The debate about the empowerment potential of women’s access to labour market opportunities is a long-standing one but it has taken on a fresh lease of life with the increased feminization of paid work in the context of economic liberalization. Contradictory viewpoints reflect differences in how empowerment itself has been understood as well as variations in the cultural meanings and social acceptability of different kinds of paid work. Research on this issue in the Bangladesh context has not been able to address these questions because it tends to use very restricted definitions of work and narrow conceptualizations of empowerment. This paper uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative data from Bangladesh to explore this debate, distinguishing between different categories of work and using measures of women’s empowerment which have been explicitly designed to capture the specificities of local patriarchal constraints. The paper found qualified support for the empowerment potential of paid work and found that ‘economic empowerment’ includes other forms of tangible and intangible change such as reductions in domestic violence. Furthermore, access to paid work had a greater impact on the level of individuals and families, and these positive changes occurred with changes in their family relationships including dominant male members.
Authors: Kabeer, Naila; Mahmud, Simeen; Tasneem, Sakiba
Type: Journal Article
Year: 2018
