Feminist Economics Research Notes 20 PDF

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Volume 20, Issue 1, 2014
Special Issue: Land, Gender, and Food Security
Since 2008, a surge in large-scale land acquisitions, or land

grabs, has been taking place in low- and middle-income
countries around the globe. This contribution examines the
gendered effects of and responses to these deals, drawing on
nine studies, which include conceptual framing essays that bring
in debates about human rights, studies that draw on previous
waves of land acquisitions globally, and case studies that
examine the gendered dimensions of land dispossession and
loss of common property.
Transnational Land Deals and Gender Equality: Utilitarian and Human Rights Approaches
Land Grabs, Power, and Gender in East and Southern Africa: So, What’s New?
Small and Productive: Kenyan Women and Crop Choice
Land Tenure Insecurity and Formalizing Land Rights in Madagascar: A Gender Perspective on the
Certification Program
Can the Law Secure Women’s Rights to Land in Africa? Revisiting Tensions between Culture and Land
Commercialization
http://explore.tandfonline.com/page/bes/rfec-research-notes/20.1[29/01/2019 10:23:05]
FERNs 20.1 | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
Women and Land Deals in Africa and Asia: Weighing the Implications and Changing the Game
When a Good Business Model is Not Enough: Land Transactions of Commercial Agriculture Projects and
Gendered Livelihood Prospects
Coercive Harmony in Land Acquisition: The Gendered Impact of Corporate “Responsibility” in the Brazilian
Amazon
Transnational Land Deals and Gender Equality: Utilitarian and Human

Rights Approaches
Poul Wisborg
Despite increasing global policy attention to women in agriculture during the first decade of the twenty-first
century, review studies show that since 2008, a wave of large-scale, transnational land deals – the buying
and…
Read
Land Grabs, Power, and Gender in East and Southern Africa: So, What’s
New?
Ritu Verma
Land grabs have recently been the subject of considerable debate among media, development
practitioners, and academics around the globe. Although these land deals affect the lives of millions of
people in Sub-Saharan Africa,…
Read

Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji, Charalampos Konstantinidis, and Andrew Barenberg
It is a stylized fact that African women farmers achieve lower yields, as measured by the value of output per
unit of land, than their male counterparts. Another common…
Read
Land Tenure Insecurity and Formalizing Land Rights in Madagascar: A

Gender Perspective on the Certification Program
Marit Widman
Land-tenure insecurity is an important obstacle for smallholder farmers - the majority of the population in
Madagascar - and is exacerbated by the current trend of commercial pressure on land (“land grabbing”).
Since both men…
Read
Can the Law Secure Women’s Rights to Land in Africa? Revisiting

Tensions between Culture and Land Commercialization
Lyn Ossome
Contemporary land deals in Africa pose new and complex challenges in regard to securing women’s rights
to land. These challenges relate to the fact that large-scale land acquisitions, which involve leases or
concessions or sale…
Read
Women and Land Deals in Africa and Asia: Weighing the Implications
and Changing the Game
Elizabeth Daley and Sabine Pallas
Large-scale land deals in the new millennium have attracted much media attention, and several
international initiatives are attempting to regulate such deals. However, the existing literature and most…
Read
When a Good Business Model is Not Enough: Land Transactions of

Commercial Agriculture Projects and Gendered Livelihood Prospects
Dzodzi Tsikata and John Awetori Yaro
Recent large-scale commercial agriculture projects in developing countries have raised concerns about how
they affect local people who rely on natural resources for their livelihoods. A significant…
Read
Coercive Harmony in Land Acquisition: The Gendered Impact of

Corporate “Responsibility” in the Brazilian Amazon
Noemi Miyasaka Porro and Joaquim Shiraishi Neto
In 1991, the quebradeiras de coco babaçu – the babassu-breaker women of Brazil, who harvest and process
nuts from the babassu palm tree – united to form the largest women-led association of…
Read
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Transnational Land Deals and Gender Equality: Utilitarian and Human Rights Approaches | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Transnational Land Deals and Gender Equality: Utilitarian and

Human Rights Approaches
Feminist Economics
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Poul Wisborg
Despite increasing global policy attention to women in

agriculture during the first decade of the twenty-first century,
review studies show that since 2008, a wave of large-scale,
transnational land deals – the buying and leasing of land, often in
poor countries in the Global South – has occurred with little or
no attention to gender. Case studies show that gender
discrimination may affect women’s participation and ability to
protect their rights and livelihoods. Examining a sample of
emerging policy documents by influential, international
organizations, Poul Wisborg asks how the ethical (normative)
approaches of utilitarianism and human rights have addressed
gender equality and women’s interests in the transnational land
deals.
Confirming the finding of earlier review studies, most of the

policy documents the author reviewed from either perspective
paid only casual attention to women’s interests and failed to
consider the systemic gender inequality that characterizes the context of most land deals.
The role of utilitarianism. Utilitarian approaches (based on the assumption that morally good actions are
those that help the most people) have dominated the increasing policy attention to women in agriculture
during the past decade. In some versions such approaches are a means to promote production and
growth, or are “nothing more than smart economics,” as the World Bank stated in 2006. Utilitarian
http://explore.tandfonline.com/page/bes/rfec-research-notes/20.1/art-1[29/01/2019 10:23:23]
perspectives alert us to the fact that land deals and accompanying investments may yield jobs, training, and
improved services, for women as well as men, but gender did not figure in utilitarian arguments when global
institutions were evaluating and seeking to regulate land acquisitions. The Principles for Responsible
Agricultural Investment, formulated in 2010 by UN agencies, the International Fund for Agricultural
Development, and the World Bank, paid only scattered attention to gender. A major World Bank study from
2011 valuably identified a general negative impact on women, yet did not address this in its conclusions and
recommendations, possibly because promoting land deals as a way to empower rural women appeared
implausible.
Human rights, women’s rights, and transnational land deals. Human rights to participation, property,
home and housing, secure livelihoods, food, and water are put at stake by transnational land deals. And
women’s rights in these respects are guaranteed in, among others, the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Maputo Protocol on the Rights of Women (2003), and the
Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food (adopted by the FAO in 2004). Various studies and critiques of
transnational land deals, particularly by civil society organizations, evoked these rights but again with
uneven attention to gender equality and impact on women. While gender equality has received increasing
policy attention, most manifestly in the 2012 Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of
Tenure to Land, Fisheries, and Forests, negotiated in the Committee on World Food Security, without an
enforcement mechanism these Guidelines remain ambiguous tools to secure women’s rights under
transnational land acquisitions.
Human rights and utilitarian approaches: Complementary lenses. Global policy attention to women in
agriculture during the past decade was not matched by effective attention to gender equality in early policy
documents on the transnational land deals. Utilitarian approaches often lack adequate protection for
individuals and projections of future benefits may be alluring in the absence of evidence on completed
deals. The utilitarian discourse on gender equality as smart economics appeared to lack plausibility and
failed to advance feminist policy responses to the land deals. While human rights are more explicit on
equality and women’s rights, the attention to gender in early policy initiatives on the land deals was
generally casual. With support in earlier review studies, Wisborg assumes the causes of this relative
invisibility to be the gendered power relations that shape land and agrarian conditions and policies,
including lack of gender-specific knowledge; Wisborg argues that normative approaches also play a role in
entrenching or challenging the exclusion of gender. In Wisborg’s view a failure to mobilize the feminist
potential in either utilitarian or human rights approaches appeared more significant than the differences
between them. Wisborg argues, however, that human rights and utilitarian approaches could be applied as
complementary lenses on the land deals, using human rights to evaluate which land deals may be justifiable
and then using utilitarian calculations to maximize the benefits from the land deals that pass the human
rights test. Then, the feminist potential of these two normative approaches would need to be mobilized in
the gendered power struggles over land, policies, and daily lives that these controversial deals involve.
View the article in full.

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Land Grabs, Power, and Gender in East and Southern Africa: So, What’s New? | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Land Grabs, Power, and Gender in East and Southern Africa:

So, What’s New?
Feminist Economics
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Ritu Verma
Land grabs have recently been the subject of considerable

debate among media, development practitioners, and academics
around the globe. Although these land deals affect the lives of
millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa, there is remarkable
silence on the way land is negotiated in situations of intense
change with respect to gender. For farmers and pastoralists,
land has multiple values that go beyond its narrow definition as a
commodity. Land has meanings inseparable from social and
gender relations, economic welfare, well-being, cultural identity,
spirituality, and symbolic significance. However, as powerful
global forces and elite actors increasingly engage in land grabs,
social justice, gender equity, environmental sustainability, and
customary institutions are losing out to a narrow focus on
resource extraction, external food security, and biofuel
production based on the priorities of a few. As these new goals
gain traction, women and men are being dispossessed of their
land, livelihoods, and access to vitally important natural
resources.
Viewing land grabbing through a historical and gendered lens. Ritu Verma critically examines local
experiences of land grabbing through a historical and gendered lens. Reflecting on feminist political-
ecological research undertaken on gender and land in Kenya, Mozambique, and Madagascar between 1997
and 2009, Verma provides windows into negotiations and contestations in processes of land grabs. Rather
than superficially “adding women” to growing debates about land grabs, it is important to explore how
gender, land, and global domains are mutually constituted (Mackenzie, 2010). This is done through prying
away what might be new from ongoing patterns, as well as critically examining the role of elites and issues
of scale. After investigating the land-grabbing phenomenon through the critical questions of what is
arguably “new,” “foreign,” and “large scale” about it, the author found the following: first, some dispossessing
forces are similar across time and place. They highlight historical continuities from the colonial past that
persist in shaping how land grabs are played out. Second, local land grabs would not be possible without
the involvement of local elites, thus highlighting elite- and male capture as enabling forces. Third, if we
aggregate the everyday, gendered micro-political land grabs that have taken place across the continent over
the past century, the sheer numbers are themselves large-scale.
New players drive land grabs. Verma also suggests that despite some continuities from the past, some
trends are new. These include new actors from the South, including China, Korea, and the Gulf States,
driving land grabs. Another is that economically powerful nations are seeking land to feed their own
populations in other countries that are already food insecure. Also new is 1) the sheer scale and political
economic power of the transnational corporations responsible for land grabs, which defy the territorial
boundaries in the nations where they are operating, the sovereignty of nation-states, and accountability;
and 2) the alarming rate, speed, and intensity at which grabs are occurring. Contemporary land grabs have
resulted from a perfect storm of financial, climate, energy, food, and development crises coming together
with a powerful multiplier effect.
Gendered power relations often override laws and rules. Verma posits that land grabs mirror gender
relations between and among women and men, whereby benefits are captured by those advantaged in
terms of power and knowledge. The end result is the preservation of the status quo, and the increased
concentration of wealth in the hands of a few powerful corporations, investors, and individuals. That land
grabbing is occurring in, for instance, Mozambique, in spite of strong land laws and policies, illustrates the
gendered power relations that are at play in bending the rules. Evidence suggests that both statutory
authorities as well as customary leaders can be corrupted, coerced, or threatened into “consenting” to land
grabs that affect communities they are supposed to represent and protect. The vast gap between policy
and law and their fair and effective implementation requires urgent attention. Lastly, if constitutional,
statutory laws and policies cannot prevent land grabs, it is doubtful that voluntary codes, principles, and
guidelines put forward by international development organizations and banks will be able to defend the
rights of economically poor women and men against the onslaught of land grabs. What is required is a set
of enforceable and binding international regulations and legal mechanisms that places the rights of local
women and men at their center.

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Small and Productive: Kenyan Women and Crop Choice | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji, Charalampos Konstantinidis, and Andrew

Barenberg
It is a stylized fact that African women farmers achieve lower

yields, as measured by the value of output per unit of land, than
their male counterparts. Another common empirical observation
is that smaller farms produce more output per acre than larger
ones. Given that African women on average farm smaller plots
than men, the finding that women achieve lower yields per unit
of land begs explanation. Smallholder farmers face a number of
pressures on their land and thus their livelihoods. Globalization
and increased urbanization have increased worldwide demand
for farm products. This pressure, along with increased
population and lack of sufficient non-farm job opportunities, has
increased demand for land, sometimes in the form of large
foreign acquisitions (land grabs), which make the situation of
smallholder farmers even more precarious. In this context, it is
important to understand the impact of farm size on output and,
given the large number of women farmers in Africa, explore
whether there are differences across gender.
Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji, Charalampos Konstantinidis, and Andrew Barenberg examine these issues in the
Kenyan context using a newly available national data set, the Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey for
2006. Using a series of econometric models, the authors explore whether there actually is a difference in
output per acre between men and women farmers. The authors find four key results. The first is that the
inverse relationship between land size and output per acre holds even when controlling for the gender of
the primary farmer. Therefore, policies that facilitate land concentration may result in lower overall
agricultural land productivity. The second finding is that a woman-controlled farm does not result in a lower
output per unit of land once we account for the likelihood of producing market-oriented crops.
The third key finding concerns the roles of soil, slope, inputs, and crop choice in the context of rain-fed
agriculture. The authors find that soil and slope are key determinants of productivity; however, their
“statistical significance” disappears when crop choice and fertilizer use are also taken into consideration.
This leads to the last finding: the differences in men and women’s productivity are largely determined by
differences in crop choice. Wa Gĩthĩnji, Konstantinidis, and Barenberg present some hypotheses that may
explain their results. One hypothesis is that if households of women farmers are less able to access credit
or insurance markets than male farmers’ households or are food insecure, they may choose to produce
subsistence crops despite their lower returns in order to lower the risk of price shocks. In this case, policies
that reduce these risks – such as food assistance, credit or insurance interventions, or food price
stabilization – could increase women farmers’ participation in cash-crop production and hence, overall
productivity.
Alternatively, it is possible that women farmers might wish to produce market-oriented crops just as much
as men farmers but are discriminated against in access to cooperatives and input and output markets.
Policies to encourage women’s participation in the cooperatives could have an important impact in
increasing women’s farm productivity. Finally, in the absence of marketing structures such as cooperatives,
or farm-gate purchases by merchants, a gendered division of labor within the household may restrict
women’s ability to engage in the additional work of marketing produce successfully. This problem may point
to the need to create structures that allow women to access markets. Such structures could include new
kinds of producers’ cooperatives that focus not on the traditional cash crops but rather on assisting farmers
in general, and women specifically, in getting their products to markets.

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Land Tenure Insecurity and Formalizing Land Rights in Madagascar: A Gender Perspective on the Certification Program | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Land Tenure Insecurity and Formalizing Land Rights in

Madagascar: A Gender Perspective on the Certification
Program
Feminist Economics
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Marit Widman
Land-tenure insecurity is an important obstacle for smallholder

farmers - the majority of the population in Madagascar - and is
exacerbated by the current trend of commercial pressure on
land (“land grabbing”). Since both men and women have the legal
right to own land in Madagascar, gender-equality principles were
not considered necessary in the land-tenure reform,
implemented there in 2005, even though there were pre-
existing, customary gender inequalities in access to and control
over land. Marit Widman studies the land-tenure reform from a
gender perspective. In particular, she analyzes the certification
program issuing formal land titles and deeds (land certificates) to
landholders. Does the presumed gender neutrality of the
certification program result in a gender-neutral outcome?
Widman’s is the first study to make a quantitative analysis of land
tenure in Madagascar from a gender perspective, and the first to
use gender-disaggregated household data.
Widman collected the data in the rural municipality of Soavinandriana in the central highlands in 2011, and
she uses it in an econometric analysis to investigate the demand for, and expectations of, land certificates.
The author finds that the majority of the land certificates are registered in a man’s name, and about 20
percent in a woman’s name; very few are jointly registered by couples. Women typically certify land that they
have inherited individually, and female heads of households are more likely than married women to obtain
land certificates. Land held jointly by couples tends to be registered only in the name of the husband. While
a small share of jointly held plots are registered in the name of only the wife, these women have
characteristics that are typically associated with empowerment, such as having an income source other
than farm income.
Widman goes on to discuss the potential implications of these patterns of certification for men and
women’s land-tenure security. An underlying problem the country must address in order to reduce land-
tenure insecurity is the discrepancy between legislation and customary land management; land titles issued
to colonial settlers during the French colonial period (1894–1960) are still valid, so the Malagasy farmers,
who have cultivated the land for generations, are squatters in legal terms. However, the certification
program does not address this problem. This study indicates that land-tenure reform needs to be more
inclusive to effectively protect the interests of all smallholder farmers. Among the key issues: large parts of
the country are still not covered by the certification program; corruption and elite capture imply that new
land-certificate holders might not be the actual users; and the cost for a certificate, while comparatively low,
is still too high for many rural poor. Moreover, agrofuel investors are showing interest in collective grazing
land that provides an important part of the livelihoods of many people but is not directly in scope of the
reform.
In regard to gender differences, weak application of gender-equality principles, and in particular the lack of
mechanisms to ensure that couples’ joint property is jointly secured, seems to have reinforced control over
land by male household heads, at the expense of women’s land rights. The issue of joint certification was
raised in an early stage of the reform, but it is still not addressed. Further research is needed on what
happens to certified land when marriages dissolve, but these results indicate that to better secure women’s
land rights, the land legislation should be more in line with the marital legislation – meaning that common
property should be jointly certified. Providing information and legal advice for women who may be unaware
of the possibilities and potential benefits of certification is another strategy to advance women’s formal
rights to land, as well as to promote civil marriage and the legal right to equal inheritance.

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Can the Law Secure Women’s Rights to Land in Africa? Revisiting Tensions between Culture and Land Commercialization | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Can the Law Secure Women’s Rights to Land in Africa?

Revisiting Tensions between Culture and Land
Commercialization
Feminist Economics
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Lyn Ossome
Contemporary land deals in Africa pose new and complex

challenges in regard to securing women’s rights to land. These
challenges relate to the fact that large-scale land acquisitions,
which involve leases or concessions or sale of public and
communal land that is already occupied and used by local
people, are centered on land markets and formalization of the
law. Many studies show that the path of formalization might
actually weaken women’s control over land and landed
resources, and undermine customary legal systems within which
many African women are still able to negotiate access to land. In
this study, Lyn Ossome grapples with the question of securing
women’s rights to land in Africa in the context of contemporary
land commercialization, through a discussion that proceeds from
a critique of two approaches to promoting gender equity in land-
tenure systems: the institutional approach, which deals with
women’s formal land rights; and the political economy approach,
which deals with the structural nature of women’s traditional
relations to land. The discussion highlights three distinct but interrelated problems in the framing of
women’s land-rights discourses.
First, by highlighting the inherent distortions of “official” customary law inherited from colonialism, the paper
recuperates the “living” customary law as a potentially progressive approach toward discussing land deals in
relation to gender equality. Second, the study critiques the notion that women could beneficially participate
in or gain from land deals if their land rights were formalized, arguing that liberal formulations of the law are
limited by a set of assumptions regarding women’s position in the political economy. These assumptions,
such as the claim that women’s indigenous land claims are secondary or amount simply to a use right
contrasted with a control right, are institutionalized and concealed within the liberal framing of women’s
land rights, and can be discerned through a structural analysis of the nature of social relations around land.
The study further interrogates the assumptions upon which land policies have historically been based,
finding that the policies promoted in Africa during the 1960s and 1970s were based on the premise that
customary systems did not provide the necessary security to ensure agricultural investment and productive
use of land. Because the security risk was thought to be the absence of clearly defined and enforceable
property rights, the appropriate policy direction was taken to be the state creation of such rights, most
often individual, private property rights. However, a number of studies showed that the move toward
formalization of customary tenure did not carry the main aims of securing individual rights to land and
aiding transferability of land. Moreover, these rights and functions had not been highly constrained under
customary tenure. Based on this analysis, Ossome interrogates the possibilities of achieving gender justice
within a capitalist system.
Third, by assessing the debates in the literature regarding the efficacy of law in protecting women’s rights to
land, the study argues that the factors that delimit formalization also constitute the possibilities for
application of customary law. For example, customary law is able to provide relative security to community
members at lower cost than state-run structures. Furthermore, basing land reform on customary law
facilitates decentralization and the participation of local people in the management of natural resources.
Studies have also shown that the narrow and limited understanding of registrable interests employed in
titling programs, coupled with the fact that for the vast majority of married women, interests in family land
are held on account of the marriage relationship, which for most women is based on customary law, means
that formalization might actually weaken women’s claims to family.
Ultimately, Ossome argues that customary law offers a more promising path toward recuperating women’s
rights to land in the context of commercialization. It is possible, as most studies on the topic suggest, that
marginalized groups, including women, are experiencing adverse effects from large-scale land
expropriations taking place in many African countries. Yet it is also still widely assumed that the problem lies
in customary tenure systems. And while there is still no conclusive evidence for customary law’s efficacy in
securing women’s rights to land, Ossome finds that contemporary land deals take place in the context of a
legal, political, and economic terrain that local communities and women are negotiating and reintepreting
within the customary domain, thus affirming the continued relevance of customary tenure regimes in
securing women’s rights to land in Africa.

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Women and Land Deals in Africa and Asia: Weighing the Implications and Changing the Game | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Women and Land Deals in Africa and Asia: Weighing the

Implications and Changing the Game
Feminist Economics
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Elizabeth Daley and Sabine Pallas
Large-scale land deals in the new millennium have attracted

much media attention, and several international initiatives are
attempting to regulate such deals. However, the existing
literature and most regulatory initiatives do not address gender
adequately. To fill this gap, Elizabeth Daley and Sabine Pallas
reviewed evidence from four case studies included in the
International Land Coalition Global Study on Commercial
Pressures on Land (conducted in 2010) to identify implications of
land deals for women and policy actions to address them. Daley
and Pallas analyzed evidence from land deals in Ethiopia,
Rwanda, the Philippines, and India from the late 1990s to 2010
using a framework that posits four dimensions of underlying
discrimination, relevant to assessing outcomes for women. The
study analyzed three of these dimensions in depth – access to
productive resources, relative income poverty, and participation
in decision making.
Women are disadvantaged. Daley and Pallas found that women are likely to be affected differently – and
disproportionately more negatively – by land deals than men. The individual details were crucial. The
Ethiopian case study shows clear evidence of relative disadvantages to women because of their reduced
rights of access to common property and consequent negative effects for relative income poverty, as well as
sociocultural obstacles that block women’s participation in decision making about land deals. The
Philippines case study also shows relative disadvantages to women losing rights of access to formerly
common property foreshores, with consequent effects for relative income poverty in terms of employment
opportunities and also for livelihoods and food security.
Low wages, increased participation in decision making. However, the situation with regard to women’s
participation in decision making about land deals is much more positive. The Rwandan case study shows
gains for women from increased employment and self-employment opportunities but at low wages and the
effects on livelihoods and food security of reduced rights of access to land; all of which are mediated by
women’s strong participation in decision making in Rwanda. The Indian case study suggests largely negative
effects for women manifesting through reduced rights of access to productive resources and limited
employment opportunities for women that adversely affect relative income poverty and their livelihoods
and food security. However, this case also shows a significant positive effect on women’s participation in
decision making, with the land deals encouraging the mobilization and political empowerment of vulnerable
Dalit women.
Conclusions. Daley and Pallas draw two conclusions from their analysis. First, the gender implications with
respect to common property seem more important than the effects land deals have on people’s formal
land ownership and employment. This is because reduced access to common property has more diverse
spillover effects for broader livelihoods and food security – and for women’s relative income poverty – than
limited new employment opportunities, and because women generally have less secure land tenure and
more limited land ownership to begin with than men. Second, the gender implications of land deals on the
political front may be, in the longer term, as important, if not more important, than those on the economic
front in achieving gender justice and moving toward greater gender equality across the board. This is
because the negative economic effects of land deals have helped women’s political empowerment in at
least some cases, and, as with any important socioeconomic change, the rush for land opens up space to
contest the status quo.
Putting gender at the center. These findings imply that ongoing international regulatory initiatives around
land deals must place gender issues at their center, including by developing gender-sensitive and locally
appropriate tools and procedures. Daley and Pallas recommend practical actions that can help change the
game for women, such as shoring up women’s weak land rights through land registration and titling;
encouraging companies to enact family-friendly policies so women can take advantage of employment
opportunities created by land deals; and promoting women’s participation in decision making during land
negotiations.
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When a Good Business Model is Not Enough: Land Transactions of Commercial Agriculture Projects and Gendered Livelihood Prospects | Explore Taylor & Franci...
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When a Good Business Model is Not Enough: Land

Transactions of Commercial Agriculture Projects and
Gendered Livelihood Prospects
Feminist Economics
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Dzodzi Tsikata and John Awetori Yaro
Recent large-scale commercial agriculture projects in developing

countries have raised concerns about how they affect local
people who rely on natural resources for their livelihoods. A
significant weakness in the emerging literature on such projects
is the lack of a gender perspective on their implications for
agrarian livelihoods. Dzodzi Tsikata and John Awetori Yaro
explore the gendered aspects of large-scale land deals on
livelihood prospects in the Northern Region of Ghana, drawing
on qualitative research they undertook from 2010–12 on two
commercial agriculture projects at Dipale and Kpachaa. The
Northern Region, which suffers from endemic poverty, poor
social development, and entrenched gender inequalities,
provided the conditions to examine how large-scale land
acquisitions are likely to be experienced by highly impoverished
communities. In these two cases, the authors examined an
influential argument in the literature that the business model of
a land deal, which includes how local communities are involved
in production and profit sharing, can determine whether it results in gains for all concerned.
This “business model” argument is based on the premise that out-grower or contract farming schemes are
superior to plantation agriculture in the modesty of the size of their land acquisitions, their incorporation of
local farmers into production as independent operators, and the possibilities they offer for technology
transfer. Typically, an out-grower scheme consists of a medium-size nucleus farm that contracts with and
manages local farmers to produce a designated crop on their own land, using inputs and technical support
provided by the nucleus farm operation. The crop is guaranteed a market by the nucleus farm and the
costs of inputs and technical support are subtracted from farmers’ earnings on their harvest. A plantation,
on the other hand, is a large-scale, mechanized commercial farm producing a mono-crop and employing
locals as permanent or casual laborers for different aspects of its operations.
Failing at poverty reduction. The Integrated Tamale Fruit Company (ITFC), a Ghanaian LLC owned by a
consortium dominated by Dutch capital, began a mango production project in 1999 with the acquisition of
1,363 acres (552 hectares) of land near the village of Dipale for the nucleus farm of its out-grower scheme.
Though the project is still in operation in some areas, its out-grower scheme at Dipale collapsed and
therefore failed to fulfill its promise of poverty reduction in the community, which had given up farmland for
the nucleus farm. The majority of ITFC employees there were poorly paid casual workers. In any case,
project employment benefits were enjoyed by only a minority of mostly male farmers at Dipale. When
matched against the loss of resources from the commons and farmlands, the project did not have a
positive balance sheet. By leasing the Dipale commons - the most convenient source of fuel wood, shea
nuts, dawadawa (African locust beans), and other resources – for mango production, the ITFC project also
increased the reproductive burdens of women, who had to walk farther to gather these resources or grow
food for their families.
Devastating independent farming. In 2007, Biofuel Africa Limited, a Norwegian company, leased land
holdings of 33,600 acres (13,600 hectares) in several villages near Kpachaa and began to establish a
plantation. The project folded in 2009 following the global financial crisis and loss of interest in biofuels –
and, in particular, in the promise of jatropha as a biofuel source that could be grown on marginal lands. By
then the company had planted 400 hectares of jatropha, which it has left derelict. The project’s employment
opportunities were also short-lived. Worse, the size of the acquisition devastated the independent farming
activities of small- and medium-scale farmers, while project land-clearing activities resulted in a massive loss
of tree resources that women had relied on heavily. Although the project is now defunct and no farming
takes place, the land has not been properly returned to its pre-project users and is still under the control of
the company (operating under a new name and management) and its former employees. That the company
has not formally relinquished its claims on the land means the interests it acquired cannot revert to those
who used the land prior to the acquisition and leaves open the possibility that the company will sell its
interests to a third party.
Although the two land deals adopted different business models – contract farming and plantation – their
gender impacts were remarkably similar. Women benefited more than men from the ancillary and
corporate social responsibility activities of both projects, which usually supported their reproductive roles
(activities included a clinic, wells, schools, and the use of company vehicles to convey sick people to health
facilities, and provision of inputs such as fertilizers, a grinding mill, and tractor services). Yet these services
were often cut when projects experienced crises. And, more men than women enjoyed the direct project
benefits, such as permanent employment and participation in out-grower schemes.
A failure to address inequalities. Tsikata and Yaro conclude that the gender-differentiated implications of
commercial land transactions result from both the pre-existing inequalities in land tenure and agrarian
production systems and the failure of projects to take these inequalities into account or to mitigate them. A
gender-aware approach would have involved paying compensation to women farming on fallow lands
belonging to their husbands, protecting common property resources, strengthening women’s participation
in out-grower schemes, and ensuring gender equity in access to permanent and casual wage work, and in
wages and conditions of service.

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Coercive Harmony in Land Acquisition: The Gendered Impact of Corporate “Responsibility” in the Brazilian Amazon | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Coercive Harmony in Land Acquisition: The Gendered Impact

of Corporate “Responsibility” in the Brazilian Amazon
Feminist Economics
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Noemi Miyasaka Porro and Joaquim Shiraishi Neto
In 1991, the quebradeiras de coco babaçu – the babassu-breaker

women of Brazil, who harvest and process nuts from the
babassu palm tree – united to form the largest women-led
association of extractive producers in the country: the inter-state
Movement of the Babassu Breaker Women (MIQCB). In their
traditional communities in the northeastern states of Maranhão
and Piauí and northern states of Tocantins and Pará, these
descendants of detribalized natives, enslaved Africans, and
immigrants displaced by large estates built their own way of life
based on the common use of lands and forest resources
traditionally accessed according to ethnic- and gender-based
local rules. The phenomenon of large-scale land acquisition by
large companies or investors, aiming to produce commodities or
merely to speculate, violates the babassu-breaker women’s
traditional-use rights to lands in the Amazon. In a 2010–11 case
study of the acquisitions by the Brazil-based company Suzano
Paper and Pulp, of lands traditionally occupied by babassu-
breaker women, Noemi Miyasaka Porro and Joaquim Shiraishi Neto investigate the effects of acquisitions on
gender relations.
Claims of social responsibility. In Brazil, the rights of peoples and traditional communities are ensured in
the Federal Constitution of 1988 and in various national laws. In response to these laws, state governments
and private companies that make large land acquisitions claim they are investing in social responsibility,
which should guarantee the rights of traditional communities. However, for these companies social
responsibility means providing donations and palliative services. Porro and Shiraishi Neto find that a
seemingly harmonious relationship exists between Suzano Paper and Pulp and affected local communities,
including negotiations that contrast with the violent land conflicts of the past decades. However, in
preliminary surveys the authors heard accounts, especially by women, of coercion from the company, which
ignored women’s claims over traditionally used lands while prohibiting them to plant their agricultural fields
and damaging water streams with agro-toxic residues. As the company installed its gigantic plant, land
prices skyrocketed and men increasingly migrated for jobs elsewhere, while women remained to provide for
the children from the few babassu palms left. These changes led Porro and Shiraishi Neto to pose a
research question: In the current legal context, can the social responsibility alleged by companies
performing large-scale land acquisitions ensure equity in gender relations in the communities whose
traditional territories were taken?
Harmony at the expense of justice. Using the concept of “coercive harmony” proposed by the US
anthropologist Laura Nader, the authors find that Brazil’s current legal models prioritize harmony at the
expense of justice, adopting the notion that negotiations should be the default behavior in a civilized world.
The case of the babassubreaker women shows that, in the current legal context that recognizes and
promotes specific rights of peoples and traditional communities, if the women sought justice in maintaining
their territories, the state would be obliged to guarantee them their rights. However, if women prioritize
harmony, through negotiating with the company, the latter has greater bargaining power and advantages in
so-called alternative conflict resolution, since coercive harmony can be repressive to groups with the least
power, even without explicit conflict. Although MIQCB continues to oppose the company, men and women
of affected communities may choose harmony because their struggles for traditional lands have lasted for
almost two decades, beginning with the company that sold the lands to Suzano. Families now have scarce
resources and energy to face such a powerful company.
Government cedes power to the market. The authors find that large-scale land acquisitions carried out
according to market criteria of priority to the most profitable are defining the fate of traditional
communities, despite their legally assured rights. The Brazilian government has chosen to subordinate its
own intervention to that of the market. The market is no longer merely the site of supply and demand, but
also the site of evaluation of governmental practices, giving the market power to define how the economic
life of Brazilian society must run, regardless of justice. In the case of Suzano Paper and Pulp, the Brazilian
government has opted for lesser state intervention, following the demands of the market for land destined
to commodities production, and not following what is in the law, to uphold justice. The authors conclude
that governments and societies that accept markets as the authority on how to define rights to land are the
major drivers of gender inequality for traditional communities in the Amazon. On the one hand, the law has
given traditional communities new rights. On the other hand, they are introduced into seemingly
harmonious dialogues, in which whatever they say is limited by what is defined by the market.

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FERNs 20.3
Feminist Economics
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The Gender Gap in Financial Security: What We Know and Don't Know about Australian Households
“Fishing Na Everybody Business”: Women's Work and Gender Relations in Sierra Leone's Fisheries
Caste, Kinship, and Life Course: Rethinking Women's Work and Agency in Rural South India
Women's Autonomy and Subjective Well-Being: How Gender Norms Shape the Impact of Self-Help Groups
in Odisha, India
Firm Performance and Women on the Board: Evidence from Spanish Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises
A Dynamic Gender Analysis of Spain's Pension Reforms of 2011
Gender Employment Disparities, Financialization, and Profitability Dynamics on the Eve of Italy's Post-2008
Crisis
The Gender Gap in Financial Security: What We Know and Don't Know
about Australian Households
Siobhan Austen, Therese Jefferson, and Rachel Ong
Wealth, in the form of accumulated assets, is an important source of financial security and provides an
important buffer against life’s emergencies. Accumulated assets can provide…
Read
“Fishing Na Everybody Business”: Women's Work and Gender Relations

in Sierra Leone's Fisheries
Andy Thorpe, Nicky Pouw, Andrew Baio, Ranita Sandi, Ernest Tom Ndomahina, and Thomas Lebbie
It is widely acknowledged that fisheries are in crisis globally. This not only endangers the future of the fishing
industry, but also puts the…
Read
Caste, Kinship, and Life Course: Rethinking Women's Work and Agency
in Rural South India
Nitya Rao
Many researchers have linked paid employment for women with an increase in their well-being. The
argument goes like this: employment and earnings enhance women’s agency, which gives them a stronger
fallback position in household…
Read
Women's Autonomy and Subjective Well-Being: How Gender Norms

Shape the Impact of Self-Help Groups in Odisha, India
Thomas de Hoop, Luuk van Kempen, Rik Linssen, and Anouka van Eerdewijk
In the early twenty-first century, women’s self-help groups (SHGs) are the most popular development
intervention to stimulate women’s empowerment in India and a host of…
Read
Firm Performance and Women on the Board: Evidence from Spanish

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises
Juan Francisco Martín-Ugedo and Antonio Mínguez-Vera
In recent years there has been pressure from society to include women on boards of directors. As a
consequence, the average number of women in corporate boardrooms has increased.…
Read
A Dynamic Gender Analysis of Spain's Pension Reforms of 2011

Patricia Peinado
One of the contributions of feminist economics has been to analyze and demonstrate links between
gendered labor market experience and retirement incomes. In contrast to previous research, which
implemented simulation…
Read
Gender Employment Disparities, Financialization, and Profitability

Dynamics on the Eve of Italy's Post-2008 Crisis
Alice Tescari and Andrea Vaona
This study investigates the connection between gender employment disparities, structural change, and
aggregate profitability in Italy from 1994 to 2008 – the period before the country’s longest recession since…
Read

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Published on 28 May 2015. Last updated on 28 May 2015.

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The Gender Gap in Financial Security: What We Know and Don't Know about Australian Households | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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The Gender Gap in Financial Security: What We Know and

Don't Know about Australian Households
Feminist Economics
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Siobhan Austen, Therese Jefferson, and Rachel Ong
Wealth, in the form of accumulated assets, is an important

source of financial security and provides an important buffer
against life’s emergencies. Accumulated assets can provide
accommodation; contribute income in the form of rent, interest,
and dividends; provide collateral when credit is required; and be
converted to cash to support current consumption. However,
there is relatively little evidence for the gender differences in
wealth.
We know from a small number of studies in Canada, Germany,

New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States that
there is a high level of inequality in the distribution of wealth
within each of these countries. Evidence also indicates
substantial differences in the distribution of wealth between
these countries, which suggests that an important role is played
by formal and informal institutions governing inheritance,
divorce, and retirement incomes. The research reveals, as well, a
gender wealth gap favoring men in most countries. However, this evidence base is currently too small to
make definitive conclusions on the size of the gender wealth gap or its sources.
Understanding the gender wealth gap. Using data from a large, national survey – the 2006 Household,
Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey – this study takes up the challenge of adding to
our understanding of links between gender and wealth by looking at asset ownership among households
headed by single men and women in Australia. Households headed by a single adult are a large and
growing proportion of Australian households, comprising 31 percent of all households in 2006, up from 23
percent in 1982. The focus on households headed by single women and men is necessitated by the lack of
appropriate data to include couple households in the analysis. In this analysis, households headed by a
“single” man or woman include people who have never been married or are divorced or separated and may
include dependents. Widowed persons are excluded on the basis that their accumulations represent the
asset holdings of two people over an extended period of time.
Siobhan Austen, Therese Jefferson, and Rachel Ong examine the distribution of wealth among single men
and women and explore whether differences in net asset holdings are associated with different
characteristics of single men and women (such as their age, education, and household composition). The
study also investigates whether there are differences in the asset portfolios of single male and female
households.
Concentration of wealth among single-male households. The authors show that, on average, the net
asset holdings of single male households are 14.4 percent higher than those of single female households.
However, the gap varies across the wealth distribution. It favors single male households by a large margin in
the higher quartiles, but it is relatively small in other parts of the wealth distribution. This reflects the
concentration of wealth among a relatively small group of single male-headed households, with wealth
levels close to zero for both single male and female households at the bottom of the wealth distribution.
Single women’s lower earnings and fewer accumulated years of paid work contribute to their relatively
lower accumulated assets. The greater prevalence of children in single female-headed households also
suggests there is a wealth penalty associated with parenthood. However, analysis reveals that these
measured differences in the characteristics of single men and women play a relatively small role in their
different wealth holdings.
Composition of wealth is important. The evidence suggests that differences in the composition of men’s
and women’s wealth portfolios may be an important factor in the gender wealth gap, particularly with
respect to the holding of housing assets. Primary home assets are a very important part of the wealth
portfolios of single female households, representing, on average, 48.4 percent of their total net worth,
compared with 32.6 percent for single male households. The dominant role that housing assets play in the
wealth portfolios of single female households implies they are more exposed to rates of return on a single
class of asset than their male counterparts. Furthermore, their relatively low rate of participation in financial
investments beyond the primary home may limit the ability of single female households to accumulate
wealth.
These differences in the composition of wealth are an important feature of the gender wealth gap and
should be considered in future research. Such research should include efforts to better understand
institutional aspects of men’s and women’s asset portfolios, including the long-term effects of asset
distribution on divorce. Additional research into the reasons for women’s relatively low level of involvement
in other forms of wealth is also warranted.

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Published on 28 May 2015. Last updated on 4 June 2015.


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“Fishing Na Everybody Business”: Women's Work and Gender Relations in Sierra Leone's Fisheries | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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“Fishing Na Everybody Business”: Women's Work and Gender

Relations in Sierra Leone's Fisheries
Feminist Economics
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Andy Thorpe, Nicky Pouw, Andrew Baio, Ranita Sandi, Ernest Tom
Ndomahina, and Thomas Lebbie
It is widely acknowledged that fisheries are in crisis globally. This

not only endangers the future of the fishing industry, but also
puts the continued health of the world’s largest ecosystem at
risk. Prior studies have emphasized that ecosystem degradation
reduces the marine resources that underpin the livelihoods of
many small-scale fisher families in developing countries.
Research into capture (wild) fisheries has long been lacking a
gender-aware perspective and overlooks the critical role
fisherwomen play in the sector, despite more than 57 million
women worldwide directly deriving an income from the sector.
The fishery crisis puts women’s livelihoods at risk in contexts
where their risk-coping capabilities are constrained by gender
inequities and biased institutions. Such is the case in Sierra
Leone examined by Andy Thorpe, Nicky Pouw, Andrew Baio,
Ranita Sandi, Ernest Tom Ndomahina, and Thomas Lebbie. The
authors draw on three in-country fisheries surveys (for 2003-08,
2008-09, and 2010) and on interviews and focus groups to make visible the economic space occupied by
women in Sierra Leone’s small-scale fisheries.
Women’s involvement in fisheries. Employing a gender-aware sustainable livelihood framework, Thorpe

et al. examine women’s contributions to the small-scale fisheries sector in Sierra Leone on three levels. First,
they explore the gendered divisions of labor that exist within the sector and in the household. Second, they
reveal how these interact with gendered social norms and cultural practices and beliefs dominating
fisheries communities. Third, they analyze how both gendered roles and underlying norms impact income
and resource access opportunities in the sector.
Gendered specialization. The authors find that a variety of local taboos and traditions are highly
prescriptive and help to institutionalize a rigid gender division of labor according to which production is
concentrated in the hands of fishermen, whereas women dominate the postharvest processing and
retailing sector. Although women are not considered incapable of fishing, their role in the fishing sector is
intimately related to their other gender responsibilities and tasks in the household domain and to the
cultural interpretation of fishing work. Working close to the home enables women to combine income
earning with reproductive work.
In Sierra Leone, fish-processing activities as well as the forward supply chain are strongly rooted in
intrafamilial relations. In fishing communities, processing is the dominant female occupation (employing
almost 90 percent of women), with only 6 percent of women in fisher households active in fish harvesting.
Nearly half of the women in fisher families are also involved in other, non-fishing related activities for their
sustenance. The median income of the majority of women processors is around 100,000 leones a month
(USD22-23 at current exchange rates), which is slightly less than their male counterparts. Almost half of
women processors rely exclusively upon processing for their income. In the case of those who undertook
multiple livelihood activities, fish processing provided, on average, 55 percent of their income. For male
fishers there was much less evidence of livelihood diversification, with fishing providing the sole income
source for two-thirds of the respondents. The fewer male fish processors occupy a more lucrative
processing niche in revenue-generation terms, hence their processing income is higher than that of women
processors, and they have less need to access income from other sources. Although women in fisheries (in
the main) lack education, access to resources, financial capital, and decision-making power, they
nevertheless derive, in some instances quite substantive, incomes from fish processing. The mean fish-
processing incomes of women were also much higher than those incomes from fishing reported by men.
Enhancing women’s fish-processing activities. As women’s participation and monthly earnings are
markedly higher in fish processing than in fishing, there is a strong case for focusing policy on enhancing
women’s processing activities and value-added rather than improving women’s fishing opportunities.
Thorpe et al. argue for the need for gender-responsive strategies that (1) acknowledge the importance of
unpaid care work mainly performed by women; (2) recognize the specific needs of women processors in
terms of access to finance and other resources; and (3) differentiate clearly between public policies that
target fishers, who are mainly men, and processors, who are mainly women. For this reason, despite the
gender income gap being more pronounced within the processing subsector, the higher absolute earnings
that are available to women processors (as compared to women fishers) suggest public policies to support
women in the sector would be better directed at enhancing processing earnings – rather than augmenting
women’s access to fishing opportunities.

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Caste, Kinship, and Life Course: Rethinking Women's Work and Agency in Rural South India | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Caste, Kinship, and Life Course: Rethinking Women's Work

and Agency in Rural South India
Feminist Economics
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Nitya Rao
Many researchers have linked paid employment for women with

an increase in their well-being. The argument goes like this:
employment and earnings enhance women’s agency, which gives
them a stronger fallback position in household bargaining, a
clearer perception of their own well-being, and a higher
valuation of their contribution to the household (Amartya Sen
1990). The underlying assumption behind the argument that
paid work is an avenue to increased well-being is that women’s
unpaid, reproductive work continues to be socially undervalued,
while visible, paid work shapes perceptions of contribution and
thereby agency within the household. Thus, it is paid work –
rather than reproductive work – that can provide women a path
to gender equality. In her article, Nitya Rao critiques some
aspects of this argument.
Does paid work enhance agency? Drawing on 2009 fieldwork

in rural Tamil Nadu, in South India, Rao re-examines the linkages
between women’s work, agency, and well-being. The author carried out a household survey of 400 rural
couples, in-depth interviews with forty of the couples, and key-informant interviews with six community
leaders. Thirty-five percent of the study sample comprised Dalits (Scheduled Castes, or SC), while 58
percent were members of Other Backward Castes (OBC). The OBC group included two distinct castes – the
landowning Gounders and the handloom-weaving Devanga Chettiars – differing in terms of landowning
status, social norms, social networks, lifestyles, and gender relations. The remaining 7 percent belonged to
other caste groups. While the interviews are disaggregated by all three subgroups, the survey recorded only
the aggregate categories of SC and OBC.
Valuing reproductive success. Based on her results, Rao questions the prioritization of workforce
participation as a path to gender equality in all contexts. Her findings demonstrate that reproductive
success in terms of producing children and nurturing them, as well as success in managing the household
budget, is also highly valued across caste groups in the locality studied. This shift in the social valuation of
work is specific to the context and relatively recent. Since becoming a global center for knitted fabric
production in the 1980s, the area has seen a decline in agricultural activity and diversification of the rural
economy, accompanied by the political mobilization of caste groups, including the Dalits, and a fall in
patronage-based labor relationships.
While opportunities for paid work do exist, the conditions are harsh and do not necessarily enhance
women’s choices. Particularly for low-caste women, engagement with productive work in factories,
plantations and poultry farms, and construction emerged more as a burden – a response to lack of choice
– than a source of agency. In fact, the ability to not engage in paid work, even temporarily (during
reproductive years), was an aspiration for many, enabled in part by state social-security provisions (such as
subsidized food grains) and by a tight labor market that led to men’s higher earnings in the locality.
Specifically, Rao shows that the effects of work participation on agency are mediated by a number of
factors, including the important ones of age and family and financial circumstances. Younger women are
more concerned with reproductive success, including the education of their children, than with entering the
work force. This statement is particularly true for Dalit women, whose social location (caste) matters in
whether paid work increases agency. Also important are the kinship links and mutual support between
mothers and daughters, supportive social policy, and locally constructed gender ideologies. While women’s
say in financial decision making at the household level may be limited, decisions in the realms of education
and health, as well as in managing social relations and status-oriented consumption, are crucial indicators
of agency, mediating the relationship between income, work, and well-being. Paid work participation also
has lifetime effects, so participation by women in their early years, usually before marriage, does influence
their ability to influence decisions later in life, based on their reputation as “good” workers.
The paper therefore strongly argues for a grounded analysis that unpacks the nature of work, both
productive (wage work in agriculture and factories, unpaid work in household farming and weaving
enterprises, as well as low-paid, home-based work in cleaning cloth waste) and reproductive, performed by
and available to women. Paid work participation should be evaluated according to whether decent paid
work is available. At times when withdrawal from the active workforce is preferable, attention should be
given to the social valuation of reproductive work and its impact on women’s agency, particularly in decision
making regarding financial and nonfinancial household resources.

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Women's Autonomy and Subjective Well-Being: How Gender Norms Shape the Impact of Self-Help Groups in Odisha, India | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Women's Autonomy and Subjective Well-Being: How Gender

Norms Shape the Impact of Self-Help Groups in Odisha, India
Feminist Economics
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Thomas de Hoop, Luuk van Kempen, Rik Linssen, and Anouka van
Eerdewijk
In the early twenty-first century, women’s self-help groups (SHGs)

are the most popular development intervention to stimulate
women’s empowerment in India and a host of other countries in
South Asia. SHGs are typically initiated by a development agency
and consist of groups of ten to twenty women involved in savings
and credit groups. Both governmental and nongovernmental
institutions spend formidable effort and funds facilitating these
groups on the premise that women’s increased participation in
economic life, and their collective action more generally,
translates into enhanced freedom for women. This study asks: If,
indeed, SHGs are successful in expanding women’s freedom,
does this also make them lead happier lives? In other words,
does SHG membership increase women’s subjective well-being?
Women’s SHG membership, autonomy, and subjective well-

being. Thomas de Hoop, Luuk van Kempen, Rik Linssen, and
Anouka van Eerdewijk demonstrate that the answer to this question is not straightforward. Women living in
patriarchal communities within India who claim more freedom following participation in SHG programs are
likely to face opposition, not only from men, but also from women who are not involved in SHGs. For
example, a woman going out in public unescorted is likely to meet social disapproval. The path to
empowerment is also an internal psychological struggle for women who have internalized conservative
gender norms. Both internal and external sanctioning may thus negatively impact women’s happiness.
Whether these negative effects offset the positive impacts that enhanced freedom entails for personal well-
being is an empirical question that this study examines.
SHG membership increases women’s autonomy. The study uses survey data collected in 2008 from
rural parts of two districts (coastal Puri and in-land Bolangir) in Odisha, one of the poorest states in India,
and it integrates these data with qualitative insights from in-depth interviews. First, the study establishes
that SHG membership indeed enhances women’s physical freedom. Using a triangulation of findings from
nonexperimental propensity score matching and instrumental variable regression analysis, and in-depth
interviews, the authors find evidence that SHG membership increases autonomy or the likelihood of women
being allowed to go to the market or see a doctor without having to seek male consent.
Trade-off between individual autonomy and social acceptance. On the negative side, the data confirm
that women who leave the house unescorted face opposition. The interviewees recount several instances
where women are scolded or subject to malicious gossip. The qualitative material also clearly brings out the
internal psychological cost that transgressions of established conservative gender norms entail. The authors
attribute this finding to a loss of identity women may face as they hover between new and traditional ideas
of how they should behave.
SHG membership has positive and negative effects on well-being. The study finds that, on average, the
positive and negative effects of SHG membership on women’s happiness or subjective well-being cancel
out. However, when differentiating between SHG participants living in villages with relatively conservative
gender norms and those in communities with more liberal ones, happiness accounts systematically diverge.
In villages where non-SHG members hold relatively conservative values, SHG membership decreases
personal well-being, whereas the opposite holds true for SHG members whose social context is
characterized by more supportive attitudes.
Hence, more autonomy is not a sufficient condition for enhancing women’s happiness, at least not in the
medium run. In fact, autonomy can decrease well-being in a social context that is hostile to evolving gender
norms. Such drops in well-being present the risk that women opt out of the empowerment process
altogether. However, increases in autonomy appear to positively affect subjective well-being in villages with
relatively liberal gender norms. This positive relationship in relatively liberal villages indicates autonomy has
a positive effect on happiness in settings where attitudes toward empowerment are supportive.
Policy recommendations. Several policy recommendations can be drawn out, which challenge the current
SHG model to varying degrees. First, SHG members could be better prepared for the social sanctions they
might experience. Another strategy to minimize social sanctions is to prioritize the sensitization of non-SHG
members, both men and women, to the motivations of SHG members. Alternatively, targeting could be
more selective, focusing SHG implementation efforts exclusively on relatively liberal communities, while
SHGs may be set up in conservative communities only when sensitization efforts start to bear fruit.

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Firm Performance and Women on the Board: Evidence from Spanish Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Firm Performance and Women on the Board: Evidence from

Spanish Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises
Feminist Economics
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Juan Francisco Martín-Ugedo and Antonio Mínguez-Vera
In recent years there has been pressure from society to include

women on boards of directors. As a consequence, the average
number of women in corporate boardrooms has increased.
However, there is wide variation across countries, with the
average female representation still at a low level in Europe
compared to the US. Antonio Mínguez-Vera and Juan Francisco
Martín-Ugedo examine the effect of gender diversity in Spanish
boards of directors of small and medium-sized enterprises
(SMEs) on firm performance. In addition, they also examine the
variables that may influence the presence of women on boards.
Why might there be a link between gender diversity and

financial performance? The board of directors has many
important functions, including monitoring and controlling
managers, providing information and counsel to managers,
monitoring compliance with applicable laws and regulations, and
linking the corporation to the external environment. Scholars
argue that women directors may have an important influence on the board’s working style and board
processes, and, consequently, on firm performance. For example, some studies show women are more risk
averse that men; other researchers point to women’s nontraditional backgrounds and the unique
perspectives, experiences, and work styles they may bring to the board as compared to their male
counterparts. Thus, women may exert a more positive influence on the firm than men on tasks related to
corporate social responsibility and strategic control. However, the evidence examining the link between
gender diversity on the board and financial performance is limited.
This study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it provides empirical evidence from Spain, a
country with one of the lowest levels of female representation on boards in the European Union. Second,
most previous evidence on boards of directors focuses on large and/or listed firms and not SMEs, as this
study does. Compared to large firms, boards of SMEs tend to be more homogeneous, less structurally
complex, and less formalized. Therefore, the range and depth of tasks performed by each member is more
varied and intense than in large firms, with each member having a greater chance to influence the adoption
of decisions. Third, in legal terms, the Spanish market is governed by the Continental, or Civil Law, system, in
contrast with the American market, which provides most of the available evidence and which belongs to the
Common Law, or Anglo-Saxon, system. The differences between the two systems are large, but can be
summarized in three points: companies in the Anglo-Saxon system tend to have a relatively dispersed
shareholder structure; there is more investor protection; and the internal control mechanisms, which
include the board of directors, are relatively weaker.
Firm performance as cause and effect of gender diversity. Focusing on a sample of non-financial SMEs
from the System of Analysis of Iberian Balance Sheets (SABI) database for the period 2003 to 2008 and
using a panel data methodology, applying the System GMM technique, Mínguez-Vera and Martín-Ugedo
show that the probability of women’s presence on the boards of Spanish SMEs increases with firm
performance (measured in terms of Return on Assets [ROA] and with the presence of a family member as
major shareholder), but diminishes with firm risk (measured as the logarithm of the variability of the ROA
over the previous five years) and when a corporation is the main shareholder. The authors also show that
the presence of women on a firm’s board exerts a positive effect on performance. Similar evidence is
obtained for different subsamples examined, such as the subsample of firms that have a corporation as
main shareholder, and firms belonging to the secondary and tertiary sector. This evidence confirms that the
presence of women on boards is positive for economic reasons.
The evidence presented in this paper shows that the presence of women on boards leads to positive
economic results. It can therefore be argued that there are practical as well as ethical reasons to include
women on boards. The authors recommend that, following the example of Norway, policymakers should
promote legislative changes that will increase the presence of women on boards.

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A Dynamic Gender Analysis of Spain's Pension Reforms of 2011 | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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A Dynamic Gender Analysis of Spain's Pension Reforms of

2011
Feminist Economics
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Patricia Peinado
One of the contributions of feminist economics has been to

analyze and demonstrate links between gendered labor market
experience and retirement incomes. In contrast to previous
research, which implemented simulation techniques, Patricia
Peinado presents an empirical methodology to study the
evolution of gender differences in retirement income among
retirees in Spain. The study provides a way to predict the effects
of the Spanish government’s policies proposed in 2011 and set
to be gradually implemented between 2013 and 2027. These
reforms will change the institutional framework of Spanish social
security system in an effort to address the fiscal challenges of an
aging population. Peinado defines two different measures in
order to account for the gender income differences among
pensioners (Gender Poverty Gap [GPG]) and the effects of
pension reform proposals on these gender differences (Gender
Policy Effect).
Econometric duration model. The econometric duration model used in this study helps to account for
gender differences among pensioners by considering the extent to which current pension systems are
capable of preventing poverty among the pensioners they protect. Specifically, it provides estimates of the
evolution of the current GPG and computes the expected GPG after the implementation of each policy
reform. Poverty is measured as the 60 percent of the Median Equivalized Income, which is a standard
poverty threshold widely available in most countries. This availability together with the fact that this
threshold is particular for each country and related to its specific level of income, simplifies the process to
implement international comparisons. Additionally, the methodology allows observing the evolution of
gender differences independently of the year of reference in the data. The first year observed is said to be
the first year of retirement and the evolution is defined as the number of years during which the pension is
being drawn or “pension age.” Consequently, the interesting point of the model is that it could be usefully
applied to measure gender differences or policy reforms in other contexts, such as in other countries with
similar pension systems or to compare different pension systems.
The case of Spain. The dynamic analysis implemented for Spain uses data from the year 2007 to estimate
the evolution of current gender differences and predict the magnitude of differences after the reforms are
implemented. The study concludes that in the case of Spain: (1) gender differences are greater the longer
the pensioners have been drawing the benefit; (2) a policy reform that increases the age at which a worker
enters the system as a pensioner is expected to progressively reduce gender differences; (3) a policy reform
that extends the period used to calculate the initial pension is expected to increase gender differences;
while (4) increasing the number of years that pensioners contribute to the pension system is expected to
decrease gender differences.
Best policy design. According to these results, the best policy reforms to avoid gender discrimination
include: (1) increasing the retirement age of pensioners – since in Spain women tend to retire at younger
ages compared to men, raising the retirement age will increase the benefit entitlement for women because
it will both extend the number of years worked and increase the contribution spell, changes that will reduce
the gender difference;
(2) increasing the number of years an individual must contribute to the pension system – since in Spain
work lives tend to be shorter for women than for men and the pension system tends to benefit each
additional year of contribution more for shorter careers, contributing a longer period should reduce gender
differences; or (3) combining both of these measures. In contrast, taking into account a longer work career
to calculate the pension benefit would produce adverse effects for women. Because women’s work careers
are usually related to lower earnings, taking into account more years of lower earnings, and therefore lower
contributions to pension systems, would not improve their situation compared with men.

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Gender Employment Disparities, Financialization, and Profitability Dynamics on the Eve of Italy's Post-2008 Crisis | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Gender Employment Disparities, Financialization, and

Profitability Dynamics on the Eve of Italy's Post-2008 Crisis
Feminist Economics
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Alice Tescari and Andrea Vaona
This study investigates the connection between gender

employment disparities, structural change, and aggregate
profitability in Italy from 1994 to 2008 – the period before the
country’s longest recession since the end of the Second World
War. Using decomposition analyses, Alice Tescari and Andrea
Vaona highlight some important features contributing to this
economic decline and show that the weakness of the Italian
economy was already evident in the years before the outburst of
the crisis in 2008. Moreover, they explore the gender dimension
of these trends and place it within an international economic
context.
Decline in profitability and gender segregation. The study

finds that in Italy between 1994 and 2008, the aggregate profit
rate declined, but the profit share did not. The authors show that
the differing trends of profit rate and share were due to a
disappointing performance of real output per unit of real capital.
In other words, Italian firms were unable to convert a considerable distributional windfall into successful
investments through product and process innovation. Therefore, Italy experienced a spiral of economic
decline and falling living standards. As shown by decomposition analysis, the decline in living standards
were driven more by men’s wages, working hours, and employment rather than those of women, who
remained at the margin of the national economy.
Decomposition analysis also shows that structural change was particularly important in these
developments. From 1994 to 2005 the Italian economy specialized in sectors with falling real wages and
wage shares. The financial sector played a key role in this process, due to a series of sizeable collective wage
restraints – except in manager salaries.
Putting it in an international context. Comparing Italy to other countries, one can label it as a “would-be
neo-mercantilist economy.” Italy tried to follow the path of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Japan, and China, for
instance, in boosting exports thanks to wage restraints. However, a lack of innovation and a weak
specialization led this strategy to fail on a grand scale. Investments did not have adequate returns, and Italy
ended up sharing most of the problems of debt-led economies, such as Greece, Ireland, and Spain, but
without previously enjoying a similar consumption boom as in those countries.
International past experience shows that wage restraints are neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition
for whoever wants to undertake the “Italian job,” namely stopping the decline of the Italian economy and
pursuing a new “Renaissance.” The recipe for those who cultivate these ambitions has both an international
and a national dimension, as explained below.
Policy implications. Contextualizing our results within the existing literature on international and Italian
economic conditions, it is possible to draw a number of policy implications. First, Italy should place pressure
on the international arena to put an end to the dichotomy between export-led and debt-led economies.
Instead, as advocated by many economists, such as Eckhard Hein and Achim Truger among others, a global
Keynesian New Deal should be adopted to support wage-led growth.
Second, to improve both labor and capital productivity, Italy needs to recover competitiveness by filling its
considerable innovation gap vis-à-vis other developed countries and to continue the within-firm
restructuring process it started, though too late, before the outburst of the crisis. The national dimension
has important gender aspects too. Women should be more involved in the economic and political life of the
country. Ending gender segregation is a complex task. It can involve, for instance, improving welfare
provisions, instituting labor norms to reconcile work and family duties, raising gender awareness, and
training provision to overcome discrimination in recruitment and career promotions. Women’s
empowerment may also be pursued through favoring women’s entrepreneurship.

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FERNs 20.4
Feminist Economics
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Special Issue: Gender and Economics in Muslim

Communities
This contribution seeks to delineate the broad contours of a

transnational, anti-imperial feminist perspective on gender and
economics in Muslim communities by bringing together feminist
analyses of Orientalist tropes, development discourses and
policies, and macro- and microeconomic trends. The goal is to
facilitate conversations among scholars who have tended to
work within their respective disciplinary and methodological silos
despite shared interests. This approach pays special attention to
intersectionality, historicity, and structural constraints by
focusing on the diversity of the experiences of women and men
by religion, location, citizenship, class, age, ethnicity, race, marital
status, and other factors.
Read more.
Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities: A Critical Feminist and Postcolonial Analysis
Moving beyond Culturalism and Formalism: Islam, Women, and Political Unrest in the Middle East
Patriarchy versus Islam: Gender and Religion in Economic Growth
The Influence of Patriarchal Norms, Institutions and Household Composition on Women's Employment in
28 Muslim-Majority Countries
Unilateral Divorce for Women and Labor Supply in the Middle East and North Africa: The Effect of Khul
Reform
Funding Pain: Bedouin Women and Political Economy in the Naqab/Negev

Peace in the Household: Gender, Agency, and Villagers’ Measures of Marital Quality in Bangladesh
“Just like Prophet Mohammad Preached”: Labor, Piety, and Charity in Contemporary Turkey
Entrepreneurial Subjectivities and Gendered Complexities: Neo-liberal Citizenship in Turkey
Choice and Constraint in Paid Work: Women from Low-Income Households in Tehran
Agency through Development: Hausa Women's NGOs and CBOs in Kano, Nigeria
Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities: A Critical Feminist and

Postcolonial Analysis
Ebru Kongar, Jennifer C. Olmsted and Elora Shehabuddin
Development scholars and practitioners have become increasingly concerned about rising global inequality,
at a time when the development community is also committed to achieving gender…
Read
Moving beyond Culturalism and Formalism: Islam, Women, and Political

Unrest in the Middle East
Gamze Çavdar and Yavuz Yaşar
In some Western media and scholarship, the Middle East uprisings of 2010 and 2011 and the subsequent
political unrest in the region are often marked by two common themes: women and Islam. It is often
assumed…
Read
Patriarchy versus Islam: Gender and Religion in Economic Growth

Elissa Braunstein
Is Islam a good indicator of patriarchal norms for studying the negative impact of gender inequality on
economic growth? A subset of the economics literature on gender inequality and development thinks so
and uses Islam as…
Read
The Influence of Patriarchal Norms, Institutions and Household

Composition on Women's Employment in 28 Muslim-Majority Countries
Niels Spierings
The economic position of women in countries with predominantly Muslim populations (hereafter, Muslim-
majority countries) has featured prominently on policy agendas for many years now. Despite much
academic progress in…
Read
Unilateral Divorce for Women and Labor Supply in the Middle East and
North Africa: The Effect of Khul Reform
Lena Hassani-Nezhad and Anna Sjögren
Women’s labor force participation rate among countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region
is barely 30 percent, which is well below other regions in the world. Gender inequalities are…
Read
Funding Pain: Bedouin Women and Political Economy in the

Naqab/Negev
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Antonina Griecci, Himmat Zu’bi, and Rachel Busbridge
How does the economy of international funding for local nongovernmental organizations impact Palestinian
activism and resistance inside the state of Israel?…
Read
Peace in the Household: Gender, Agency, and Villagers’ Measures of

Marital Quality in Bangladesh
Fauzia Erfan Ahmed
Although development studies have emphasized quality of life, the quality of marriage remains
uninvestigated in this literature. Theories of marriage and intrahousehold gender relations are largely based
on the bargaining…
Read
“Just like Prophet Mohammad Preached”: Labor, Piety, and Charity in

Contemporary Turkey
Damla Isik
Recent research has pointed out how, challenged by ongoing neoliberalization and globalization, Muslim
women and men throughout the world are refashioning their labor in various public, institutional, and
workspaces as acts of…
Read
Entrepreneurial Subjectivities and Gendered Complexities: Neo-liberal

Citizenship in Turkey
Özlem Altan-Olcay
Recent decades have seen a surge in encouraging entrepreneurship among disadvantaged populations in
less-developed countries. In particular, attention has focused on the potential of entrepreneurship among
poor women to…
Read
Choice and Constraint in Paid Work: Women from Low-Income

Households in Tehran
Roksana Bahramitash and Jennifer C. Olmsted
Feminist economists have increasingly problematized dualistic assumptions that women’s employment is
either empowering or exploitative. Detailed accounts that illustrate the complex ways in which…
Read
Agency through Development: Hausa Women's NGOs and CBOs in

Kano, Nigeria
Adryan Wallace
As several scholars have observed, dominant development paradigms have tended to ignore the
contributions of Muslim women to development efforts in their communities. Analyzing the participation of
devout Muslim women in…
Read

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Published on 22 September 2015. Last updated on 22 September 2015.

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Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities: A Critical Feminist and Postcolonial Analysis | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities: A Critical

Feminist and Postcolonial Analysis
Feminist Economics
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Ebru Kongar, Jennifer C. Olmsted and Elora Shehabuddin
Development scholars and practitioners have become

increasingly concerned about rising global inequality, at a time
when the development community is also committed to
achieving gender equality. At the same time, critical scholars
have raised concerns about the long-standing problem of
Orientalism, and particularly of the impulse to stereotype Muslim
women. Given that Muslims make up one fifth of the world’s
population, and are overrepresented among the poor, nuanced
studies that portray the diversity of Muslim women’s experiences
and desires are of key importance.
A feminist and postcolonial approach. Ebru Kongar, Jennifer C.

Olmsted, and Elora Shehabuddin bring together feminist
critiques of Orientalist literatures and feminist analyses of
economic processes and outcomes to examine the diverse ways
that Muslim women have been portrayed in contemporary
economic analyses. In doing so, they aim to facilitate
conversations among feminist scholars across disciplines in order to provide a more nuanced picture of the
situation facing women in Muslim communities. This approach pays special attention to the role of Islam in
economic analyses of gender equality and women’s well-being in Muslim communities, while also
challenging biased and inaccurate accounts that essentialize Islam. Their article argues that, in order to gain
a nuanced understanding of gender and economics in Muslim communities, it is crucial for feminist
scholarship not only to address the concerns over the male and market biases in economic scholarship, but
also incorporate an awareness of white and western bias and privilege. A feminist and postcolonial
approach also pays special attention to the diversity of women’s and men’s experiences within and across
Muslim communities and explores the complex ways that Islam interacts with social, economic, and political
factors in women’s economic realities in these communities. Ideally, this approach is carefully situated
within a historical and institutional context, including the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. Finally, a
nuanced picture of gender equality requires interdisciplinary analyses and different methodological
approaches such as ethnographic work, quantitative data analyses, and historical and rhetorical analyses. In
particular, the increasing overreliance on quantitative methods in social sciences such as economics and
political science may mean forgoing a more nuanced, detailed analysis that requires either a qualitative or a
mixed-methods approach.
Orientalism and stereotypes. A long history of scholarship and popular writing about Islam and Muslims,
dating back to the nineteenth century, reflects Western biases in perceptions and depictions of women and
men in Muslim communities, commonly referred to as “Orientalism.” Renewed emphasis since the 9/11
attacks has been put on portraying women in Muslim communities as passive victims of Islam and of
Muslim men (themselves stereotyped as violent terrorists and patriarchs), and, quite significantly, in need of
saving by the West (by colonialism, by development, by neoliberal policy packages). Concerns about
Orientalist stereotypes are not merely academic, since existing research often shapes policy decisions,
which in turn has very real economic, political, and social implications for women living in Muslim
communities.
Understanding the economic lives of Muslim women. In the context of a feminist-economic critique of
Orientalism, Kongar, Olmsted, and Shehabuddin discuss how the articles in this special issue advance our
knowledge of gender and economics in Muslim communities. Nuanced case studies conducted in
Bangladesh, Iran, Israel, Nigeria, and Turkey illustrate the historical and institutional diversity of Muslim
communities and draw vivid pictures of the everyday economic lives of Muslim women and men in these
communities. These are complemented by quantitative analyses that extend beyond inserting Islam as a
dummy variable. The contributions to this special issue represent a wide range of disciplines, including
anthropology, economics, gender studies, political science, psychology, and sociology. This diversity places
critiques of Orientalist scholarship in direct dialog with scholarship on economic development in Muslim
contexts and illustrates how different methods and frameworks can work together to provide a better
understanding of gender equality and women’s well-being in Muslim contexts. Challenging Orientalism
ultimately is not merely an academic exercise. It is a requirement in order to assure that development
policies effectively address the diversity of women’s lives.

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Moving beyond Culturalism and Formalism: Islam, Women, and Political Unrest in the Middle East | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Moving beyond Culturalism and Formalism: Islam, Women,

and Political Unrest in the Middle East
Feminist Economics
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Gamze Çavdar and Yavuz Yaşar
In some Western media and scholarship, the Middle East

uprisings of 2010 and 2011 and the subsequent political unrest
in the region are often marked by two common themes: women
and Islam. It is often assumed that women’s lives would be
negatively influenced by the presence of Islam. The assumption
that Islam is the main determinant of Muslim women’s lives has
roots in long-held cultural approaches to Muslim societies, which
take it as a given that Muslim women are unique among all
women and in desperate need of Western protection. This
culturalist understanding of Muslim societies has long been
criticized by scholars, who have demonstrated that Muslim
women show great variation across countries and share many
characteristics with non-Muslim women. These challenges have
come from various perspectives, including the fields of political
economy and postcolonial studies. In particular, area specialists,
who engage in fieldwork and pay special attention to local
contexts, remain highly critical of the culturalist accounts.
The formalist challenge. A more recent, but less promising, challenge to the culturalist approaches has
come from formalism, which has applied the precepts of neoclassical economic theory to Muslim women.
Gamze Çavdar and Yavuz Yaşar discuss this newly emerging trend, in which the discipline of political science
is influenced by economics. Having examined 118 abstracts and 104 articles published in top disciplinary
journals for political science, the authors discuss two articles (M. Steven Fish 2002; Lisa Blaydes and Drew A.
Linzer 2008) as examples that address women’s status in the Middle East and North Africa. At the time of
writing this article, the uprisings were still ongoing and the only written material was the news coverage;
there was no scholarly article published about the uprisings yet. Although the sample articles were written
earlier and did not examine the uprisings, they demonstrate how the recurring themes of Islam and women
dominate the literature. Çavdar's and Yaşar's examination of the abstracts and articles reveals that the
formalist trend in the top political science journals has dominated the field, leaving little room for non-
formalist approaches. Striving to be objective and scientific, neoclassical economic theory assumes that
individuals are rational, self-interested, and autonomous. Accordingly, individuals who are fully aware of
their interests try to maximize their gains and minimize their losses. How is formalism in economics applied
to the way the political science discipline approaches the Middle East region?
Use of formalism in economics. Roger E. Backhouse (1998) identifies three different methodological
formalisms in economics: axiomatization, mathematization, and empirical testing. Axiomatization reduces
the main matters of knowledge to a set of independent axioms on which it makes propositions according to
well-defined logical rules. Mathematization simply utilizes mathematical techniques (geometry, algebra, set
theory, topology) in economic arguments. Empirical testing is used to solve specific problems based on a
set of methods that are determined by common consent. Since the axioms apply to any time and society,
rational agents can be consumers, producers, the state, voters, or the whole nation, just as their underlying
motivations may include buying, selling, being autocratic, marrying, voting, or making a decision about war
or peace. The results of theoretical constructs are usually demonstrated by comparative-statics exercises
and tested by regression analyses.
Formalism reinforces misconceptions of Muslim women. Çavdar and Yaşar show that the use of
formalism in political science under the influence of neoclassical theory hardly provides a good alternative
to culturalism. The article demonstrates this by focusing on the two sample articles. Despite claiming to be
objective, value-free, and universalist, the formalist approaches reinforce misconceptions about Muslim
women as unique and in dire need for Western intervention. This happens due to the fact that the
culturalist misconceptions are still present in these studies, and this time they are presented as scientific
and value-free. The authors argue that the challenges of Muslim women should be studied by
contextualizing domestic settings, questioning the misconceptions about their uniqueness, and paying
attention to the variation among them instead of taking Islam as the main determinants of their lives.
References
Backhouse, Roger E. 1998. “If Mathematics is Informal, Then Perhaps We Should Accept that Economics
Must be Informal Too.” The Economic Journal 108(451): 1848-58.
Blaydes, Lisa and Drew A. Linzer. 2008. “The Political Economy of Women’s Support for Fundamentalist
Islam.” World Politics 60(4): 576–609.
Fish, M. Steven. 2002. “Islam and Authoritarianism.” World Politics 55(1): 4–37.

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Patriarchy versus Islam: Gender and Religion in Economic Growth | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Patriarchy versus Islam: Gender and Religion in Economic

Growth
Feminist Economics
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Elissa Braunstein
Is Islam a good indicator of patriarchal norms for studying the

negative impact of gender inequality on economic growth? A
subset of the economics literature on gender inequality and
development thinks so and uses Islam as a proxy for traditional
culture or as an exemplar of a “taste” for gender discrimination.
Elissa Braunstein argues this approach is a problem on at least
two counts: first, it confirms Western stereotypes about Islam as
exceptional relative to other religious affiliations, and second, it
obscures the role of patriarchy as a system of male advantage
that constrains economic growth and development. It is not that
certain Islamic countries or societies are so closely wed to their
(extremist) religious beliefs that they are willing to pay high
economic costs to maintain them, but rather that patriarchal
systems benefit a few at the expense of the many, a dynamic this
study terms “patriarchal rent-seeking.” Focusing on religion
draws attention away from the sources and consequences of
patriarchal power, centering it on misleadingly simplistic views of
Muslim practice and culture. Braunstein makes this argument using regression analysis in a cross-country
endogenous growth framework, utilizing the concept of patriarchal rent-seeking as a way to understand the
economic costs of establishing and maintaining patriarchal institutions.
Gender inequality is economically costly. The contention that gender inequality is economically costly is a
common finding (and policy refrain) in the empirical growth literature. The basic logic is that gender
inequality and discrimination are inefficient because they do not maximize productive capacity since they,
for instance, limit women’s access to education or work, resulting in higher levels of fertility.
Patriarchal rent-seeking as additional cost. It also seems likely that gender hierarchies exact other, less
direct economic costs that are not adequately captured by the gender inequality variables typically used in
these sorts of studies – namely, inequality in education or employment. Consider that patriarchy, a system
of male advantage associated with a variety of institutions, rules, and norms, must be created and
maintained. These efforts themselves exact an economic cost over and above those associated with gender
inequality in education or labor markets. One way to conceptualize these activities economically is by
thinking of them in terms of rent-seeking, which refers to economically wasteful efforts to claim unearned
revenues. Rent-seeking can influence the organization of nonmarket institutions, as when patriarchal
property rights create male advantage in capital markets, or when norms of violence against women
maintain male dominance and privileged access to resources. Patriarchal rent-seeking can thus be thought
of as socially wasteful efforts to establish and claim the economic rents associated with male privilege.
Islam as a control for patriarchal preferences is misleading. Braunstein’s empirical analysis shows that
direct measures of patriarchal institutions dominate a variety of religious affiliation variables and model
specifications in capturing the negative impact of gender inequality on economic growth. Constructing an
index called “patriarchal dominance,” which is based on measuring the extent of patriarchal institutions in
social practices like property rights and divorce, Braunstein finds that patriarchal dominance is associated
with substantial costs to economic growth, even after controlling for the negative impact of gender
inequality in education on income growth. Braunstein concludes that using affiliation with Islam as a control
for patriarchal preferences in studies of growth and gender inequality is misleading in multiple ways. First, it
presumes an answer rather than critically investigating the question of what religious affiliation actually
measures. This presumption is particularly problematic in the context of prevailing social and political
stereotypes about Islam, which facilitate easy equivalences between Muslim communities and economic
irrationality or gender bias. Second, it obscures the role of patriarchy as a system of male advantage, which
incurs costs akin to those generated by rent-seeking activities. Therefore, it is likely that studies that use
gender inequality outcomes, such as those in education, income, or the labor market, to capture the growth
costs of gender bias are lower bound estimates. Incorporating direct measures of patriarchal institutions in
studies of gender and growth adds more nuance and rigor to our understanding of the economic causes
and consequences of gender systems.

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The Influence of Patriarchal Norms, Institutions and Household Composition on Women's Employment in 28 Muslim-Majority Countries | Explore Taylor & Franci...
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The Influence of Patriarchal Norms, Institutions and

Household Composition on Women's Employment in 28
Muslim-Majority Countries
Feminist Economics
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Niels Spierings
The economic position of women in countries with

predominantly Muslim populations (hereafter, Muslim-majority
countries) has featured prominently on policy agendas for many
years now. Despite much academic progress in understanding
the influences on these women’s positions, many comparative
studies tend to offer essentialist explanations and blame the
“patriarchal nature of Islam” for the supposed low levels of
women’s employment across these countries. This view
completely ignores the diversity among and within Muslim-
majority countries, and, by implying that Western countries are
not patriarchal, it also sketches a very simplistic picture of
patriarchy. Using survey data for twenty-eight Muslim-majority
countries, this study examines the relationships between
patriarchal norms, institutions, and household compositions and
women’s nonagricultural paid employment. To create a better
understanding of how patriarchy influences women’s economic
position in Muslim-majority countries, Spierings focuses on the
differences in women’s nonagricultural paid employment among and within these countries.
Patriarchy as a manifestation of traditional values. At the core of “classic patriarchy” are patrilineality
(men and older people are most important) and a strict male-breadwinner/female-homemaker model.
These positions can limit women’s employment likelihood when codified in state policies or enforced
through local norms. Moreover, if women are expected to be care providers, and men are expected to
provide an income, and if male and own children are considered more valuable, many aspects of the
composition of a household can be expected to influence women’s employment likelihood.
Studying differences. Spierings assesses how these different national, local, and household manifestations
of patriarchy influence women’s employment, using multilevel models and unique data on 250,410 women
from 383 districts in twenty-eight Muslim-majority countries. All of the women are married, divorced, or
widowed and between ages 15 and 49. The survey data are collected between 1997 and 2008. Descriptive
analysis confirms that the differences within and among countries is substantial: the nonagricultural paid
employment rates vary from 3.6 percent in Yemen to 47.6 percent in Nigeria, and the differences are even
larger at the district level, ranging from 0 to over 50 percent.
Patriarchal norms and policies differ among countries. Spierings finds that the differences between
countries and between districts within countries are partly explained by differences in patriarchal policies
and norms. The ones focusing on women’s public presence particularly impact their employment. Women’s
employment is lower depending on the level of dominance of men in the public sphere in the district (labor
market and education system) and the presence of laws restricting women’s movement and economic
rights. These norms and policies vary widely across countries and districts.
Household composition plays an important role. Household composition is important in shaping the
employment differences between households. Odds on employment are lower if the care needs in a
household are higher due to the presence of more and young children and elderly people. More adult
women being present help to alleviate those care needs and thus increase employment likelihoods. Since
men are expected to fulfill economic needs for an income first, the presence of adult men and having a
(male) partner lowers employment likelihoods, whereas being head of household increases it.
Who benefits from less patriarchal policies and norms? Finally, Spierings explores how the impact of
household composition differs according to the strength and presence of patriarchal norms and policies.
The results suggest that the impact of households’ demands for income or care is smaller in more
patriarchal environments, where all women are more restricted to the household. In less patriarchal
environments, women in a household without children or women without a male breadwinner can enter
the labor market more easily compared to women with children or a male breadwinner in the household.
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Unilateral Divorce for Women and Labor Supply in the Middle East and North Africa: The Effect of Khul Reform | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Unilateral Divorce for Women and Labor Supply in the Middle

East and North Africa: The Effect of Khul Reform
Feminist Economics
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Lena Hassani-Nezhad and Anna Sjögren
Women’s labor force participation rate among countries in the

Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is barely 30 percent,
which is well below other regions in the world. Gender
inequalities are manifested in the legal environment governing
family decisions such as divorce, inheritance, and custody laws.
Strict and asymmetric laws, specifically divorce laws, may
arguably contribute to an imbalance of bargaining power to the
extent that decisions in the household reflect more of the
husband’s preferences. Therefore, it is an interesting and
important policy question to investigate whether and how the
labor supply of women in the region adjusts to a change in the
legal environment. Lena Hassani-Nezhad and Anna Sjögren try
to answer this question by studying a reform in divorce laws in
the MENA. During 1980–2008, many countries in the region
adopted Khul, which under Islamic law gives a woman the right
to unilaterally petition for divorce in return for paying back her
dower (Mahr; a gift a groom gives to a bride upon marriage,
which legally becomes her property). Divorce can be granted by decision of a judge, without the husband’s
consent. Prior to Khul, unilateral divorce existed only for men and a woman petitioning for divorce needed
the consent of the husband. During this legal reform period, women’s labor force participation rates also
increased by some 50 percent. Hassani-Nezhad and Sjögren investigate whether Khul can explain the
dramatic increase in women’s labor supply in the MENA.
How does women’s right to unilateral divorce affect their labor supply choices? There are two
mechanisms through which a Khul reform may affect women’s labor force participation. First, it is possible
that the probability of divorce increases. This raises a woman’s incentive to secure a livelihood for herself
both within marriage and in the event of divorce. In marriage, the woman may want to prepare for the
possibility of a life on her own by working and gaining attachment to the labor market. Following the
divorce, the woman obviously has more incentives to work, since she cannot rely on the husband’s earnings
for her and her children’s livelihood. The second mechanism is that Khul reform increases women’s
bargaining power within the household by allowing women to walk out of marriage in case they are not
satisfied with their marriage arrangements. If it is the husbands’ preferences or wishes to conform with
traditional gender roles that prevent women from working, increasing women’s bargaining power may
result in their increased labor force participation even if they do not act on their divorce threat.
Data and methodology. The labor force participation data are taken from Key Indicators of Labor Market
(KILM dataset) for eighteen MENA countries over the period 1980–2008. To investigate the impact of the
reform, the changes in women’s labor force participation before and after the implementation in the
countries with the reform is compared with the corresponding change in countries without the reform.
Controlling for country fixed effects, year fixed effects, and country-specific time trends, the authors find
that, following the reform, there was an increase in the labor supply of women compared to men. There is
also some evidence that this increase was larger for the younger cohort of women compared to the older
cohort.
How can we interpret these results? The evidence presented suggests that Khul increased women’s labor
force participation, but available evidence on divorce rates does not support that divorce rates have
increased. A possible interpretation is thus that Khul reform has improved women’s bargaining power
within marriage such that more women who want to work are empowered to do so. The results therefore
suggest that policies balancing the bargaining power of the wife and the husband in the household are an
important policy tool to increase women’s labor supply in the MENA.

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Funding Pain: Bedouin Women and Political Economy in the Naqab/Negev | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Funding Pain: Bedouin Women and Political Economy in the

Naqab/Negev
Feminist Economics
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Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Antonina Griecci, Himmat Zu’bi, and

Rachel Busbridge
How does the economy of international funding for local

nongovernmental organizations impact Palestinian activism and
resistance inside the state of Israel? Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian,
Antonina Griecci, Himmat Zu’bi, and Rachel Busbridge explore
this question, in particular examining how donors rely on
Orientalist assumptions about Bedouin women living in
unrecognized villages in the Naqab/Negev desert in southern
Israel. Rather than shaping funding efforts around historical and
political awareness of Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian
dispossession, the funding agencies instead focus on individual
and culturalized problems as the root of the women’s struggles.
By bringing Bedouin women’s voices to the forefront of analysis,
the authors challenge the political economy of state violence
against the women’s communities and consider how donors’
perceptions of Bedouin culture and gender roles can reinforce
the state’s oppressive structures.
International funding economy. The authors’ argument is driven by interviews, focus groups, and
participatory research conducted between 2009 and 2011 with twenty Bedouin activist women engaged in
challenging the state’s violation of their rights and gendered violence. The women operate in the context of
the Naqab’s unrecognized villages, which the state constantly seeks to dispossess through denying basic
rights to the inhabitants. The state refuses to provide services such as water, electricity, education, and
transportation infrastructure to these communities, and the threat of home demolitions creates a perpetual
circumstance of instability and displacement. Shalhoub-Kevorkian et al. discuss the state’s settler colonial
policies against the unrecognized villages, through which Bedouin communities are forced to either remain
unrecognized in their historic homeland or give up their land rights and relocate to government-approved
“planned towns.” The authors investigate how donors’ insistence on individualizing and culturalizing the
Bedouin women’s struggles neutralizes the political and historical dimensions of their suffering and further
impedes women’s abilities to work against systemic and structural erasure. According to the women
interviewed, donors often violate their privacy, inquiring about personal and intimate details of their lives in
order to approve funding to support them. This voyeurism of their pain not only increases feelings of
exclusion and isolation among Bedouin women, it enhances their sense of dispossession. Bedouin women
explained that the donors provided funding only after they exposed their own and their community’s
internal struggles.
By exposing the inscription of power over the Bedouin community, the authors argue that the economy of
international funding emphasizes the “primitivism and patriarchy” of the Bedouin community, their “culture,”
and “traditions,” while hiding the machinery of oppression and the regime of control that disrupts the safety
of their community, traps their social relations, and limits their political and social aspirations. As such, while
funding is intended to assist women and “help” or “develop” these communities, donors’ agendas can end
up replicating the state’s colonial logic, while further dispossessing women from the little power they have.
Funding pain. Shalhoub-Kevorkian et al. suggest that in order to effectively engage with the Bedouin
community in the Naqab, donors must recognize the political, economic, legal, and historical modes of
oppression that shape the current circumstance of Bedouin women’s lives. Centralizing Bedouin women’s
voices and analyses and engaging with their insights to understand the systems of power they encounter
and that guide the politics of funding is necessary to reshaping this approach. The authors conclude that if
scholars and policymakers fail to consider these bottom-up voices, donors will not only end up “funding
pain” but will exacerbate the structure of erasure that maintains the funding economy.

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Peace in the Household: Gender, Agency, and Villagers’ Measures of Marital Quality in Bangladesh | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Peace in the Household: Gender, Agency, and Villagers’

Measures of Marital Quality in Bangladesh
Feminist Economics
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Fauzia Erfan Ahmed
Although development studies have emphasized quality of life,

the quality of marriage remains uninvestigated in this literature.
Theories of marriage and intrahousehold gender relations are
largely based on the bargaining model of marriage, which
analyzes the marital relationship as based on negotiation
strength and exit options. This study challenges the bargaining
model of marriage because it is not based on women’s
knowledge and voices. Based on findings from an ethnographic
study (1999–2009) of ninety-two microcredit-loanee families in
rural Bangladesh, Fauzia Ahmed investigates local meanings and
measures of gender relations. She reveals that Muslim women
believe that high marital quality or togetherness leads to peace
in the household, which is a local model of marriage.
Peace-in-the-household model. Peace in the household

(shangshare shanti) is a key concept believed by both Muslims
and Hindus in rural Bangladesh. It is gendered and hotly
debated against the current backdrop of changing social norms in Bangladesh, with the definition of a good
Muslim woman as the main focus. A “good” Muslim woman is traditionally held responsible for maintaining
this peace; and it is she who is blamed, if there is “trouble” in the household. But, as Ahmed’s findings
indicate, village women ingeniously shift the locus of the debate to ask an equally important question: What
should a good Muslim husband be like?
Eight measures of marital quality. Sharecropper women answered this question by identifying eight local
measures of marital quality. Together, these measures define what low-income women think a good Muslim
husband should be like. These measures include: 1) Respect for women’s reproductive labor. Women want
husbands to be especially loving during pregnancy, childbirth, and when they are breastfeeding; 2)
Willingness to put property in wife’s name. Even though Islam gives women property rights, women often
give up their inheritance rights to property in order to maintain a good relationship with their brothers.
Property, as the most valued asset, means prestige and security for women; 3) Joint decision making.
Women spend more of their income on family needs; while some husbands are unwilling to even disclose
their income to their wives. Joint decision-making, especially in financial matters, is imperative for a stable
household economy. 4) Investment in fatherhood. Women want husbands to take an interest in their
children’s studies and to keep track of their academic progress. Women expect this degree of investment in
the family because it unites the couple toward a common purpose – a better life for their children; 5)
Termination of domestic violence; 6) Sharecropper women love and revere the Prophet and use him as a
role model. They think that his relationships with his women relatives are exemplary. The Prophet’s respect
for women’s rights serves as the collective ideology of Muslim sharecropper women’s struggle for gender
justice; 7) Understanding the wife’s need to rest. Women’s paid work has increased as a result of their
entrepreneurial activities, but their reproductive labor has not decreased. Housework cannot be
postponed, and husbands need to share the housework; and 8) Entrusting a wife with physical mobility.
When they go to the NGO office to take out micro loans, women are often accused of having affairs with
NGO staff. A husband should trust his wife, and she should not have to ask his permission before she
leaves the house.
Transforming masculinity. The peace-in-the-household model, with its eight measures of a good
husband identified by sharecropper women, suggests the transformation of oppressive masculinity is
imperative in rural Bangladesh. In addition to identifying these characteristics of a good husband, women
argue that gender empowerment and poverty alleviation programs must include men. Women’s voices
indicate that it is not enough just to focus on women alone; men must also take responsibility for changing
conventional notions of manhood. Through inclusion of men as partners, transformation of oppressive
masculinity needs to become a major program strategy for development organizations all over the world.

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“Just like Prophet Mohammad Preached”: Labor, Piety, and Charity in Contemporary Turkey | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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“Just like Prophet Mohammad Preached”: Labor, Piety, and

Charity in Contemporary Turkey
Feminist Economics
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Damla Isik
Recent research has pointed out how, challenged by ongoing

neoliberalization and globalization, Muslim women and men
throughout the world are refashioning their labor in various
public, institutional, and workspaces as acts of piety. This trend
invites the close examination of everyday pious practices, paying
attention to how such practices affect and are affected by
economic choices. Based on ethnographic research conducted
in Turkey during 2004–9, Damla Isik documents how gendered
individual religious practices are conjoined to transnational
business competition, changing labor conditions, and broader
projects of economic transformation. Isik focuses on the carpet
weaving and textile industries and civil society organizations in
Turkey and investigates the ways in which charitable giving, pious
practice, and local labor conditions create uniquely complex
ways in which socioeconomic policies, processes, and
commitments affect gendered lives.
Pious conduct and economic behavior. Isik’s study examines everyday conduct as a form of cultivating
individual discipline. Globalization and neoliberalization are not abstract concepts imported or exported
wholesale; they are ubiquitous, daily assemblages of organization and governance of proper conduct. Isik
explores the nexus of proper conduct framed by charitable giving, daily work, and economic uncertainties.
In doing so, she underscores the inseparability of pious conduct and economic globalization and
neoliberalization that shape conservative women’s and men’s lives in contemporary Turkey.
Relatively few feminist studies examine the ways in which economic and pious conduct simultaneously give
meaning to and constitute each other in specific locales, which may mean that both communal and
individualistic sentiments could be present in how subjects react to specific circumstances. Similarly,
research that specifically focuses on globalization has little or no discussion of women’s understanding of
piety and pious conduct and does not specifically analyze the interconnected nature of pious conduct and
economic behavior. Yet, for the women Isik interviewed, any economic transaction needs to be firmly
situated in individual pious conduct, which prompts the researcher to go beyond the dichotomies of
communal-familial/individual to think seriously about the interconnections between piety, economy, charity,
family life, and the individual as they give meaning to each other within the context of neoliberalization and
globalization. In these neighborhoods, women used the weekly religious gatherings as a way to discuss
work-related issues, labor disputes, and share information with each other. Additionally, through these
gatherings, work was folded into a religious worldview that emphasized the value of home production as a
way to help women avoid gossip and use the home space as a productive and safe environment to support
the household budget.
With a focus on women’s everyday pious behavior, Isik also notes how despite continuous and impressive
economic growth, there has been a rather small reduction in social risks and income inequality in Turkey;
informalization of the labor market exacerbated this effect. The government has not taken effective steps to
reverse these damaging developments and indeed contributed to labor market flexibility and insecurity. It is
no surprise, then, that most conservative women interviewed by Isik actually prefer being homemakers to
being workers in the labor force and accept very low-paying home-based paid work.
Affective ties bind religious and economic practice. The article adds to the developing research on the
interconnected nature of religious and economic practice through a sustained focus on the pious economic
practices of women weavers and volunteers. Isik highlights how market relations that developed between
employers and employed also included ties of “nurturing, love, and altruism,” and these economic relations
were part of a bigger web of relations that included charitable associations, neighborhood religious
gatherings, and volunteerism activities. This shows the importance of communal, affective ties in the
inculcation of proper pious conduct and ethical practice that are both central to neoliberal and religious
practices. Neoliberalization is not about the fashioning of detached, individuated subjects; on the contrary,
it is about the mobilization and nurturance of affective ties that bind various types of work together, in this
case – semi-formal work of weaving and civil societal work of charitable giving.
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Entrepreneurial Subjectivities and Gendered Complexities: Neo-liberal Citizenship in Turkey | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Entrepreneurial Subjectivities and Gendered Complexities:

Neo-liberal Citizenship in Turkey
Feminist Economics
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Özlem Altan-Olcay
Recent decades have seen a surge in encouraging

entrepreneurship among disadvantaged populations in less-
developed countries. In particular, attention has focused on the
potential of entrepreneurship among poor women to generate
employment, reduce household poverty, and advance gender
equality. In her article, Özlem Altan-Olcay examines the
promotion of women’s entrepreneurship in Turkey in the early
2000s through the activities of two civil-society organizations that
focus on issues of gender equality in labor force participation. In
2011–12, the author collected data through participant-
observation in the organizations’ programs on cooperatives,
microcredit, business training, and consultancy as well as from
semi-structured, in-depth interviews with women who benefited
from these programs. The author interprets her data to explore
the following questions: What does the proliferation of ideas of
women’s entrepreneurship reveal about the relationship
between neoliberalism and citizenship? How does the everyday
implementation of these ideas in development programs interact with ideologies of gender?
Critiquing the neoliberal paradigm. The author also aims to build on and add to the literature critiquing
the neoliberal paradigm and the development programs couched in its logic. By considering Turkey, where
the consolidation of the neoliberal structuring of the state has already happened, the author provides a
context for coherent articulation of neoliberal citizenship ideals. Second, most ethnographic work available
on these issues centers on the relationship between domestic politics and international NGOs, as they
interact through the provisioning of microcredit to the poor. In this case, Altan-Olcay’s focus is both
narrower and wider: narrower in the sense of working with actors (entrepreneurial women) whose primary
goal was women’s economic empowerment, not necessarily treating this as an instrument of household
poverty alleviation; wider in the sense that she looks at a terrain of economic support, which includes
microcredit but is not limited to it.
Constructing “responsible” behavior. The author finds that these NGO initiatives do not just find and
encourage entrepreneurial women; they also contribute to the construction of gendered subjectivities of
entrepreneurship and individual responsibility. Interactions between NGOs and the beneficiaries create the
conditions through which women come to define their labor in terms of individual responsibility, effort, and
market capacity. Another finding is that the NGOs’ promotion of the goal of women’s gainful labor involves
the assumption that women contribute more to the well-being of their families than men. Discourses of
“giving mothers” expect women to use their income for the benefit of other members of their household.
This expectation is revealing of how neoliberal ideas of self-sufficiency do not actually work and are based
on the obfuscation of gendered divisions of affect and labor. Finally, these initiatives and the ideas behind
them have gendered implications for how citizenship is perceived and practiced in the neoliberal age.
Neoliberal citizenship, by which Altan-Olcay refers to discourses and practices that formulate expectations
of citizens’ conduct, speaks through the language of individual responsibility. Yet these same discourses
also encourage communitarian support in familial networks and assume “natural” divisions of labor,
responsibility, and affect between men and women.
Conclusion. Overall, Altan-Olcay aims to contribute to scholarly work on development programs by

shedding light on the hidden gender scripts of discourses and practices of entrepreneurship. By studying
the contradictions that emerge in the everyday, the author’s goal is to show inconsistencies of models of
neoliberal citizenship and how people navigate them. The paper shows the ways in which such initiatives
can lead to some economic empowerment for women in some cases, as a result of NGO officers’ own
resourcefulness, but not necessarily due to the underlying logics.

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Choice and Constraint in Paid Work: Women from Low-Income Households in Tehran | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Choice and Constraint in Paid Work: Women from Low-

Income Households in Tehran
Feminist Economics
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Roksana Bahramitash and Jennifer C. Olmsted
Feminist economists have increasingly problematized dualistic

assumptions that women’s employment is either empowering or
exploitative. Detailed accounts that illustrate the complex ways
in which women experience and perceive paid employment, as
well as more generally the role that choice and constraint play in
shaping employment outcomes, add depth to our understanding
of the complex ways paid employment impacts women. Such
studies are particularly valuable in the context of Muslim-
majority countries such as Iran, where stereotypes have
flattened scholars’ and policymakers’ understandings of the
diversity of women’s experiences, and in particular, where
women’s low labor force participation rates are routinely
identified as an indication of their disempowerment. Studies of
women and gender relations that have been enriched by
qualitative evidence provide needed nuance, which informs
theory, gives women more voice, and counters the
homogenization of Muslim women workers’ motivations,
aspirations, and work lives.
Low-income women’s economic strategies. Drawing from Roksana Bahramitash’s fieldwork, carried out
in in 2009–10 in various low-income communities in Tehran, Bahramitash and Jennifer C. Olmsted analyze
ninety interviews with a range of working women to illustrate the economic strategies low-income women
utilize to survive economic hardship, the women’s perceptions of their jobs, and the complexities of what
motivates women to seek paid employment. In keeping with feminist methods, the analysis gives voice to
Iranian women’s concerns as well as to the mixed feelings they have toward paid employment. Almost all of
the women interviewed said they worked due to economic need, but the degree to which paid employment
was a positive experience varied considerably. In response to employment choices that some perceived as
stigmatizing, and which also contributed to increasing women’s already heavy responsibilities in providing
unpaid care, a number of women expressed a preference for the male-breadwinner model. A few invoked
Islam (which stipulates that women have the right to control their assets and that husbands are responsible
for providing household income) as a strategy for controlling their own income and for limiting their work
burden. At the same time, other women rejected a strict male-breadwinner model and were proud of their
economic contributions to their households. Work that was identified as stigmatizing and difficult by some
was appealing and enjoyable to others. Certain jobs, such as working as vendors on the metro and as
masseuses in sports clubs, were seen as particularly stigmatizing and difficult, but even those jobs were not
disliked by all who performed them.
Government policy and intergenerational views of gender norms. Attitudes about paid work varied by
age, with younger women on average perceiving paid employment more positively than older ones. This
finding is of particular interest, since it suggests that despite the rise to power of religious conservatives in
the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution, younger women, raised after the revolution took place, are
more likely to reject the male-breadwinner model and to view paid employment in a positive light. More
generally, Bahramitash and Olmsted’s findings suggest that one-size-fits-all policies that focus on paid work
as a panacea for empowering women do not take into account intergenerational differences in women’s
perceptions and preferences.

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Agency through Development: Hausa Women's NGOs and CBOs in Kano, Nigeria | Explore Taylor & Francis Online
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Agency through Development: Hausa Women's NGOs and

CBOs in Kano, Nigeria
Feminist Economics
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Adryan Wallace
As several scholars have observed, dominant development

paradigms have tended to ignore the contributions of Muslim
women to development efforts in their communities. Analyzing
the participation of devout Muslim women in development work
can provide crucial insights into the complex interactions of
religion, culture, and politics with women’s economic activities.
Based on interviews with Hausa communities in Kano, Nigeria, in
2010–11, this study expands our understanding of the ways in
which Muslim women cultivate concepts of gender and
development that are mediated through their work in civil-
society organizations (CSOs), including faith-based (FBOs) and
non-faith-based governmental organizations (NGOs) and
community-based organizations (CBOs). More specifically,
Adryan Wallace highlights the specific ways in which Hausa
women are active agents, creating their own development
constructs and successfully deploying them through Islamic
frames, rather than being mere beneficiaries of donor- or state-
driven development paradigms.
Mixed-method approach. To address the gaps in the statistics on Hausa women’s development-oriented
labor in northern Nigeria, Wallace utilized ethnographic and qualitative methods that contextualize the ways
Muslim women understand their social and economic production roles. The study focuses on a total of
seven faith-based CSOs: the Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations in Nigeria (FOMWAN), the Muslim
Sisters Organization (MSO), the Voices of Widows, Orphans and Divorcees (VOWAN), Women and
Development (WODEN), the Grassroots Health Organization of Nigeria, a trading CBO, and a traditional
birth attendant (TBA) CBO. In addition, Wallace conducted a total of thirty-five semi-structured interviews,
ten with women engaged in NGO work, sixteen with members of a trading CBO, and nine with members of
a TBA CBO. The mixed-method approach generated data that created a more complete picture of the
decision-making frames Hausa women use to determine their economic activities through their civil-society
groups.
Strategic labor choices. Hausa women use strategic cooperative labor choices over the course of their
lives to actively contribute to the economic needs of their families, linking motherhood, community, and the
state, rather than framing professional and familial labor as in conflict. Additionally, women’s work in
religiously based organizations is better positioned to utilize multiple streams of resources from
international organizations, Kano State, and financial contributions from their own social networks and to
have working relationships with multiple stakeholders, including religious and traditional leaders.
Long-term economic benefits. The long-term economic benefits of women’s activities need to be
assessed because Hausa women in NGOs, acting as intermediaries for CBOs, are in a position to change
the relationships of women to the state through empowering and working with women across social
locations. Additionally, they could continue monitoring government delivery of services. Developing the
capacity of CBOs can also improve women’s economic position, collectively and individually.
Through their participation in NGOs and CBOs, Hausa women expanded the presence of women in
different sectors of development and made new contributions in sectors like education and health where
women already have some presence. This study revealed examples of the difficulty of documenting various
aspects of the work done by NGOs. For example, NGOs played a key role in providing Human Rights in
Islam trainings for women, addressing limitations in access to healthcare facilities, income-generating
activities, supporting women entrepreneurs, and monitoring elections. Future studies are required to
explore the political implications of Hausa women working across privilege in addition to interactions
among women in development and nondevelopment economic sectors.

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Transnational Land Deals and Gender Equality: Utilitarian and

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