Tag: Gender equality

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Does women’s empowerment promote economic development?

Conventional wisdom and a number of recent papers say yes, but Matthias Doepke and Michèle Tertilt have a paper out that suggests we think twice about this relationship:

“In this paper, we examine the link between female empowerment and economic development from the perspective of economic theories of household decision making. We develop models that are consistent with the empirical observation that an increase in female resources leads to more spending on children. We use these models to address two related questions. First, we focus specifically on programs that target transfers to women and aim to raise female income, and ask whether such policies really make children better off. Second, we consider a wider range of policies, and ask whether alternative forms of female empowerment have similar effects.
While at first sight it may seem that existing empirical evidence is sufficient to answer these questions, our theoretical analysis shows that this is not the case. We demonstrate that the link from the observed empirical patterns to policy implications is far from obvious: the effects of policy interventions are highly sensitive to the details of the underlying economic model, unintended consequences can arise, and different forms of female empowerment can have opposite effects.”

Full paper available here.

In related news, happy Women’s History Month! International Women’s Day 2012 is this Thursday, March 8. More on this soon.

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Gender and Development

A topic worth exploring. From the 2012 World Development Report, Gender Equality and Development:

The lives of girls and women have changed dramatically over the past quarter century. Today, more girls and women are literate than ever before, and in a third of developing countries, there are more girls in school than boys. Women now make up over 40 percent of the global labor force. Moreover, women live longer than men in all regions of the world. The pace of change has been astonishing—indeed, in many developing countries, they have been faster than the equivalent changes in developed countries: What took the United States 40 years to achieve in increasing girls’ school enrollment has taken Morocco just a decade.

In some areas, however, progress toward gender equality has been limited—even in developed countries. Girls and women who are poor, live in remote areas, are disabled, or belong to minority groups continue to lag behind. Too many girls and women are still dying in childhood and in the reproductive ages. Women still fall behind in earnings and productivity, and in the strength of their voices in society. In some areas, such as education, there is now a gender gap to the disadvantage of men and boys.

The main message of this year’s World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development is that these patterns of progress and persistence in gender equality matter, both for development outcomes and policy making.