Women's Economic Empowerment

Insights from Africa and South Asia

Kate Grantham, Gillian Dowie, Arjan de Haan, Kate Grantham, Gillian Dowie, Arjan de Haan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000340341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de desarrollo global

This book investigates the barriers to women's economic empowerment in the Global South. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of countries, the book outlines important lessons and practical solutions for promoting gender equality.

Despite global progress in closing gender gaps in education and health, women's economic empowerment has lagged behind, with little evidence that economic growth promotes gender equality. International Development Research Centre's (IDRC) Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) programme was set up to provide policy lessons, insights, and concrete solutions that could lead to advances in gender equality, particularly on the role of institutions and macroeconomic growth, barriers to labour market access for women, and the impact of women's care responsibilities. This book showcases rigorous and multi-disciplinary research emerging from this ground-breaking programme, covering topics such astheschool-to-work transition, child marriage, unpaid domestic work and childcare, labour market segregation, and the power of social and cultural norms that prevent women from fully participating in better paid sectors of the economy.

With a range of rich case studies from Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nepal, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Uganda, this book is perfect for students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working on women's economic empowerment and gender equality in the Global South.

PART I
Conceptualising the relationship between economic growth and gender equality

1
GENDER EQUALITY, INCLUSIVE GROWTH, AND LABOUR MARKETS

Naila Kabeer

Introduction: markets as sites of gender subordination

Growth is inclusive when it ensures livelihood opportunities for all sections of the population. An inclusive growth agenda is thus concerned not only with the quantity of employment but also with its distribution. Recent research suggests both an instrumental and an intrinsic rationale for an explicit focus on gender equality within such an agenda. The instrumental rationale reflects a strong and growing body of research suggesting that gender equality has a positive impact on economic growth. This relationship appears most consistent regarding education (more widely studied) and employment (less widely studied) and holds for a variety of different countries and across differing time periods over the past half century (Kabeer and Natali 2013).

These positive macro-level findings are supported by both macro-level evidence (Klasen 1999, 2002; Seguino 2007a) and a wealth of micro-level studies (Quisumbing 2003; Doepke and Tertilt 2011; World Bank 2012) showing that women’s access to valued economic resources can have a range of positive outcomes for their voice and influence within the household, including their ability to invest in the human capital and capabilities of their children. Women’s increased participation in the labour market can also have a positive effect on gender-related norms and attitudes in countries (Seguino 2007b). Such findings provide a strong intrinsic rationale for ensuring women’s participation in processes of growth—it contributes to the inclusiveness of growth merely by the fact that women make up half of the world’s population, but it is also likely to improve the distributional pattern of the growth process.

However, evidence on the converse relationship—the implications of growth for gender equality as measured by a range of indicators—is far more mixed (Kabeer and Natali 2013). Indeed, some of the fastest growing low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) show the least signs of progress on gender equality in terms of economic and political access (World Economic Forum 2018). Economic growth per se clearly cannot be relied on to promote gender equality. At the same time, the findings noted above suggest that growth is far more likely to promote women’s bargaining power and household wellbeing when it is accompanied by an expansion of women’s education and employment.¹

These findings highlight the pivotal importance of women’s access to economic resources, both contributing to growth as well as promoting the equity of growth outcomes. They help to explain some of the growing interest in the economic dimensions of gender equality within the international development community, epitomised by the emergence of the concept of women’s economic empowerment (WEE).

Conceptualisations of women’s empowerment have always included a material dimension. The new focus on their economic empowerment has had a double-edged impact. On the one hand, it has narrowed the empowerment agenda for many policymakers to a largely market phenomenon. On the other, it has allowed feminist researchers to draw attention to the market as a site of women’s subordination rather than as the competitive mechanism for welfare maximisation that is assumed in a great deal of mainstream economics.

The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how gender inequalities in wider society are perpetuated and reinforced by market forces in ways that block women’s capacity to contribute to more inclusive forms of economic progress. The chapter begins by exploring how mainstream and feminist economics have understood labour market inequalities and outlines a conceptual framework to guide an empirical analysis of the constraints on women’s efforts to earn a livelihood. It then provides an empirical overview of the intersectional stratification of market opportunities, how gender overlaps with other socioeconomic inequalities in determining the position of men and women within the occupational hierarchies of the market. Next, it turns to explore the ways that gender inequalities within and beyond the household operate to constrain women’s ability to take up paid work and restrict the kinds of work they can do. Following this, the text draws on studies of waged workers and self-employment to provide a more detailed illustration of these constraints as they play out in the labour market. The chapter concludes by drawing out the policy implications of the analysis.

Gender inequalities in the labour market: theoretical approaches and an analytical framework

Theoretical approaches to labour market analysis can be broadly divided into neoclassical theories, which focus on individual choice, and sociological theories, which focus on structural constraints. There has been some convergence of these approaches over time as social norms and legal constraints have been incorporated into choice-theoretic frameworks and as greater attention is paid to issues of choice and agency within structuralist explanations—but important differences remain.

Individual choice is, of course, at the heart of neoclassical economics and has dominated much of its analysis of gender and labour markets. It conceptualises workers’ decisions to sell their labour in terms of their efforts to maximise utility and employers’ decisions to hire labour in terms of their efforts to maximise profits. Differences in how men and women fare in the labour market are explained in several ways.

One explanation suggests that gender-differentiated labour market outcomes reflect gender differential investments in human capital endowments, a rational response to women’s role in biological reproduction and family care and, by extension, their weaker attachment to the labour market (Polachek 1981). A second argues that gender inequalities in labour market outcomes reflect a ‘taste for discrimination’ on the part of individual employers but maintains that such tastes can only be sustained in the absence of competitive markets (Becker 1971). A third puts forward the idea of ‘statistical discrimination’, suggesting that, given imperfect information, employers use aggregate group characteristics, such as group averages of education levels, to make judgements about the suitability of all members of that group for particular jobs. This means individuals belonging to different social groups can be treated very differently even if they are identical in every other way (Arrow 1973). More recently, women’s lesser ability to adjust to market signals as easily as men, as a result of their family responsibilities, has been described as giving employers the monopsony-like power to hire women on less favourable terms than men (Manning 2003).

Neoclassical economic analysis of labour markets relies almost exclusively on variable-centred econometric techniques to translate its theoretical models into empirical estimates. This has helped to identify and measure gender differences and discrimination but throws very little light on the underlying causes. These are generally assumed to reflect the theoretical model adopted rather than being considered a matter for empirical investigation. For feminist economists, on the other hand, gender is “more than a dummy variable” (Figart 2005). Figart uses econometric approaches to the gender wage gap to illustrate the limitations of such an approach. She notes that an unexplained residual in these estimates, once gender differences in education, experience, skills, size of firm, and other likely influences on wages have been controlled for, is taken by economists to be a measure of gender discrimination. In fact, some economists believe that this residual would converge to zero if the model was correctly specified. However, as Figart points out, decreasing the size of the residual by adding explanatory variables does not necessarily imply a reduction in gender discrimination. It merely shifts the analysis of discrimination to the processes that explain gender differences in education, experience, skills, size of firm, and other likely influences on wages.

Feminist economists have paid greater attention to the causal processes that underlie gender inequality in labour market outcomes. Some of this work relates to the social construction of apparently objective market phenomena such as skills and wages. Treiman and Hartmann (1981) were among the first to point out that the higher the female-intensity of an occupation in the US, the lower were the wages associated with it. Phillips and Taylor (1980) drew on empirical evidence to suggest that definitions of skill in the workplace, and the associated wages, were often based on the identity of the person carrying out the jobs rather than on the technical demands of the job. In other words, “women workers carry into the work place their status as subordinate individuals, and this status comes to define the work they do” (Phillips and Taylor 1980: 79). Far from being an objective economic fact, skill was often an ideological category imposed on certain types of work by virtue of the sex and the bargaining power of the workers who performed it.

Other insights relate to the factors which give rise to the systematic social stratification observed in the occupational structure. An early explanation for the phenomenon of ‘crowding’, the over-representation of marginalised groups in a limited range of occupations, was put forward by Edgeworth (1922) who focused on the collective action of male-dominated unions in excluding women from ‘men’s work’, causing an oversupply of women and the reduction of their wages. A later explanation by Bergmann (1974) suggested that women and black people had been historically confined to a narrow range of occupations on the margins of the labour market by social stereotyping and employer discrimination. Whatever the precise combination of mechanisms, ‘crowding’ can be observed in labour markets across the world, increasing the monopsony power of employers over marginalised groups of workers and preserving better jobs in the economy for privileged sections of the workforce.

For feminist economists, therefore, gender inequality in the marketplace cannot be explained away in terms of choices and preferences of individual workers and employers. Rather it is structured into market forces by discriminatory practices inherited from the past, as well as by the bargaining power exercised in the present by different groups of market actors pursuing their own self-interest. Employers and workers may well be engaged in a struggle over wages and working conditions, but they may also gain collective benefit from colluding to exclude particular groups of workers. For instance, employers have benefitted from exploiting gender divisions within the workforce as a means of weakening class solidarity or constructing some of the workforce as secondary earners, a ‘reserve army’ of labour, to be drawn in at the height of the business cycle and laid off during recessions. Organised male workers have been able to use collective action to constitute themselves as the core workforce, with access to permanent jobs, a ‘family wage’, and both legal and social protection, creating barriers which insulate them from competition with the rest of the workforce.

Feminist economists thus acknowledge that individuals and groups make choices and exercise agency but suggest that they do so within the limits imposed by the structural distribution of rules, norms, assets, and identities between different groups in their society. Gender disadvantage in the labour market is a product of these ‘structures of constraint’ (Folbre 1994), which operate over the life course of men and women, although somewhat differently for different social groups in different social contexts. These structures may be captured for analytical purposes by a stylised categorisation which helps to highlight their institutional, rather than purely individual, character. Drawing on Whitehead’s distinction between relationships that are ‘intrinsically’ gendered and those that are ‘bearers of gender’, we can usefully distinguish between two broad categories of structural constraint (Whitehead 1979; Kabeer 2008).

The first set of constraints derives from the customary norms, beliefs, and values that characterise social relationships within the institutions of family and kinship, relationships which are ‘intrinsically gendered’ (Whitehead 1979). These norms, beliefs, and values define the dominant models of masculinity and femininity which prevail in different societies and which assign men and women, and boys and girls, to different roles and responsibilities on the basis of these definitions, generally ascribing a lower value to those aptitudes, abilities, and activities conventionally defined as ‘feminine’ relative to those conventionally defined as ‘masculine’. They thus define constraints which apply to women and men by virtue of their gender.

Intrinsically gendered constraints contribute to the gendered pattern of labour market outcomes observed in different regions of the world. Men’s higher labour force participation relative to that of women across the world reflects the bread-winning responsibilities ascribed to them in most cultures. Women’s labour force participation around the world, on the other hand, varies considerably. While most societies ascribe primary responsibility for unpaid work within the domestic domain to women and girls, they vary considerably in their expectations of women’s economic contributions. In some regions, including much of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South East Asia, women are expected to share in breadwinning responsibilities and may inherit property and manage their own farms and enterprises in order to fulfil these responsibilities. In others, not only are they expected to confine themselves to unpaid domestic work, but there are strong cultural restrictions on their mobility in the public domain. Such restrictions contribute to the much lower rates of female labour force participation (FLFP) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and in South Asia compared to the rest of the world (UN Women 2015).

Intrinsically gendered constraints may also structure the kinds of productive activity considered suitable for men and women. For instance, there are longstanding taboos about women touching the plough in South Asia which serves to restrict such work to men. In West Africa, where women have traditionally been active as farmers in their own right, there are frequent references in the literature to ‘male’ and ‘female’ crops—although what constitutes a male or female crop may vary considerably. These customary constraints can be seen as containing the seeds of gender-segmentation of the occupational structure.

The norms, values, and practices associated with the intrinsically gendered relations of family, kinship, and community are further reinforced through a second category of constraints that are associated with the public domains of states, markets, and civil society. Unlike the relations of family and kinship, the institutions of states and markets are purportedly impersonal. They become ‘bearers of gender’ (Whitehead 1979) when they reflect and reproduce preconceived notions about masculinity and femininity as routine aspects of their rules, procedures, and practices.

For instance, many countries in the world have statutory laws which explicitly discriminate against women. The World Bank’s 2019 review of laws pertaining to women’s entrep...