STATE OF WOMEN IN CITIES 2012-2013 - UN-Habitat

Yet while these issues have demonstrated that women’s
poverty cannot be encapsulated by income alone, this does
not mean that women do not face multiple challenges when
heading their own households. Female heads are not only likely
to continue to have disproportionate responsibility for unpaid
and care work, which are especially onerous in urban contexts
characterised by limited access to basic services and difficult
environmental circumstances, but tend also to have to engage
in paid work too. 25
By the same token, ‘double burdens’ of labour are
increasingly affecting all women and has led scholars like
Sylvia Chant to advance an alternative formulation of the
‘feminisation of poverty’ under the rubric of a ‘feminisation of
responsibility and/or obligation’. This stresses the importance
of labour, time and assets and the fact that privation is not
associated with female household headship alone. 26 In addition,
examining the relationship between gender and poverty requires
analysis of labour markets, households and states in a holistic
way. 27
Another important factor in conceptualising gender and the
prosperity of cities has been work on women’s empowerment
and especially their economic empowerment. Although
the notion of ‘empowerment’ is one of the most contested
terms used today, it remains very important especially in
relation to women and gender. Many draw implicitly and
explicitly on the work of Michel Foucault in their thinking on
empowerment highlighting it as a process rather than an end
state. Following this, Rowlands has identified empowerment
as a way of accessing decision-making as well as changing the
ways in which people think about themselves in relation to
three core dimensions: the ‘personal’, ‘close relationships’ and
the ‘collective’. 28 She developed a typology of different types
of power, all of which interrelate and need to be combined
(See Box 1.1.1). There can therefore be several pathways to
empowerment that take time, effort and structural change in
order to be realised.
The notion of ‘women’s empowerment’ has been in wide
circulation in policy discourse since the Fourth World
Conference for Women in Beijing in 1995, where the Platform
for Action was billed as an ‘agenda for women’s empowerment’
that focused on shared power and responsibility. It has also been
operationalised by different international agencies.
More recently, however, the concept has been criticised on
grounds that since development agencies have adopted the
term it has become ‘softer’ and ‘more conciliatory’ and fails
to address the underlying structural inequalities and pervasive
discrimination that requires women to be empowered in
the first place. 29 In addition, although many definitions of
empowerment refer to ‘choice’, many poor women do not have
Box 1.1.1
Types of power that underpin empowerment processes
• Power over: domination/subordination involving
threats of violence, fear and intimidation by individual
or group. May be overt.
• Power from within: spiritual strength which is selfgenerated.
Refers to self confidence, self awareness
and assertiveness. Changes from within and also about
challenging power.
• Power with: people organising with common purpose
or understanding to achieve collective goals. Sense of
communion and solidarity as power.
• Power to: gain access to full range of human abilities
and potential which allows women to have decisionmaking
authority.
• Power as resistance: compliment to power over
and neither are found alone. Manipulation. Resistance
takes lots of forms from subtle to overt
Sources: Rowlands (1996); Chant and McIlwaine (2009)
the luxury of being able to make choices. It can be difficult to
impose empowerment through interventions because it entails
changing gender ideologies which can only be brought about
by psycho-social and political transformation as well as those
linked with the material conditions of life (See Figure 1.1.1). 30
Women’s economic empowerment is sometimes used instead
of the more general notion of empowerment. However, this too
is inherently multidimensional and multi-scalar. It is essential
to recognise that women’s economic empowerment extends
beyond women’s economic position in terms of work, income,
education and assets to encompass other social and political
dimensions. 32 More specifically, this requires skills and resources
to compete in markets, fair and equal access to economic
institutions, and the ability to make and act on decisions and
control resources and profits in terms of exercising power
and agency. 33 These ideas have also been incorporated into
definitions of women’s economic empowerment that have been
outlined by various agencies. These include the International
Center for Research on Women (ICRW) definition that refers
to woman’s ability to succeed and advance economically and
the power to make and act on economic decisions, 34 and UN
Women’s framework which focuses on increasing assets for
women. 35
8