This report draws on household survey data collected in Egypt, Ghana and Bangladesh by the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Partners’ Consortium. It examines the ‘resource’ pathways that enhance women’s agency and thereby contribute to the inclusiveness of economic growth. It also looks at the extent to which the structure of economic opportunities, generated by a country’s growth strategies, translated into positive impacts on women’s lives in the three country contexts.
In all three countries, formal employment was found to have had the most transformative impact on women’s lives, with the state playing the most important role in providing this form of employment. The state has also helped to redistribute the benefits of economic growth in other ways that have proved empowering for women, most prominently in the field of education.
The findings suggest that economic growth alone does not promote gender equality. Rather, unless patterns of growth generate reasonable quality jobs for women, the extent to which greater gender equality is achieved will depend on the actions of the state and civil society.
Greater gender equality, in turn, does have the potential to contribute to inclusive growth when it is achieved in education, employment and other valued resources. In particular, women’s access to valued resources, such as decent jobs and higher education, can have positive distributional implications for growth.
The expansion of economic opportunities through greater attention to the employment potential of growth strategies would create more hospitable macroeconomic conditions for achieving women’s economic empowerment. The kind of formal employment that contributes most consistently to empowering women to exercise greater voice and agency within their households and communities has been on the decline in the shift to market-oriented strategies. Women were in the minority in formal public-sector employment, and have lost out disproportionately as these jobs were retrenched without making compensatory gains in formal private-sector employment. The high percentage of educated women among the economically inactive group in the three case study countries suggests that the dearth of jobs suited to their qualifications may be keeping many women out of the labour market.
In the near future, it is unlikely the three countries will be able to provide sufficient formal employment opportunities. Policymakers could therefore seek to replicate some of the more desirable aspects of formal employment in the informal economy, and extend the regulatory framework to bring increasing numbers of workers into the formal economy. The report highlights three broad areas for intervention:
- An enabling regulatory environment: Action needs to include addressing discriminatory legislation, such as inheritance laws, and promoting legislation that seeks to level the economic playing field for women and men, such as state support for maternity leave.
- Social protection policies: These measures can be designed to address the risks and insecurities of livelihoods in the informal economy (in which many women work), and to be gender-responsive. For example, the empowerment potential of cash transfers could be enhanced if they were untied from women’s reproductive responsibilities and combined with improved access to markets and the banking sector.
- Support for women’s capacity to organise: This can give women greater voice and influence in advancing their own needs and priorities and greater capacity to address barriers to women’s progress. Such support can assist women to become strong agents for social transformation.
