urbanization has distinct effects in different realms of female empowerment in politics, economics, and education, the biggest positive impact being in the area of education. It further states that urbanization has a non-linear, quadratic effect on female empowerment with diminishing impact at higher levels of urbanization. The article maintains that: (i) the transformative role of urbanization usually affects women’s empowerment positively at the aggregate level; (ii) however, this positive change can only be realized with supportive societal and institutional structures, including inclusive political and economic institutions for women; (iii) the aggregate level analysis regarding the relationship between urbanization and women’s empowerment that offers us generalizable findings should be further buttressed with more in-depth, meso- or micro-level analyses. In general, the paper aims to contribute to a variety of academic literatures, namely feminist studies, urban studies, modernization theory, and democratization.
The structure of the article is as follows. It first offers a literature review on the state of female empowerment in urban centers. It then conducts empirical analyses based on an original global dataset that covers all the available data on female empowerment (1960–2014) in the areas of politics, economics, and education, as well as urbanization. To further test the reliability of the research findings, the article explores the Turkish case, as an archetypal example of a society replete with patriarchal norms and institutions and a neoliberal economic order. The paper finally discusses the major political and social implications of these statistical findings and offers new avenues of future research.
