Women empowerment and economic development are closely related: in one direction, development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men and women; in the other direction, empowering women may benefit development. Does this imply that pushing just one of these two levers would set a virtuous circle in motion?
This paper reviews the literature on both sides of the empowerment– development nexus, and argues that the interrelationships are probably too weak to be self-sustaining, and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women.
Key findings:
- Recent research suggests that economic growth, by reducing poverty and increasing opportunity, can indeed have an important positive impact on gender equality.
- There is evidence that growth will not be enough to overcome discrimination in the home and in a number of domains. Sex ratios remain skewed in favour of boys.
- There are two rationales for supporting active policies to promote women. The first is that equity is valuable in and of itself: women are currently worse-off than men, and this inequality between genders is repulsive in its own right. Second, a central argument in the discourse of policy makers is that women play a fundamental role in development.
- While there is no doubt that education has a positive effect on child mortality, it is not clear that girls’ education is much more critical than boys’ education. The automatic presumption that female education is more important than male education for child mortality and for other children outcomes may need to be revised: it seems that both matter.
- Increasing women’s control over resources, even in the short run, improves their say within the household, which will not only increase their welfare, but as research seems to have shown repeatedly, child nutrition and health as well.
- Families do not function very well, since they are not able to provide each other even basic necessities. This means that we cannot rely on the family to correct imbalances in society in, for example, women’s property rights.
- Women’s empowerment and economic development are closely interrelated. While development itself will bring about women’s empowerment, empowering women will bring about changes in decision making which will have a direct impact on development.
- Contrary to what is claimed by some of the more optimistic policymakers, it is not clear that a one-time impulsion of women’s rights will spark a virtuous circle, with women’s empowerment and development mutually reinforcing each other and women eventually being equal partners in richer societies.
- Economic development alone is insufficient to ensure significant progress in important dimensions of women’s empowerment, in particular, significant progress in decision-making ability in the face of pervasive stereotypes against women’s ability.
- Women’s empowerment leads to improvement in some aspects of children’s welfare (health and nutrition, in particular), but at the expense of some others (education).
- Neither economic development nor women’s empowerment is the magic bullet it is sometimes made out to be. In order to bring about equity between men and women, it will be necessary to continue to take policy actions that favour women at the expense of men, and it may be necessary to continue doing so for a very long time.
- This may result in some collateral benefits. Those benefits may or may not be sufficient to compensate for the cost of the distortions associated with such redistribution. This measure of realism needs to temper the positions of policymakers on both sides of the development/empowerment debate.
