The new EP Library Catalogue allows you to search the EP collection for:
- Journals, books and articles in paper or electronic format
- EPRS and Policy Department publications
Publisher's note: We examined the prevalence of sexual abuse against women around the world and the protective factors that may prevent this violence. Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from 470,000 women in 50 countries informed our multivariate estimates. Our results show that one out of ten women aged 18-49 years old, experienced -at least once in their life time- sexual abuse, and most perpetrators are people in the environment of their victims. We also find that women educational attainment is a key factor in order to prevent sexual abuse, but gender equality achievements in economics, politics and health do not guarantee lower rates of sexual abuse. These results promote further discussions on strategies to strengthen effective preventive programs, especially for vulnerable women.
Publisher's note: This introduction to a special section describes how a recently developed measure, the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) can be used to assess empowerment impacts of agricultural development interventions in India and Bangladesh as well as broader changes in rural labor markets. The special section comprises three papers. The first examines the impact of membership in self-help groups in five states in rural India on women’s and men’s empowerment and gender equality. The second presents experimental evidence from a pilot project in Bangladesh that provided trainings in agricultural extension, nutrition behavior change communication, and gender sensitization to husbands and wives together. The third investigates changes in women’s roles within the jute value chain in the Southern Delta region of Bangladesh as household members migrate out of the study area and the availability of male labor declines. Although these papers focus on Bangladesh and India, pro-WEAI can be applied to impact assessments of agricultural development projects more generally. The three papers show both the usefulness of this new measure in detecting changes in empowerment indicators within the lifespan of a project and the value of having explicit empowerment objectives in agricultural development projects. The papers also demonstrate the value of having data on both men and women so that project designers can be more intentional about including both of them and monitoring outcomes for both to promote more gender equitable outcomes.
Publisher's note: Economic theory suggests that growth may improve gender equality directly by raising women’s employment and indirectly by reducing poverty–thereby causing poorer families to discriminate less against females in intra-household allocations. This paper argues that growth in India has not substantially improved gender equality because it has not sufficiently activated either of these mechanisms. I analyze structural changes from 1982/83 to 2011/12 to show that India’s high-growth period has not been pro-poor. While female employment levels have actually declined since the 1980s, growth has not expanded remunerative employment opportunities sufficiently, even for poor males. This suggests that better-paid jobs for men—by lowering poverty—might actually have led to greater gender equality in India—by reducing poverty-linked gender discrimination. The analysis thus highlights the importance of pro-poor growth, illustrating how structural changes can shape employment, thereby altering the quality of growth and its impact on gender equality.
Publisher's note: The relation between the institutional frameworks and the promotion of gender equality, considering the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, has been scarcely analyzed from the experiences of developing economies. We aimed to contribute to fill that gap, bringing to the debate the concepts of emancipation in organizations and support groups. We asked: in which ways, gender equality fostered by initiatives implemented in developing economies by transnational corporations in the form of support groups allow for organizational transformations that strengthen the process of women’s emancipation in the corporate world? So, an ethnography was undertaken within a transnational company of the financial sector that operates in Brazil. The results show that these initiatives can only lead to organizational transformations that strengthen women’s empowerment if they are inscribed in an institutional framework that guarantees the participation of multiple actors.
Publisher's note: Combining a unique dataset from the Gallup World Poll for the period 2009–2018 with Wolfsfeld et al.’s (2013) protest index, we evaluate the impact of the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests on gender equality in eleven Middle Eastern and North African countries. We use a difference-in-differences approach and find a negative impact of mass protests on female access to labor markets and support for women’s rights in the years following the events. In particular, a one-standard-deviation increase in the protest intensity lowered female participation rates by 3.7 % points. Likewise, Arab Spring protests significantly lowered support for women’s legal rights, occupational rights, and divorce rights. Findings are robust to different samples, alternative model specifications, omitted variable bias, and an alternative protest measure from Steinert-Threlkeld (2017). Regarding potential mechanisms, we suggest that a shift in the Arab zeitgeist towards a less secular society might help explain our findings.
Publisher's note: The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and accelerated many gendered labour market inequalities in Australia and around the world. In this introduction to our special issue, ‘Workplace Gender Equality: Where are we now and where to next?’, we examine the impact of the pandemic on women’s employment, labour force participation, earnings, unpaid care work and experience of gendered violence. We identify five key areas where action is urgently required to create a more equitable post-pandemic recovery: addressing gender-based labour market segregations and discrimination; building access to mutually beneficial flexibility; ensuring a more gender-equitable distribution of unpaid care; confronting gender-based violence at work and beyond; and mobilising union action through gender equality bargaining.
Publisher's note: This article identifies the way spaces of violence operate within gendered hierarchies in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. As migration accelerates, gender-related differences become evident. Strong push factors underlined by patriarchal power systems and hypermasculine spaces have normalized violence against women. Using data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and local data from the three countries, this article illustrates how gender inequalities sustain the emigration of women. The study also evaluates how the interweaving of female murders has further ostracized women and forced them to flee their home countries in search of sanctuary.
Publisher's note: This paper will look at international frameworks and regional efforts which are guiding the mission to eliminate the practice globally. The paper will then consider the challenges to monitoring and enforcement of laws prohibiting the practice including arguments that it is a religious practice which is protected by international law. Finally, the paper will consider the manner in which FGM is considered within the context of international protection.
Publisher's note: The article examines how the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women has been instrumental in developing state obligations for tackling gender-based violence against women. The Committee first adopted a General Recommendation on violence against women in 1989 and then brought it unequivocally into international human rights law through its ground-breaking General Recommendation 19 in 1992. Twenty-five years later, in 2017, in light of the continuing and deadly violence against women that "remains pervasive in all countries, with high levels of impunity" the Committee updated its work in a further General Recommendation, No.35. This Recommendation provides guidance to and an anchoring of the legal standards that have evolved over the last 25 years, while also looking forward in terms of current and emerging challenges and trends in this field.
Publisher’s note: This paper places women at the centre of analysis, examining the potential and promise of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ACDEG) in the advancement of women's political rights. This is a highly under-researched topic, necessitating a mapping of the current political landscape for women and an understanding of how ACDEG addresses these challenges as well as provides opportunities for advancing women's political participation. This paper argues that ACDEG provides a good basis and framework to operate from for member states – some of whom already have suitable policies, and more importantly suitable practices, in place that emerge from a range of normative frameworks, including the Maputo Protocol. ACDEG complements these frameworks and makes a further case for women's full and meaningful participation in public and private life by obligating states to take concrete steps to guarantee women's political rights. Considering this, the paper identifies prospects for women's rights activists and organisations to invoke ACDEG and monitor its implementation in the move towards the realisation of African women's political rights.
Publisher’s note: Thanks to successful strategizing by women's rights organizations, attention to gender equality and women's rights is remarkably wide‐ranging in the 2030 Agenda. But the ambition to have gender equality as a crosscutting issue tends to evaporate at the level of targets and indicators. This speaks to the difficulties of using quantitative indicators to capture the largely context‐specific and qualitative dimensions of gender equality. Ultimately, some of the concerns about the huge significance attached to the measurement imperative stems from the inordinate weight that the global indicators framework is carrying, effectively substituting for substantive contestation on key policy issues and meaningful accountability mechanisms. While indicators and data can be very useful for monitoring progress, they can hardly substitute for a robust accountability framework, one that allows independent reviews and supports women's rights organizations and other civil society actors to hold governments and other duty‐bearers to account.
Publisher’s note: Since Cynthia Enloe asked, 'Where are the women?' in 1989, studies about the place of women in International Relations have increased. However, most of the analyses since then have focused on the participation of women in international organisations, events and institutional spaces, making invisible other practices and places occupied by black or indigenous women from the South. This article aims to highlight the role of women at the international level, analysing their performance in disputes over the meanings of development in Latin America and the Caribbean, based on struggles against extractivism. In addition to denouncing the impacts of this development model, these struggles seek to construct alternatives that, although they could be essentially local, have been multiplied and articulated throughout the Latin American and the Caribbean territory, as part of a broader resistance to the dominant extractivism in the region. These struggles will be mapped using a database of 259 conflicts around mining activities, developed by the Research Group on International Relations and Global South (GRISUL).
Publisher’s note: This article reflects on transnational feminist organising by drawing on the experiences of the African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) during the consultations leading up to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. First, we re-examine some of the debates that have shaped the field of women's rights, feminist activism and gender justice in Africa, and the enduring legacies of these discourses for policy advocacy. Second, we analyse the politics of movement-building and the influence of development funding, and how they shape policy discourses and praxis in respect of women's rights and gender justice. Third, we problematise the nature of transnational feminist solidarity. Finally, drawing on scholarship about transnational feminist praxis as well as activism, we distil some lessons for feminist policy advocacy across geo-political divides.
Publisher’s note: The article presents a study which examined the cross-country patterns on the relationship between gender-discriminatory laws and different women's economic agency indicators. Other topics include the efforts to advance women's legal rights, women's asset ownership and labor force participation, as well as wage gap and discrimination in wage work and parental leave.
Publisher’s note: Research on international human rights law suggests that the beneficial effects of treaties depend on the strength of democratic political institutions. However, democracies are, by definition, compliant with many provisions in treaties that protect civil and political rights. Additionally, theories of compliance derive from a focus on civil and political rights rather than on other rights, so we lack a good understanding of whether predictions hold for other kinds of rights. We examine compliance with the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which protects rights that are distinct from those that characterize democratic governance. To measure compliance, we create a new indicator of women's rights that offers several advantages over existing indicators. We examine the conditional effect of CEDAW using models that allow for heterogenous treaty effects. This helps to adjudicate between theories that expect treaties to be most effective in highly democratic countries and those that expect them to be most effective among partial democracies. Our findings do not support either expectation and suggest that effectiveness does not depend on democracy, at least in the case of CEDAW. This points to the need to enrich existing theories of ratification and compliance by accounting for differences in the nature of the rights protected by different treaties.
Publisher’s note: This paper analyses the role of feminist mobilizing in formulating the gender equality agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): the goal (5) to 'achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls' and gender‐related targets across other SDGs. It explores how three key drivers shaped its contours and the effectiveness: (1) context of socioeconomic and political environment; (2) institutions; and (3) the processes of movement building. While feminist mobilizing led to significant advances in the SDGs relative to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), important unresolved barriers of financing and political opposition to women's human rights and gender equality remain and will require continued feminist mobilizing. This paper argues for the need to locate feminist mobilizing for the SDGs in the context of the history and persistence of gender inequality and violations of girls' and women's human rights, and the struggle against these violations. This history is located within economic, social and political environments that are sometimes more open to progressive social change but often, as in the current global conjuncture, may not be. There is a need to locate feminist mobilizing for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the context of the history and persistence of gender inequality and violations of girls' and women's human rights, and the struggle against these violations.
Publisher’s note: The main international human rights documents establish gender equality as a right to be enforced. Nevertheless, this equality has remained purely formal. The task of transforming it into real equality has been arduous, especially because the historical construction of human rights has always occurred with the exclusion of women and the reinforcement of patriarchal ideologies. This study aims to discuss the main international treaty related to women's protection, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and to analyze how Brazilian legal system incorporates this treaty, which influences our domestic legal order, adopting as a research technique the bibliographic review, managed from the deductive method of approach. This, in order to analyze how the treaties are received and how these international norms influence or can influence the conformation of the Brazilian legal system. The present study is based on the hypothesis that the adequate confrontation of the circumstances that lead to the situation of vulnerability of women, linked to the fight against gender inequality, is essential for the fight against discrimination against women, and consequent protection of human rights, which is why is the subject of concern of several international bodies.
Publisher’s note: Though, Pakistan came into being with pledge to provide human rights to all its citizens without any discrimination but presently the situation is otherwise. It is very discouraging to see that in reality women are not enjoying the human rights, which are available to them in black and white. Though laws exist in favour of women in the country but most of legislation is confined only to the papers and male dominated society is least interested in its implementation. Neither legal provisions nor Qura'anic principles are followed in letter and spirit, rather the same are tried to be twisted by men in their own favour. This paper elaborates the legislation, which exists in favour of women in papers, the current status of women in our country and also provides some suggestions towards the implementation of human rights. It is after empowerment of weak segment of society, that we can become a strong and progressive nation.
If you are unable to access the article you need, please contact us and we will get it for you as soon as possible.
| Data Protection Notice | Cookie Policy & Inventory |
 |
 |
 |
Journals on all devices |
Books, articles, EPRS publications & more |
Newspapers on all devices |