Since the 1990s, gender mainstreaming has been a widely accepted strategy for promoting gender equality within governments, multilateral agencies, and development NGOs, although critics continue to question its premises and results. This paper reviews how the development agencies of Australia,...

Revisiting foundational feminist work on the concept of empowerment from the 1980s and 1990s, this paper draws on the findings of a multi-country research programme, 'Pathways of Women's Empowerment', to explore pathways of positive change in women's lives, in diverse contexts, and to draw...

This paper examines gender inequality and female empowerment in rural Viet Nam. Using an extensive panel dataset on 2,181 households, we examine how the welfare of women living in rural areas has evolved during a period of dramatic rural transformation, 2008 - 14. We find that while the economic...

In this paper, we address the question of whether official development assistance promotes gender equality in the Middle East and North Africa region by examining the effects of aid to Women's Equality Organizations and Institutions on women's political empowerment, measured by the proportion of...

In developing countries, women's decisions concerning their children's health depend on 'empowerment' concerning decision-making, husband/partner's use of violence, woman's attitude towards this violence, available information, and resources. We derive an empowerment indicator using the 'fuzzy...

Using household data from the latest wave of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, this paper utilizes machine learning techniques to examine the effect of gender wage differences within households on women's empowerment and welfare in Ghana. The structural parameters of the post-double selection...

This paper describes the very different role played by female elites in contemporary developing countries, as compared to the 'early' industrializing countries of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It shows that women are far more important in business and politics in today's developing...

This paper analyses the political economy of women's-empowerment-related policymaking in India through a re-examination of the context of both the genesis and closure of a major programme, Mahila Samakhya. Mahila Samakhya, which embodied feminist philosophy and pedagogy, started in 1987 with the...

This paper investigates the impact of migration of male household heads on the autonomy of their spouses. Using panel household survey data from Ethiopia, the methodology mainly relies on an instrumental variables approach that addresses the endogeneity inherent in the relationship using past...

In this paper, we explore the links between polygyny and female labour supply in Senegal using a nationally representative survey. In a reduced-form approach, we first measure the impact of polygyny on participation using a joint model of spouse participation. The identification of the impact of...