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Empowering Work


How are women in different categories of work trying to reposition themselves in public (including markets) and domestic spheres to change attitudes, break barriers, achieve recognition, enhance their bargaining power and exercise their rights at home and at work?

Work under this theme will explore:

    • how the sexual division of labour in the domestic sphere is being restructured and at how the disconnect between women’s paid and unpaid work can be reduced

    • how women as economic actors, cross-border traders and migrants can enhance their incomes, influence, assets and personal safety, especially in post conflict contexts

    • how women’s rights as workers and caregivers can be enhanced, and what mechanisms and forms of recognition can best support women’s work as a tool for empowerment

    • how women workers organize to claim rights and recognition

    Latest


    'Researching the Relationship between Paid Work and Women’s Empowerment: Complexities, Contradictions and Contestations',     Naila Kabeer (pdf file 1 MB), forthcoming Pathways Working Paper

    This paper is intended as a contribution to the agenda-setting activities of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC.  The paper is concerned with Pathways' theme of empowering work, more specifically with women’s access to paid work and the pathways through which such work might translate into empowerment. This focus on the transformative potential of paid work can be seen as one strand in a broader research agenda on the material dimensions of women’s empowerment, an agenda which would also include women’s property rights, access to credit, social transfers, skills training and other kinds of economic resources. However, different resources have their own forms of materiality in that the changes associated them are likely to take concrete shape through somewhat different pathways in women’s lives.  In order to keep the discussion in the paper focused, I deal primarily with paid work but draw on research relating to these other economic resources for illustrative purposes.


    Introducing Empowering Conditional Cash Transfers to Egypt

    On 30th and 31st January 2008, the Social Research Center (SRC) in Cairo hosted a workshop aimed at gathering insights and experiences for the design and implementation of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) pilot in Egypt. Both local and foreign experts (from Latin America and the UK) discussed current CCT programmes and how they could be adapted to suit the Egyptian social, political and economic landscape. See Pathways Events for more...