Four fundamental areas to transform norms for women’s economic rights and empowerment are: employment, non-financial assets, financial inclusion and entrepreneurship.
Benefits of women’s economic empowerment
Women’s economic empowerment is essential to achieving women’s rights and gender equality. Women’s economic empowerment means ensuring women can equally participate in and benefit from decent work and social protection; access markets and have control over resources, their own time, lives, and bodies; and increased voice, agency, and meaningful participation in economic decision-making at all levels from the household to international institutions.
Promoting women’s economic justice and rights in the economy and closing gender gaps in the world of work are key to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and achieving the Sustainable Development Goal.
When more women work, economies grow. Women’s economic empowerment increases economic diversification and income equality for shared prosperity. It is estimated that closing the gender gap could give the global economy a USD 7 trillion boost.
Increasing women’s and girls’ educational attainment contributes to women’s economic empowerment and more inclusive, environmentally sustainable economic growth. Education, upskilling, and re-skilling-especially to keep pace with rapid technological transformations affecting jobs-are critical for women’s and girls’ health and wellbeing, as well as their income-generation opportunities and participation in the formal labour market.
Women’s economic equality is good for business. Companies greatly benefit from increasing employment and leadership opportunities for women, which is shown to increase organizational effectiveness and growth. It is estimated that companies with three or more women in senior management functions score higher in all dimensions of organizational performance.
Current status of women
One in every 10 women is living in extreme poverty (10.3 per cent). If current trends continue, by 2030, an estimated 8 per cent of the world’s female population – 342.4 million women and girls – will still be living on less than $2.15 a day. Most (220.9 million) will reside in sub-Saharan Africa.
Women are less likely to have access to social protection. Gender inequalities in employment and job quality result in gaps in access to social protection acquired through employment, such as pensions, unemployment benefits, or maternity protection. Coverage of women lags behind men by 8 per cent (34.3 per cent and 26.5 per cent, respectively). Globally, an estimated 73.5 per cent of women in wage employment do not have access to
social protection.
Women are more food insecure than men. Gender gaps in food insecurity have grown from 1.7 per cent in 2019 to more than 4 per cent in 2021, with 31.9 per cent of women moderately or severely food insecure compared to 27.6 per cent of men. This is even more acute for older and indigenous women, women of African descent, gender-diverse persons, persons with disabilities, and those living in rural and remote areas.
Women and girls suffer most from the dearth of safely managed water and sanitation. Women and girls are responsible for water collection in 70 per cent of households without access to water on premises. Menstrual hygiene management is difficult in the absence of water, soap, and gender-responsive sanitation facilities, whether at home, school, or work.
Women are less likely than men to have access to financial institutions or have a bank account. The gender gap in bank account ownership has dropped in 2021 after years of stagnation, although rates vary across economies. In developing economies, the gender gap stands at 6 per cent per cent while globally it sits at 4 per cent with 78 per cent of men reporting having an account at a formal financial institution compared to 74 per cent of women.
The digital divide remains a gendered one with 37 per cent of women globally not using the internet, meaning 259 million fewer women have access to the internet than men
Why ‘women’s economic empowerment’?
The term ‘women’s economic empowerment’ can be contentious for a number of reasons.
Access to education, training programmes, and employment possibilities for women promotes their engagement in the workforce, which boosts economic production and productivity. Second, empowered women are more inclined to launch their own companies and participate in entrepreneurial endeavors.
Principal among these is the tendency of many so-called economic empowerment programmes to address the symptoms rather than the underlying systemic causes of women’s economic disadvantage. For example, St. Ritah Women is often over-used to refer to incremental improvements for individual women, who may become a little less poor but do not gain any additional control of economic resources or decision-making
Along similar lines, some argue that, unless they address the structural barriers that hold women back, our programmes can be instrumentalist in their approach – simply treating women as individual economic units with the potential to contribute to national and global economic growth. Another critique is that Women programmes can be paternalistic, using top-down processes of external
interventions that seek to ‘give’ economic power to women, rather than trying to remove the
structural barriers related to economic resources, agency and opportunities that would enable women to have the freedom and ability to make strategic life choices. We empower women socially, politically and economically to promote an inclusive society for better development.
