The Case for Women Empowerment

We celebrated International Women’s Day a few weeks ago. The newspapers were full of articles on women’s empowerment. It set me thinking on the myriad ways that women’s empowerment works in building a better, a more peaceful, and equitable society. I have collated some excerpts from various writers and researchers on this subject. Here it goes.

Jeffrey Sachs presents evidence in his book, The End of Poverty, that, in Iran following the 1976 Islamic revolution, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) fell from 6.7 in 1980 to just 2.6 by 2000 (ie in 20 years). The Iranian revolution, it seems, brought a generation of young girls into the schools, and this boom in girls’ literacy translated rapidly and dramatically into the desire for fewer children. (it was 2.1 by 2022, ie, just about the population replacement rate). 

Similarly, he presents the case of Bangladesh, where TFR fell from 6.6 in 1975 to just 3.1 in 2000 (currently it is 2.0, ie below replacement rate). Rapid and substantial improvement in female literacy rates is considered the main proximate factor for this demographic transition.

Jean Dreze & Amartya Sen in their book, India: Development & Participation, describe a similar phenomenon in India. They contend that, "Speedy fertility declines in the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, or Himachal Pradesh can be firmly linked to the rapid enhancement of female education and other sources of empowerment of young women."

They go on to describe how women empowerment, especially through literacy leads to a better and less dysfunctional society. In their words, "… it is useful to look at those parts of India which have relatively high literacy rates, and other social features that are associated with voluntary reduction in fertility rates. Kerala does provide an interesting comparison with China. Kerala’s fertility rate of 1.8 is just below China’s 1.9, and this has been achieved without any compulsion by the state. Kerala has higher literacy rates than China and in fact, the female literacy rate is higher in Kerala than in every province of China. Kerala’s success in reducing the birth rate disputes the necessity of coercion for cutting down fertility. Moreover, since this low fertility has been achieved voluntarily, there is no sign of the adverse effects that are noted in the case of China, eg, heightened female infant mortality and widespread abortion of female foetuses."

Education is only one means of empowering women. It is (correctly) argued in The Economics of Microfinance, that in the traditional neoclassical economic approach to household decision making, there is no room for analyzing conflict between men and women in the family. Households are seen as acting as a single unit, making choices as if household members were in full consensus. This approach suggests that it is optimal for men to benefit from their comparative advantage by specializing in strength-intensive marketable activities outside the house. Women, on the other hand, should devote more time to unpaid household work and those marketable activities that require considerably less physical strength, even if the monetary rewards are often low due to market discrimination. It remained unclear whether such unequal specialization within the household truly reflects women’s preferences.

Rather than assuming that households work by consensus, economists have recently started deconstructing household choices, finding them to be driven often by inequalities, bargaining, and conflict. They have thereafter derived implications of a model in which bargaining power is driven by the ability of women to credibly threaten to leave the household. The credibility of those threats will depend on factors like earning power and other factors that affect women’s relative power within the household, such as divorce or employment legislation, and of course education.

This line of thought on the societal benefits of empowering women, finds an echo in Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba in their recently released book, Breaking the Mould. They present the case that “Paid employment increases a woman’s bargaining power at home, leading to greater gender equality, including a greater role in household decision-making and greater ownership of household assets.” They also refer to a recent IMF study, which brings an interesting aspect to the role of working women in society. The study contends that, men and women are not simply substitutable labour. Men and women increase each other’s productivity by bringing different sets of skills and perspectives to the workplace.

Dedicated to all the gutsy and glorious women in my life.