The 2012 report recognized that expanding women’s agency – their ability to make decisions and take advantage of opportunities is key to improving their lives as well as the world. This report represents a major advance in global knowledge on this critical front. The vast data and thousands of surveys distilled in this report cast important light on the nature of constraints women and girls continue to face globally.
This report identifies promising opportunities and entry points for lasting transformation, such as interventions that reach across sectors and include life-skills training, sexual and reproductive health education, conditional cash transfers, and mentoring. It finds that addressing what the World Health Organization has identified as an epidemic of violence against women means sharply scaling up engagement with men and boys. The report also underlines the vital role information and communication technologies can play in amplifying women’s voices, expanding their economic and learning opportunities, and broadening their views and aspirations.
Removing constraints and unleashing women’s full productive potential can yield enormous dividends that help make whole societies more resilient and more prosperous. Delays in marriage are associated with greater educational achievement and lower fertility. And lower fertility can increase women’s life expectancy and has benefits for children’s health and education. When more women are elected to office, policy-making increasingly reflects the priorities of families and women. Property ownership can enhance women’s agency by increasing the social status of women, amplifying their voice, and increasing their bargaining power within the household.
Recognising agency constraints in development project design can also improve effectiveness. Use of reproductive health services by adolescents, for example, is better where projects address mobility constraints and train providers to address possible issues of stigma. This fact underlines the broader significance of understanding how agency constraints operate and how policies and public action can lift those constraints and enhance agency.
Where do we stand?
Expanding agency is a universal challenge. Agency constraints and deprivations affect women and girls in all countries, whatever their income level. The basic facts are sobering:
Gender-based violence is a global epidemic, affecting women across all regions of the world. In most of the world, no place is less safe for a woman than her own home, with more than 700 million women globally subject to physical or sexual violence at the hands of their husbands, boyfriends, or partners. As shown in the map in figure 1, regional rates of such violence range from 21 percent in North America to 43 percent in South Asia. Across 33 low- and middle- income countries, almost one-third of women say that they cannot refuse sex with their partners.
Many girls have limited control over their sexual and reproductive rights. On present trends, more than 142 million girls will be married before the age of 18 in the next decade. And each year, almost one in five girls in developing countries becomes pregnant before her 18th birthday. The lifetime opportunity costs of teen pregnancy have been estimated to range from 1 percent of annual gross domestic product in China to as much as 30 percent in Uganda, measured solely by lost income. In developing countries, pregnancy-related causes are the largest contributor to the mortality of girls ages 15–19—nearly 70,000 deaths annually.
Fewer women than men own land and housing. In some cases, this differential is wide. In Burkina Faso, for example, more than twice as many men as women (65 percent and 31 percent, respectively) report owning a house. In many countries, women can access land only through male relatives.
In too much of the world, women are grossly underrepresented in formal politics and positions of power. Worldwide, women account for less than 22 percent of parliamentarians and fewer than 5 percent of mayors. Rates vary across countries and regions. In Nordic countries, for example, women hold 42 percent of parliamentary seats, and in Rwanda, the share is close to two-thirds.
Agency has multiple dimensions and is inevitably context specific. To enable global coverage and add value, this report limits its focus to four central domains of women’s agency: freedom from violence, control over sexual and reproductive health, ownership and control of land and housing, and voice and collective action. At the same time, it recognizes that these are just a few areas of women’s lives that are important for promoting women’s agency and gender equality.