women empowerment and wco dev 2012

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Journal of Economic Literature 2012, 50(4) , 1051–1079http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jel.50.4.1051

1051

1. Introduction

T he persistence of gender inequality ismost starkly brought home in the phe-nomenon of “missing women.” The term was coined by Amartya Sen in a now clas-sic article in the New York Review of Books (Sen 1990) to capture the fact that the pro-portion of women is lower than what wouldbe expected if girls and women throughoutthe developing world were born and died at

the same rate, relative to boys and men, asthey do in sub-Saharan Africa. Today, it isestimated that 6 million women are miss-ing every year (World Bank 2011) Of these,23 percent are never born, 10 percent aremissing in early childhood, 21 percent inthe reproductive years, and 38 percent

above the age of 60. Stark as the excessmortality is, it still does not capture thefact that throughout their lives, even beforebirth, women in developing countries aretreated differently than their brothers,lagging behind men in many domains. Foreach missing woman, there are many more women who fail to get an education, a job,or a political responsibility that they wouldhave obtained if they had been men.

Table 1 summarizes some indicators of

the relative position of women and mencirca 1990 and circa 2009 in poor countries.Both the relative deprivation of women,and the extent to which there have beenimprovements over the last twenty years, areapparent in a number of spheres. In accessto education: in low and moderate incomecountries, the enrollment rate for girls insecondary school was 34 percent in 2010, while that for boys was 41 percent. Twenty

Women Empowerment andEconomic Development

E D*

Women empowerment and economic development are closely related: in one direction,development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men

and women; in the other direction, empowering women may benefit development.Does this imply that pushing just one of these two levers would set a virtuous circle in motion? This paper reviews the literature on both sides of the empowerment–development nexus, and argues that the interrelationships are probably too weak

to be self-sustaining, and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women. ( JEL I14, I24, I32, I38, J13, J16, O15)

* Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jel.50.4.1051http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jel.50.4.1051


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Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. L (December 2012)1052

years before, the rates were respectively

22 percent and 30 percent. Meanwhileprimary school enrollment has becomenearly universal for both boys and girls. Inlabor market opportunities: women are lesslikely to work, they earn less than men forsimilar work, and are more likely to be inpoverty even when they work. Women spendalmost twice as much time on housework,almost five times as much time on child care,and about half as much time on market work

as men do (Berniell and Sánchez-Páramo

2011). In political representation: womenconstituted just 19.4 percent of the mem-bers of lower and upper houses of parlia-ments in July 2011 (Inter-parliamentaryUnion 2011). In legal rights: women inmany countries still lack independent rightsto own land, manage property, conductbusiness, or even travel without their hus-band’s consent. Twenty-one of the 63 coun-tries studied by Htun and Weldon (2011)

TABLE 1 S I W M W

1990 2009 or 2010Boys/men Girls/women Boys/men Girls/women

Primary enrollment rate (gross) (1) 81(1991) 67(1991) 107 100 [low income countries]

Secondary enrollment rate (gross) (2) 30 (1991) 22 (1991) 41 34

[low income countries]

Labor force participation (3) 82% 50% 78% 52%

(1980) (1980)

Gender ratio at birth, China (4) 1.11 1 1.18 1

Gender ration at birth, India (5) 1.06 1 1.09 1

Maternal mortality (per 100,000 live births) (6) X 850 X 580

[low income countries]

Life expectancy (7)

[low income countries] 51 54 56 59

[high income countries] 72 79 77 83

Sources:(1) World Bank (2011).

(2) World Bank (2011).(3) World Bank (2011).(4) People’s Republic of China Population Census Office (1990).(5) Indian Registrar General and Census Commissioner (1990).(6) World Bank (2011).(7) World Bank (2011).


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1053Duflo: Women Empowerment and Economic Development

have unequal inheritance rights for menand women.

There is a bidirectional relationshipbetween economic development and wom-en’s empowerment defined as improvingthe ability of women to access the constitu-ents of development—in particular health,education, earning opportunities, rights,and political participation. In one direction,development alone can play a major role indriving down inequality between men and women; in the other direction, continuingdiscrimination against women can, as Senhas forcefully argued, hinder development.Empowerment can, in other words, acceler-

ate development.Policymakers and social scientists have

tended to focus on one or the other ofthese two relationships. Those focus-ing on the first have argued that genderequality improves when poverty declines.Policymakers should therefore focus oncreating the conditions for economicgrowth and prosperity, while seeking, ofcourse, to maintain a level playing field forboth genders, but without adopting specificstrategies targeted at improving the condi-tion of women.

In contrast, many emphasize the sec-ond relationship, from empowerment todevelopment. The Secretary General of theUnited Nations, Kofi Annan, for example,has argued that achieving gender equalityis a “prerequisite” to achieving the otherMillennium Development Goals (MDGs),including eliminating poverty, reducing

infant mortality, achieving universal edu-cation, and eliminating the gender gap ineducation by 2015 (United Nations 2005).In its report, “Engendering Development,”the World Bank (2001) calls for policiesto address gender imbalance in “rights,resources, and voice,” and recommendsthat institutional structures be overhauledto promote equality, and that specific mea-sures, such as girls’ scholarships and quotas

for women in parliament, be adopted.These measures are justified, according tothe report, not only because they promoteequity, but also because they are necessaryto accelerate development. Interestingly,the 2012 World Development Report(World Bank 2011) adopts a much morenuanced message. While it emphasizes the“business case” for women empowerment,it mainly takes it as given that the equalitybetween women and men is a desirable goalin itself, and policies should aim to achievethat goal.

This paper reviews the evidence on bothsides of the empowerment–development

relationship. It first shows that povertyand lack of opportunity breed inequalitybetween men and women, so that wheneconomic development reduces poverty,the condition of women improves on twocounts: first, when poverty is reduced, thecondition of everyone, including women,improves, and second, gender inequalitydeclines as poverty declines, so the condi-tion of women improves more than that ofmen with development. Economic devel-opment, however, is not enough to bringabout complete equality between menand women. Policy action is still neces-sary to achieve equality between genders.Such policy action would be unambigu-ously justified if empowerment of womenalso stimulates further development, start-ing a virtuous cycle. This essay arguesthat empowering women does indeedchange society’s choices in important ways,

although the usual depiction of womenas always making the best decisions forlong-term development is somewhat exag-gerated. The conclusion here is a more bal-anced, somewhat more pessimistic pictureof the potential for women’s empowermentand economic development to mutuallyreinforce each other than that offered bythe more strident voices on either side ofthe debate.


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2. Can Economic Development CauseWomen’s Empowerment?

Gender inequality is often greater amongthe poor, both within and across countries.For example, while the gender gap in pri-mary and secondary gross enrollment hasrapidly gone down between 1991 and 2009 worldwide, it is still wider in poor countries(7 percentage points for primary enrollment,13 percentage points for secondary enroll-ment) than in middle income countries (3percentage points for primary enrollment, 2percentage points for secondary enrollment)and rich countries (0 percentage points for

primary, 1 percentage point for secondary).And within countries, gaps between boysand girls persist in poorer and more iso-lated communities (World Bank 2011). Theparticipation of women in the labor markethas grown by 15 percent in East Asia andLatin America between 1971 and 1995, arate faster than that for men, and the gendergap in wages has narrowed as well. The lifeexpectancy of women has increased by 20–25 years in developing countries over the pastfifty years (World Bank 2011), while male lifeexpectancy did not improve as much.

Is it the case that as countries develop, women’s empowerment will follow naturally,and there is therefore no need for specificpolicies targeted at improving the conditionof women? Is it sufficient to fight povertyand to create the conditions for economicgrowth in poor countries? Recent researchsuggests that economic growth, by reduc-

ing poverty and increasing opportunity, canindeed have an important positive impact ongender equality.

2.1 Relaxing the Grip of Poverty throughEconomic Development

The first way by which economic devel-opment reduces inequality is by relaxingthe constraints poor households face, thusreducing the frequency at which they are

placed in the position to make life or deathchoices. Because these tragic choices areoften resolved at the expense of women’s well-being, increasing the resources avail-able to families, as economic developmentdoes, reduces the excess vulnerability of women.

Even in the countries where the prefer-ence for boys is strongest, the evidence thatgirls systematically receive less care thanboys under normal circumstances is not asclear-cut as one might guess. It is, of course, very difficult to observe whether, for exam-ple, girls are given less to eat than boys, sincehouseholds under observation are likely to

change their behavior. Also, when asked tokeep diaries of how much each member con-sumes over a given period, households maymisreport the portions given to boys andgirls. Finally, households may give the sameamount to boys and girls, but girls’ needs maybe different. Deaton (1989, 1997) proposedan ingenious way to use household consump-tion data to indirectly estimate whether girlsare given less to eat than boys. He noted that, when a child is born, the household, in effect,becomes poorer, since there is now one moreperson to feed—one who will remain unpro-ductive for a long while. This means that theadult members of the household need to cutdown on their own consumption to makeroom for the new expenditures. Observingthe extent to which the household consump-tion of “adult goods,” such as cigarettes, alco-hol, or adult clothing drops when a child isborn, provides us with an indirect estimate

of the “cost” of the child. If families expendfewer resources on girls, for example, if girlsare given less to eat than boys, then the adults will cut their consumption of adult goods bya smaller amount when they have an extragirl than when they have an extra boy. Yet,both in Cote d’Ivoire, where Deaton firstconducted the research, and in Pakistan, where he repeated the analysis (Deaton1997), there is no evidence that households


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reduce consumption of adult goods less fora girl than for a boy. The lack of evident dis-crimination in everyday life is also apparent,for example, in immunization rates. The vaccination differential between boys andgirls in India is small or nonexistent (accord-ing to the National Family Health surveys,girls have received 4.55 shots, and boys 4.79shots). Rajasthan is one of the states in India with the lowest female to male ratio and thelowest immunization rate among states inIndia. Yet, Banerjee et al. (2010) find no dif-ference in immunization rates between boysand girls: on average, boys had received 1.19immunizations, and girls 1.18.

This is not to say that girls are not treateddifferently than boys. The differential treat-ment is observed when either children orparents face extreme circumstances. Indiahas one of the largest discrepancies in gen-der-specific mortality rates. One reason forthis is that that girls are treated differently when ill: for example, a study found that,in the poor neighborhoods of New Delhi,girls are more than twice as likely to die ofdiarrhea (Khanna et al. 2003). This may notonly cause excess mortality, but a progressivedeterioration in the nutritional status of girlscompared to boys, even if girls eat as muchas boys. If poor households are less likelyto spend money on a girl’s illness than on aboy’s illness, then improved access to healthservices, through either health insurance forthe entire family or free medical care for thepoor, would disproportionately help girls,even if parents do not change their behavior

toward them.Differential treatment of girls and boys

also becomes acute when the householditself is facing a crisis. In India, the excessivemortality rate of girls, relative to boys, spikesduring droughts. When they cannot afford tofeed everyone, families disproportionatelysacrifice the welfare of girls (Rose 1999).Research conducted in rural Tanzania showsexplicitly how the vulnerability of women

increases when households face a crisis. When the harvest is bad, due to droughtsor floods, and food is scarce, the murder of“witches” (almost always old women) is twiceas likely to occur as in normal years (Miguel2005). If crises throw poor households intocircumstances in which they are more likelyto discriminate against vulnerable women,then increasing the ability of poor house-holds to weather crises would disproportion-ately help women.

These two examples suggest that justreducing the grip of poverty on these house-holds or helping them to deal with crisescould improve the welfare of women of all

ages. Ali et al. (2011) show that, in sevencountries around the world (includingAfghanistan and India), there is no differencein the ways that girls and boys are treatedby health practitioners once they reach thefacility. If facilities were closer and easier toreach, parents would likely be bringing boysand girls more often, and they would thenbe equally treated. Some also argue that,mechanically, improvements in water andsanitation conditions, as well as the bettercontrol of infection, may also be more ben-eficial to girls than to boys, because boys aremore susceptible to congenital deformation,and their disadvantage compared to girls, islower for infectious diseases (Drevenstedt etal. 2008).

As households become richer, they willalso be less likely to face choices at themargin of subsistence. Indeed, in India,the study by Rose (1999) shows that house-

holds that can buffer their consumption ina bad year—those, for example, with assetsto sell—do not show the dramatic increasein relative mortality of girls during droughts.This first suggests that providing house-holds with insurance against risk may reduceboth child mortality and the mortality gapbetween boys and girls, and second, thathouseholds that are a little richer are lesslikely to be thrown into desperation by bad


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rainfall. Reducing poverty, it seems, even without targeting women, will dispropor-tionately help women. Pension remittancesin South Africa offer suggestive evidence ofhow a nontargeted transfer can improve theplight of women. At the end of apartheid inthe early 1990s, old-age pension programs,previously limited to whites, were expandedto cover South Africans of all races. Since theintroduction of the program, witch killings inrural Northern Province have dropped dra-matically (Singer 2000). It is, of course, dif-ficult to definitively establish causality giventhe many other political and social changesthat occurred in South Africa during the

same period.Economic development reduces pov-

erty. It increases the ability—distinct from will—of households to withstand crises andthe ability of governments to insure theirpoorest citizens against sickness and hunger.Thus, by reducing the vulnerability of poorhouseholds to risk, economic development,even without specifically targeting women,disproportionately improves their well-being

2.2 Economic Development, Fertility,and Maternal Mortality

Other than pre-birth and in early child-hood, women are most likely to be missingrelative to men in childbearing years. This,of course, is not the result of active discrimi-nation, but due to the fact that women carrychildren and give birth, and that in itself is adangerous activity. Other than directly affect-ing the welfare of women (and not men) in a

significant way, maternal mortality is poten-tially a source of lower parental investment inchildhood: if parents expect girls to be muchmore likely to die as young women than boys,they may be more inclined to invest in boys.Jayachandran and Lleras-Muney (2009) findthat the sudden reduction in maternal mor-tality in Sri Lanka (brought about by effec-tive public policy) led to a convergence inthe education level of boys and girls. They

estimate that every year of increase in lifeexpectancy leads to an increase in years ofeducation of girls (relative to boys) of 0.11 ofa year. This creates two ways for economicdevelopment to potentially improve therelative welfare of women: by reducing thechance that they die at each childbirth, andbecause economic development goes handin hand with a reduction in fertility.

In sub-Saharian Africa, a woman faces a1 in 31 chance of dying from complicationsdue to pregnancy or childbirth, while inthe developed regions the risk is 1 in 4,300(World Bank 2011). While maternal mortal-ity depends on a number of factors, it is less

likely to occur if individuals are richer (andare able to deliver in a high quality facility)and if health systems function better. Thediffusion of technological innovation mattersas well: Jayachandran, Lleras-Muney, andSmith (2010) find that the introduction ofsulfa drugs in the United States led to a 24 to36 percent reduction in maternal mortalityin the 1930s.

Overall, fertility decreases with incomeand education and age at first birth increases.Age at first birth is a risk factor in maternalmortality: very young mothers are morelikely to die or have complications in child-birth. Fertility has declined dramatically inmost developing countries over the last twodecades, with few countries now having atotal fertility rate of 6 or higher. That in itselfhas had a mechanical impact in reducing thenumber of missing women by decreasing thenumber of chances a woman has to die dur-

ing her childbearing years.2.3 Giving Women Hope by Expanding

Their Opportunities

The fact that women have fewer oppor-tunities in the labor market may contributeto their unequal treatment in the house-hold. Parents have lower aspirations for theirdaughters than for their sons, and femaleteenagers themselves have lower aspirations.


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For example, in West Bengal, Beaman et al.(2011) find that, in places where no womanhad ever been the local leader, 86 percent ofparents wanted their daughters to be eithera housewife or whatever their in-laws woulddecide for her (the corresponding fraction was below 1 percent for the boys).

If women do not work outside the home,there may be a perception that they donot need to be as strong and healthy andthat they do not need a formal education.Interviews of parents in five states in northIndia conducted for the Public Report onBasic Education (PROBE) in India (ThePROBE Team 1999), found that as high as

10 percent of them believed that it was notimportant for girls to be educated—only upto 1 percent believed the same for boys. Fifty-seven percent wanted their sons to study “asfar as possible,” while only 28 percent wantedthe same for their daughters. Many parentsbelieved that educating girls is not necessary,since girls are only expected to marry andtake care of their households. In the Beamanet al. (2011) study, 32 percent of the parentsreported that they wanted their teenage boysto graduate from secondary school or college,and only 18 percent wished the same for theirgirls.

If part of the motivation for educating chil-dren is to enhance their employment oppor-tunities, then improving the opportunitiesavailable to women in the labor market wouldprovide a strong catalyst for the treatment of women to change for the better. Economicdevelopment leads to a change in the nature

of work that is more conducive to women’s work. This happened in the United States dur-ing 1930–50, where expansion of the demandfor clerical workers increased the availabilityof jobs that even respectable women couldkeep once married (Goldin 2006). Morerecently, this has happened not only in Chinaand Mexico, with the rise in factory work suit-able for women, but also in India with the risein service jobs due to outsourcing.

It has been shown in several contexts thatparents and children are sensitive to theperceived returns to education: those whobelieve that education is more worthwhileinvest more in school (avoiding dropping out,being absent less often, or working hardertoward exams).1 Three recent studies, one inChina and two in India, show that increasedopportunities for women in the labor marketdo indeed translate into better outcomes for women. The introduction of the HouseholdProduction Responsibility System as part ofpost-Mao agricultural reforms in rural Chinaallowed farming households to grow cashcrops instead of staple cereals. This led to a

substantial boost in the production of tea inareas that were suitable for growing it. Giventheir smaller stature, particularly in termsof their height and the size of their hands, women have a comparative advantage overmen in the production of tea. In regionsunsuitable for growing tea, the production ofcash crops disproportionately produced bymen rather than women increased followingthe reform. Qian (2008) shows that the num-ber of missing women, which is particularlyhigh in China, decreased in tea producingregions compared to other regions. For thesame increase in total household income, anincrease in female income of 7 U.S. dollarsper month (10 percent) translates into a 1percentage point increase in the survival ratefor girls. It is striking that this is true evenin China, where it is generally believed thatcultural factors and the “one-child” policyare very strong determinants of the prefer-

ence for boys.The entry of India into the world econ-

omy provides another example of economicdevelopment leading to improved genderequality, even reversing the fortunes ofboys and girls as the traditional segregationof schooling options turned against boys.

1 See Jensen (2010b), Nguyen (2008), and Attanasioand Kaufmann (2009).


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Munshi and Rosenzweig (2006) study thechoice of language instruction in Mumbaiover several decades. In universities, instruc-tion is in English, but in primary and sec-ondary schools, parents can choose eitherEnglish or the local language, Marathi, as themedium of instruction for their child. WhenIndia liberalized its economy in the 1990s,and its software and service industries grew,the economic returns to education in Englishincreased dramatically. The new sectors,such as outsourced telemarketing, also provided labor market opportunities for women who had traditionally been shut out of thelabor market, leading to a rapid increase in

English-based education for both boys andgirls. Among the lower castes, the increase was much faster for girls than for boys: theproportion of lower-caste girls instructed inEnglish almost caught up to that of upper-caste girls, but for the boys, the increase was not any faster compared to other castes.Among the lower castes, girls are now morelikely to be educated in English than boysare. The reason is that members of low-caste households have traditionally relied onthe caste network to find jobs, and choosinginstruction in English for the child was con-strued as an attempt to break out from theforay of the caste. This spirit persists to someextent, locking boys into education in Marathiand then less lucrative jobs. This constraintdoes not apply to girls, who traditionallydid not participate in the labor market. Inother words, girls have no tradition of rely-ing on the caste (old-boy) network and are

free from the group expectations that bindthe boys. Girls can be educated in Englishand therefore be in a better position to takeadvantage of marketplace opportunities asthey arise. A quiet revolution is happening,even if households are not fully aware of theconsequences of their individual choices.

An experiment conducted by Jensen(2010a) provides another clear demon-stration of how an increase in available

opportunities can benefit girls more thanboys. Jensen teamed up with Business ProcessOutsourcing centers (BPOs) centers to orga-nize recruiting sessions in randomly selected villages in rural areas where recruiters wouldtypically not go in three states in NorthernIndia. In some villages, only women wererecruited, and in some villages, both men and women were recruited. Not surprisingly, com-pared to other randomly chosen villages thatdid not see any such recruiting efforts, there was an increase in the employment of young women in BPOs in these villages. Much moreremarkably, given that this was in the part ofIndia probably most notorious for discrimi-

nation against women, three years after therecruiting started, girls age five to eleven wereabout 5 percentage points more likely to beenrolled in school in the villages where there was recruiting. They also weighed more, sug-gesting that parents were taking better careof them. The effects on boys was much moremuted, even in villages where they wereexplicitly recruited. Jensen and Miller (2010)show that this low effect is the combinationof a negative effect of boys whom parents wanted (at baseline) to keep them on the farmand positive for those whom they wanted tosend away. Here again, the facts that girls arenot expected to continue to be the ones topreserve the family tradition actually turnedout to be to their advantage.

All these examples show that gender-blind policies that improve the economic welfare of households can improve genderequality, and that diversifying the economy

and increasing women’s options in the labormarket can cause households to adjusttheir behavior, moving them toward genderequality.

2.4 Freeing Up Women’s Time

A key source of inequality between women and men stems from the way they areexpected to spend their time. Berniell andSánchez-Páramo (2011) conducted a study


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of time use for the World DevelopmentReport 2012, using data for 23 countriesfrom the Multinational Use Study, and 12countries that they added to make the dataset more representative of poor countries.A clear, unsurprising pattern emerges: at alllevel of incomes, women do the majority ofhousework and care and, correspondingly,spend less time in market work. The dif-ference ranges from 30 percent more timespent on housework by women than menin Cambodia to six times more in Guinea,and from 70 percent more time for childcare in Sweden to ten times more in Iraq.These differences have an impact on wom-

en’s ability to participate in market work, befully engaged in their career, etc. This is onereason why women in developing countriesare more likely to be involved in informal work (such as running a small business) thatmay not be the most productive use of theirtime. For example, they may run a shop fromtheir house in order to be able to mind thechildren at the same time, instead of takingon productive employment. This reducesthe chance that they have an autonomousincome, which, as we will see below, hasclear implications for their bargaining power within the household.

In this context, economic developmentcan lead to the empowerment of women byfreeing their time (which can then be usedfor market activities or for other things).Greenwood, Seshadri, and Yorukoglu(2005) argue that the diffusion of appli-ances in the United States between 1930

and 1950 was a key driver of the increasein the labor market participation of womenduring that period and beyond. Dinkelman(2010) exploits the logistical feasibility ofthe roll out of electrification in South Africato study the impact of access to electricityon female and male labor supply. She findsthat electrification led to an increase of 9.5percentage points in female employment(without any change in male employment)

and argues that this increase was due totime freed for women in home production.Devoto et al. (2011) find no impact on timedevoted to market activities when house-holds became connected to piped water inMorocco, but a significant increase in lei-sure and reduction in stress levels and intra-households conflicts.

Another source of gain of time with eco-nomic development is the reduction of fertil-ity, already mentioned, as well as the changein the timing of this fertility. Young women who marry or have children typically dropout of school or college and are less likely to work (Field and Ambrus 2008, Miller 2010,

Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer 2011). They tendto marry partners who are older than them.All of these lead to a reduction in women’sautonomy and capacities. In the UnitedStates, Goldin and Katz (2002) show howthe availability of the pill to young, unmar-ried women in the 1960s increased the ageat marriage and the length of study of young women.

2.5 Economic Development and

Women’s RightsEmpirically, there is a strong correlation

between economic development and wom-en’s legal rights, in areas as diverse as prop-erty rights, access to land, access to bankloans, violence against women, abortionpolicy, etc. Doepke and Tertilt (2009) showa robust negative correlation of 0.4 or higheracross countries between the lack of rightsand GDP per capita. Historically, the expan-

sion of economic rights to women in theUnited States and Europe preceded theiraccess to political rights (Doepke and Tertilt2009; Fernandez 2009). While it is of courseimpossible to infer causality from the data,two lines of argument suggest why economicgrowth could lead men to willingly surren-der economic rights to their wives. Doepkeand Tertilt (2009) argue that, when theimportance of human capital in the economy


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increases (with technological progress), menstart to be willing to surrender some rightsto women to ensure that children get bet-ter educated (the argument requires that women care more about children’s humancapital and that bargaining power matter forhousehold decisions, which we will discussbelow). The trade-off is between their utilitytoday and the utility of their offspring (chil-dren, grandchildren, and future generations).Fernandez’s (2009) argument is slightly dif-ferent, although related: she argues that asfertility declines, fathers’ interest as hus-bands (who would like to have all the rights),start to conflict with their interest as fathers

(who would like to protect their daugh-ters against their future son-in-laws). Witheconomic growth and a decline in fertility,the balance starts tilting towards the latterinterest, and women’s economic rights areexpanded. Doepke and Tertilt provide somehistorical narrative that is consistent withtheir theory, and Fernandez some sugges-tive evidence from the granting of rights to women in the United States that states thathad a faster reduction in fertility were morelikely to expand women’s rights. Empirically,there remains much more to be done, andthis is a very interesting area of research.These two papers provide convincing theo-retical arguments, however, that economicgrowth can lead to a progression in women’srights. In fact, Doepke and Tertilt explicitlyconclude that institutions such as the WorldBank that are interested in women’s rights would be well inspired to focus on programs

favorable to economic development (such aseducation policy), rather than push for directlegislative changes for women’s rights.

Is that how it works, then: as countriesdevelop, empowerment of women will follownaturally? Is there a reason to design policiesspecifically targeted toward improving thecondition of women? Or is it sufficient forimproving women’s condition to fight povertyand to create the conditions for economic

growth in poor countries? In a word, willeconomic development be enough?

2.6 But Will Economic Development BeEnough?

There is evidence that growth will notbe enough to overcome discrimination inthe home and in a number of domains. Sexratios remain skewed in favor of boys. InChina, despite rapid economic growth (andthe reforms described above), the sex ratio atbirth has worsened continuously since 1970, with an acceleration in the 1990s from about53 percent of boys among all (reported)births to about 57 percent of boys among all

(reported) births. Within Asia, the sex ratioat birth in South Korea and Taiwan, bothrich countries, is similar to that in China andIndia. The gap between girls and boys is clos-ing for primary and secondary schooling, butfor tertiary education, the ratio of females tomales has not improved overall, even thoughparticipation has risen for both boys andgirls. In the labor market, even in developedcountries, women who are equally qualifiedcontinue to earn less than men at all levels ofqualification. Legal rights, particularly prop-erty rights, of women remain different fromthat of men in many countries, even as econo-mies grow. Compared to economic opportu-nities, education, and legal rights, the gendergap in political participation has narrowedthe least between 1995 and 2005. As of July2011, only 26 countries in the world had metthe target (set by the U.N. Economic andSocial Council in 1990) of having 30 percent

or more women in national legislative seats;the proportion of seats held by women in sin-gle or lower houses of parliament was only19.4 percent globally, up from 15.9 in 2005,13.5 percent in 2000, and 9 percent in 1987(Inter-parliamentary Union 2011).

The persistent difference in sex ratiosat birth illustrates the fact that economicdevelopment, and the availability of newtechnologies, can have perverse effects on


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gender equality if it decreases the cost ofdiscriminating against girls. High differ-ences in reported sex ratios at birth betweengirls and boys are the result of unreportedbirth—infanticide—and increasingly, fromsex-selective abortion. Sex-selective abor-tion shows how the wider availability of newtechnologies and the increased well-beingof households resulting from economicdevelopment have led to an increase in aparticularly egregious form of discrimina-tion. This is not limited to China: the 2001census in India revealed a reversal of thetrend in the sex ratios, particularly in themost prosperous states in the north of India.

By the time of the 2011 census, they haddropped to their lowest levels since inde-pendence. Economic calculus plays a rolehere as well. Advertisements for clinicspracticing sex-selection in Mumbai used toread, “Better pay Rs 500 now than Rs 50,000later” (Desai 1994). The Rs 50,000 refers tothe dowry that the parents would need topay when a girl is married. With the cost ofsex identification and abortion becoming solow with new technologies, many more par-ents may prefer to abort girls rather thanto raise and marry them. In Taiwan, Lin,Qian, and Liu (2008) document that thesex ratio at birth (i.e., the fraction of boysamong live births) in Taiwan increased from0.515 in 1980 to 0.54 by 1990. All of theincrease is accounted for by increases inthe sex ratio for higher parity. They arguethat the legalization of abortion in Taiwanin 1985/86 (when prenatal sex determina-

tion was already available) is responsible.Even if increased opportunities for womenreduce the dowry, there is little chance thatthey will bring it to such a low enough levelso as to make it worthwhile to let a girl livein the face of such a low cost for abortion.Sex selection does not appear to disappeareven in the United States. When a blood testthat can determine the gender of the babyafter seven weeks of pregnancy became

commercially available in the United States,there were reports of concerns that it couldbe used for sex-selective abortion (Belluck2011). These concerns are almost surely justified: even without this test, there is evi-dence of sex-selective abortion in some eth-nic groups in the United States and Canadatoday: in particular, since 1980, there is anabnormal ratio of boys to girls among chil-dren at higher parity in Chinese, Korean,Asian American, and Indian-American fami-lies (Abrevaya 2009; Almond and Edlund2008; Almond, Edlund, and Milligan 2009).Almond and Eldund report, for example,that for third children, if there is no previ-

ous boy, boys will outnumber girls by 50 per-cent. Using linked records from California,Abrevaya shows that Asian Indian mothers were significantly more likely to have a ter-minated pregnancy and to give birth to a boy when they have previously only given birthto girls. Eventually, in societies where thereis a male preference, the pressure on themarriage markets due to the rising sex ratio(it is estimated that there are twenty millionmore boys under 20 than girls in China, and25 million more in India (Edlund and Lee2009)) may provide some incentive for thesex ratio to revert. Edlund and Lee (2009)provide evidence that the sex ratio is nor-malizing in Korea, after having exploded with the introduction of sonography.

The disparity in earnings at all levels ofqualification even in richer countries illus-trates the persisting bias against women.This is not the place for a detailed review on

gender discrimination in developed coun-tries: Goldin (2006) provides a masterfulsummary of the long-run evaluation of theplace of women in society. Gaps in wages,occupation, education, and labor force par-ticipation have shrunk considerably in theUnited States from 1930 to 1990, in part dueto some of the phenomena discussed earlier(a rise in the demand for clerical work, theresulting larger investment in education,


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household appliances, the diffusion of thepill), but the convergence seemed to leveloff after 1990. Differences in participationand in wages do persist, particularly at thetop, in part due to biases toward women, as well as different cultural attitudes of what isexpected of women.

Ample research by psychologists showsthat in developed countries, there is a wide-spread “implicit” bias, shared by both menand women, associating men with career andthe sciences and women with family and lib-eral arts For example, implicit associationstests (e.g., Greenwald et al. 2002; see also www.implicit.org) ask participants to sort

two series of names to the left or the right ofthe screen. For example, female first namesmust be placed on the right, and male firstname on the left. In the second series (alter-nating with the first), words evoking careermust be placed on the left, and words evok-ing family must be placed on the right [orthe opposite]. Because it is easier for peopleto put things on the same side if they “gotogether,” the difference in the time spentfilling the stereotypical block (e.g., womenand family are on the same side) and thenonstereotypical block (women and careerare on the same side) indicate an implicitbias. Both women and men are more likelyto associate women with family and men with careers. Both women and men are morelikely to associate women with liberal artsand men with science.

This bias has persisted despite the wide-spread participation of women in these aca-

demic disciplines and the labor markets inthese countries. These biases affect women’srewards for participating in the labor mar-ket or for getting a higher education bothdirectly and indirectly, by persuading girlsthat they are not cut out for particular jobs,or just not as good as men. Psychologistshave shown this effect, known as the “ste-reotype threat,” to be very powerful. Whenfemale and male students, recognized

for being good at math, are given a diffi-cult math test in college, women do worsethan men. When they are given the sametest after being told, “You may have heardthat girls are less good than boys at math,but this is not true for this particular test,”however, female students do just as well asmales (Spencer, Steele, and Quinn 1999).The explanation for this phenomenon isthat girls have accepted and internalizedthe bias that they are not as good at math,and they give up when the going gets tough. When they are told that this “fact” does notapply to that particular test, they know tocontinue to try hard. As long as these biases

persist, gender equality will be hinderedeven if the technological conditions foran even playing field are met. Women arealso negotiating less and less aggressivelythan men at hiring and during the promo-tion stage, and are less willing to compete(Babcock and Laschever 2003; Gneezy,Niederle, and Rustichini 2003).

Likewise, while a number of factors con-tinue to hinder the parliamentary repre-sentation of women—the type of electoralsystem present in a country, the role anddiscipline of the political parties, the lack ofprevious political experience of women—the widespread perception that womenare not competent leaders is probably thestrongest barrier to greater participationof women in policy making. It persistsin developed countries as well: a seriesof experiments have shown that, holdingperformance constant, women leaders are

evaluated more negatively than male lead-ers. These studies typically either provide a written description of leadership situations, varying the sex of the leader, or use trainedactors to lead, allowing the experimentersto control the degree of success the leaderachieves (Swim et al. 1989). The surveysfind the bias is most pronounced when theleadership role is typically considered amale role.

http://www.implicit.org/http://www.implicit.org/


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Similar evidence coming from India sug-gests that citizens tend to give lower per-formance marks to female leaders than tomale leaders, given the same informationabout them, are also less likely to associate women with leadership than men, and aregenerally not feeling positive toward femalesin politics. Beaman et al. (2009) investigateattitudes in rural West Bengal using a vari-ety of methods. In one experiment, theyask respondents to listen to a short politicalspeech, read out either by a male actor ora female actor. Among people who had nothad the experience of a female leader, ran-domly selected respondents who heard the

“male” speech are significantly more likelyto give it favorable marks than those whoheard the female speech. In another part ofthe study, they conduct “implicit associationtests,” and show a strong association between women and the domestic sphere. Finally,respondents (particularly male) seemedquite comfortable acknowledging that theystrongly preferred a male as leader ratherthan a woman (this is in a country that hasa female head of the majority party and afemale president—since then, the state of West Bengal has also elected a female as thehead of the state). It seems that there is asignificant cultural barrier to recognizing women as competent policy makers.

Evidence such as this provides supportfor the idea of “reservations” or quotas for women in policy-making positions. Sinceperceptions are biased, in the absence ofaffirmative action of some sort, it would be

very difficult for women to break into politics.Indeed, in most of the seventeen countries where the target of 30 percent of women inparliament has been achieved, some kind ofaffirmative action measure has been in place.If one wants to achieve balanced gender rep-resentation rapidly, it seems clear that affir-mative action will be needed.

More generally, economic developmentalone will probably not be enough to bring

about equality between women and men inthe foreseeable future, and policies will berequired to accelerate this process.

Yet, the gains from policies that target women come, to some extent, at the expenseof men. This much is evident in politics. Anyposition that a woman gets through a quotais a position that a man does not get. Thetrade-offs are not always as explicit, but canbe very stark indeed. For example, specificmeasures to improve access of girls to school,such as scholarships for girls or latrines inschool, are an expensive way to get moregirls into schools. Given that enrollment isalready high, many scholarships go to girls

who would have gone to school anyway, mak-ing the cost per additional girl induced to goto school very high. This means that withinthe very limited budget of most develop-ing countries, the transfers to girls comeat the direct expenses of boys. The moneyspent on scholarships is not spent on otherthings that may help both boys and girls,such as hiring new teachers, or dewormingeveryone. The trade-offs are real: compara-tive cost effectiveness research (comparingacross different experiments in a varietyof contexts) suggest that the cost per extrachild enrolled of additional scholarships maybe much larger than that of deworming, orinforming parents of the returns to educa-tion (Dhaliwal et al. 2011).

Thus, policies that explicitly favor womenneed to be justified, not just in terms of beingnecessary to bring about gender equality,but in terms of gender equality itself being

desirable and worth the cost it implies. Thesecond part of this essay explores the com-mon justification that the trade-off betweenthe interests of various people seen in theshort run is transitory; in the long run, thereis no trade-off between helping women moreand helping everyone, because increasingthe share of resources going to women willincrease the amount of resources so muchthat everyone will be better off.


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3. Can Women’s Empowerment CauseEconomic Development?

There are two rationales for supportingactive policies to promote women. The first isthat equity is valuable in and of itself: womenare currently worse-off than men, and thisinequality between genders is repulsive inits own right. For example, in the UnitedNation’s 2005 report on the MillenniumDevelopment Goals (MDG), Kofi Annan,the Secretary General of the United Nations, writes: “The full participation of women toall levels of decision-making is a basic humanright.” The second, a central argument in thediscourse of policymakers, is that women

play a fundamental role in development. Thegender gap in education, political participa-tion, and employment opportunities shouldtherefore be reduced not only because it isequitable to do so, but also because it willhave beneficial consequences on manyother society-wide outcomes. It should bedone, in other words, to increase efficiency.Accordingly, in the same report, Kofi Annanargues that gender equality is in fact a “pre-requisite” to achieving the other MDGs.

The stance that women empowerment isdesirable for efficiency shapes both the pol-icy debate and the resultant economic poli-cies the world over. Micro-credit schemes,for example, have been directed almostexclusively at women, because, it is argued, women invest the money in goods and ser- vices that improve the well-being of families,in goods that are conducive to development.Similarly, most conditional cash transfer

benefit programs in developing countries,such as PROGRESA/Opportunidades inMexico, direct the transfer to women, notmen. Transfers conditioned on school enroll-ment are often higher for girls or evenpositive only for girls. Measures to enforce women’s access to political positions throughquotas have been instituted in 87 countries,including India, where a 1993 constitutionalamendment required that one-third of rural

village council seats and village presidenciesbe reserved for women.

Former World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, addressing the Fourth UNConference on Women, said:

Education for girls has a catalytic effect onevery dimension of development: lower childand maternal mortality rates; increased edu-cational attainment by daughters and sons;higher productivity; and improved environ-mental management. Together, these canmean faster economic growth and, equallyimportant, wider distribution of the fruits ofgrowth. . . . More education for girls will alsoenable more and more women to attain lead-ership positions at all levels of society: fromhealth clinics in the villages to parliaments in

the capitals. This, in turn, will change the waysocieties will deal with problems and raise thequality of global decision-making.

Wolfensohn makes four claims. First ofall, that education of girls would change out-comes for their children and the rest of us. We might call this a “reduced form” argu-ment: broad “empowerment” of womencould change outcomes. Education couldhave an effect, for example, through, forexample, by improving their understandingof how to raise children, use contraception,and manage their homes. His second claim isthat empowerment of women in a narrowersense (power or the ability to influence deci-sion making) would also change outcomes.The third claim is that these changes wouldbe positive. The comment also raises a fourthissue, assuming that increasing decision mak-ing of women would indeed lead to different(and better) outcomes, that is what policy

instruments are available to policymakers toachieve these changes. Do they need to waitfor it to come from improvement in theirhuman capital (the quote suggests it wouldbe a consequence of their improved educa-tion), or can policy interventions, such aschanges in the law, change in electoral rules,changes in the rule governing programs,or other similar “top down” interventionschange effective power?


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The remainder of this section investigatesthese four issues. As will become apparent,the answers are often interlinked: it is oftena change in the rules governing local politics,or particular programs, for example, whichallow us to identify shifts in power and theirresulting outcomes. Moreover, there is nosimple measure of “power” (unlike educa-tion, for example), so that change in poweris often proxied by changes in outcomes.Nevertheless, these four themes serveas a useful organizing framework for theliterature.

3.1 Women Empowerment and Changes inFamily Outcomes

A substantial literature has studied theseissues and found clear evidence of a correla-tion between mothers’ education and earn-ings, and child welfare, particularly childhealth. Moreover, the correlation with moth-ers’ education and earnings is almost alwaysfound to be stronger than the correspond-ing correlation with fathers’ education andearnings. However, correlations are oftenmisleading. In this instance, there are twofundamental problems with the interpreta-tion of the results. First, a woman’s educa-tion, earnings, or political participation maybe correlated with unobserved dimensionsof her ability, family, or community back-ground. To the extent that these unobservedfactors directly determine child health, thecorrelation does not indicate the causaleffect of raising a woman’s education, earn-ings, or political participation. It is important

to recognize that the very fact that womenare typically less likely to get an education,earn an income, and participate in politicaldecisions is likely to make this bias strongerfor women than for men. Likewise, chil-dren might do better in countries or regions where women’s political participation isgreater because these places are otherwisemore favorable environments. Second, thecomparison between the coefficients of

husbands’ and wives’ education or earningsmight be obscured by a correlation between wives’ education or earnings and unobservedcharacteristics of husbands for two reasons:On the one hand, more educated or richer women may be able to marry men who caremore about their children. On the otherhand, the observation that, after controllingfor total resources, income in the hands of women is associated with more desirableoutcomes than income in the hands of menmay reflect unobserved attributes of a manthat directly influence child outcomes. Forexample, if he is progressive enough to allowhis wife to seek employment, then this same

progressive attitude may make him treat hischildren better.

To get around these problems, researchershave exploited specific circumstances wherethe distribution of power, education, or earn-ings of women and men changed for reasonsthat had nothing to do with their individualchoices. These situations allow us to approxi-mate what would happen if women’s empow-erment policies were put in place and appliedto everyone, not only to very special families.

A first dimension of empowerment (thatmentioned by Wolfensohn) is education.Education can have a range of benefits withinthe households: if more educated womencommand higher outside wages, and it is eas-ier for them to get a job, then investing morein educating women, rather than in men,may indeed have a more positive impact onchild health than when the investments arespread evenly if women’s bargaining power

in the household leads to better outcomesfor children. In addition, if women are theprimary caregivers for young children, thenmore education may help them provide bet-ter care. Therefore, many believe that a spe-cial effort is needed to educate girls, and thateducating girls would have tremendous spill-over effects. Unfortunately, the evidence forthis is not as strong as is commonly believed.Although an association between education


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of mothers and the outcomes of their chil-dren has been found over and over again, theevidence, in most cases, suffers from obvi-ous biases: educated girls come from richerfamilies and marry richer, more educated,more progressive husbands. As such, it is, ingeneral, difficult to account for all of thesefactors, and few of the studies have tried todo so. Breierova and Duflo (2004) use themassive expansion of school construction inIndonesia in the 1970s to generate variationin the differences in schooling between hus-bands and wives based only on their regionof birth and their dates of birth to get aroundthis problem. When they correct for the

fact that more-educated women differ fromless-educated ones, they still find that, con-ditional on the household’s average educa-tion level, households have fewer children when the wife is more educated. However,they did not find a lower infant mortality. While there is no doubt that education hasa positive effect on child mortality, it is notclear that girls’ education is much more criti-cal than boys’ education. Chou et al. (2010)use the same empirical strategy to study theimpact of father and mother education onchild health in Taiwan (which introducedcompulsory junior secondary schooling in1968 and introduced it progressively in dif-ferent regions). They find strong and positiveeffects of both father and mother educationon child survival, and one effect is not sig-nificantly greater than the next. While moreneeds to be learned about this, the automaticpresumption that female education is more

important than male education for childmortality and for other children outcomesmay need to be revised: it seems that bothmatter.

3.2 Women as Decisionmakers

3.2.1 . . . within the Household

Micro-credit schemes or welfare agenciesthat restrict credit or transfers to women on

the grounds that the money will be put to usegermane to development implicitly recog-nize that women are not entirely powerless.If women were powerless, then the money would be immediately appropriated by theirspouses, and we would see no impact of dis-tributing the money to women rather than tomen. Conversely, if households were harmo-nious entities where everyone had the samepreferences and desires, then the nominalownership of money would not matter withinthe household. It would all go to a commonpool and channeled toward the best uses forthe families.

In practice, there are good reasons to think

that real families are somewhere betweenthese two extremes—neither ruled by a dic-tator, nor without discord. Instead, all house-hold members have different preferences,and different ideas about many things, fromhow many children to have to how best tospend household income, and each ideais given a different weight in the ultimatedecision depending on each member’s infor-mation set and bargaining power. In demo-graphic and health surveys, for example, women typically report wanting fewer chil-dren than their husbands (Becker 1999).A consequence of this difference is that if women can hide their contraceptive choicefrom their husbands, final fertility may belower. Ashraf, Field, and Lee (2010) providea clear demonstration of this phenomenonin Zambia. In an experiment, they provided836 married women in Lusaka, Zambia, witha voucher guaranteeing free and immediate

access to a range of modern contraceptivesthrough a private appointment with a family-planning nurse. Some women received the voucher in private, while others received the voucher in the presence of their husbands.This made a huge difference: comparedto cases where husbands were involved, women who were seen alone were 23 per-cent more likely to visit a family-planningnurse, 38 percent more likely to ask for a


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relatively concealable form of contraception(injectable contraceptives or contraceptiveimplants), and 57 percent less likely to reporta unwanted birth nine to fourteen monthslater. It is important to note that this doesnot mean that allowing women to concealcontraception would be a desirable policy:it is quite possible that, once husbands dolearn that this option exists, they becomequite suspicious of their wives. They could,for example, prevent them from going to thehealth clinic altogether, delaying importantcare. But the paper is clearly demonstratingthat the lack of congruence in preferencesand the ability (and willingness) to conceal

information is a critical element in under-standing household decisions. Ashraf (2009)presents lab-experiment evidence that alsodemonstrates the importance of information:men who need to decide how to allocate aprize do it very differently when they mustshare the information on what they decided with their wives and when they must negoti-ate with them before taking the decision.

The need to keep things hidden from, or atleast not immediately available to, their hus-bands appears to lead women to forgo conve-nience to keep things quiet, and some timesto act in a way that lowers overall efficiency.Anderson and Baland (2002) argue, forexample, that the rotating savings and creditassociations (ROSCAs) popular especiallyamong women in many parts of Africa areprimarily a way for women to keep savingsaway from their husbands.2 Schaner (2011)provides striking evidence of this phenom-

enon in Kenya. As part of an experiment, sheopened bank accounts for men and womenin Kenya. After having opened the accounts,

2 Other arguments have been made for ROSCAs.Besley, Coate, and Loury (1994) show that for every personexcept the last one in the group, ROSCAs allow membersto have the good faster than if they saved on their own,increasing utility even if they have to forgo interest rates.Gugerty (2007) and Basu (2011) propose that ROSCAs area way for hyperbolic discounters to commit to save.

some randomly selected individuals receiveda free ATM card, which cut the cost chargedby the bank for withdrawals (in addition tomaking it more convenient). Men behaved asexpected: those who got the ATM card mademore active use of the accounts: they savedmore, and withdrew and deposited moneymore often. But the effect was opposite for women: those who got the ATM card usedthe accounts less. Further analysis showedthat this effect was concentrated among women with low bargaining power. It thusseems that women were less willing to usethe account if it was easy for their husbandsto get the money out.

In this context, the share of the house-hold budget contributed by a member may well have an important impact on how much weight is given to the expenditures he/shefavors. When women are decisionmakers within the household, how much they bringto the table can have an important impacton ultimate choices. Empirically, a large lit-erature has tested whether income in thehands of women of a household has a dif-ferent impact on intra-household allocationthan income in the hands of the men. Theevidence suggests that, compared to incomeor assets in the hands of men, income orassets in the hands of women is associated with larger improvements in child health(e.g., Thomas 1990), and larger expenditureshares of household nutrients, health, andhousing (e.g., Thomas 1993). These stud-ies may in general, however, suffer from theproblem that families where women earn

a larger share of the income are differentfrom those where women do not. Thomas(1990, 1993) uses unearned income to cir-cumvent the issue that earned income isendogenous (and corresponds to the laborsupply decisions of men and women). Butthis only partially addresses the problem,because unearned income is often the prod-uct of assets (so women with more unearnedincome may have come to the marriage with


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more wealth, and therefore are different).Moreover, marriage decisions further com-plicate the interpretation of these results, asmen who marry richer women may be morelikely to have tastes similar to theirs.

Duflo (2003) takes the strategy of usingunearned income a step further, and usesthe rapid expansion of the Old Age PensionProgram in South Africa to address theremaining identification issues. At the endof apartheid, the government committed toachieving parity of benefits and eligibilityrequirements between whites and blacks.This was achieved mostly by increasing thebenefits received by blacks, which grew

very rapidly between 1990 and 1993. In1993, 80 percent of black women aboveage 60 and 77 percent of black men aboveage 65 received the pension. The maximumbenefit of 370 rands per month—about 3U.S. dollars per day—was equal to one-halfof the minimum wage, and about twice themedian per capita income in rural areas.Due to traditional living arrangements,nearly one-third of black children underthe age of 5 currently live with a pensionrecipient. Children who live with a pensionrecipient tend to come from relatively dis-advantaged backgrounds, and so they tendto be smaller than other children their age.To estimate the effect of receiving a pensionon the anthropometric status of children,Duflo exploits the fact that height reflectsaccumulated investments in child nutri-tion. The larger the proportion of life dur-ing which a child was well-nourished, the

taller she will be given her age. Expansionof the program in the early 1990s increasedthe likelihood of receiving a pension amongqualified elderly people, and the ben-efits became substantially larger. Thus,to the extent that the pension resulted inimproved nutrition, children born after theexpansion were more likely to have spent alarger fraction of their lives well-nourishedif they lived with a pension recipient.

Indeed, Duflo finds that girls who live witha grandmother who receives the pension areheavier than those who live with a grand-mother who is not quite old enough to receivethe pension. Moreover, when she looks atheight, Duflo finds that older girls, who wereborn before the pension was in effect, aresmaller when they live with a pension recipi-ent (male or female) than when they live with a nonrecipient. However, among younggirls, who have lived their lives since the pen-sion system was put in place, those who live with a grandmother who receives the pen-sion are taller than those who live withoutone. This suggests that pensions received

by women do translate into better nutri-tion for girls. While the weight of the oldergirls catches up immediately, deficit in earlynutrition continues to be seen in height evenafter good nutrition has resumed, and this is why the older girls remain smaller. We esti-mate that for girls, living with a grandmother who receives the pension is enough to bridgehalf the gap between the size of children inthe United States and in South Africa. Incontrast, no such effect is found when thepension is received by a man and no corre-sponding effects were found for boys (notethat boys were as delayed as girls in terms oftheir stature before getting the pension, sothis difference does not appear to be due tothe fact that only girls need to catch up).

3.2.2 . . . on the Farm: Women andProperty Rights

We observe many instances in which

women retain property rights over a por-tion of the assets they bring into the house-hold (we have already seen an examplein Indonesia). In Africa, it is common for women and men to retain separate propertyrights over productive assets, particularlyland. For example, in Burkina Faso, womenretain ownership of their individual plots within the marriage. Household members work on each other’s plots, and inputs such


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as fertilizer may be purchased collectively.The production is also pooled together forconsumption by all household members. Ofcourse, as we saw above, household mem-bers may have different opinions about howthese pooled resources should be used, and various factors, including how much landthey own, will influence the final consump-tion choices of the household. A well-func-tioning family, however, would first try tomaximize the size of the pie before thinkingabout how to divide it. All inputs, includinglabor, seeds, and fertilizer, should be allo-cated to all plots so as to maximize the overallproductivity of the landholding. Udry (1996)

shows that, in practice, this is far from beingthe case. Many more inputs are being usedon the men’s plots, so that, after controllingfor the year, the characteristics of the plots,and the type of crops produced, men’s plotsare much more productive than women’splots, mostly because much more fertilizeris applied to these plots. Because the effec-tiveness of using fertilizer declines steeply with how much is used, it would make muchmore sense to use a little on both men’sand women’s plots. This, however, is not what households seem to be doing in mostcases. Overall, household production mightincrease by 6 percent just by reallocating thesame amount of fertilizer and labor. This isnot negligible in an environment where peo-ple are so poor.

So why would they not do this? One answermay be that households decide how to allo-cate resources as a function of how much food

everyone produced in a day, without takinginto account the fact that a household mem-ber may have helped out another to generatethis production. Each household memberprefers a bigger share of a smaller pie and, asa result, each works mostly on their own plot without regard to maximizing overall house-hold production, and they do not sufficientlyhelp other household members with timeor inputs. Men, being richer and therefore

less credit constrained, can afford fertilizer, which they use on their own plot, but not onthe woman’s plot. Given this imperfection innegotiating within the household, a solutionto increase household productivity wouldbe for the woman to “rent” her land to herhusband, who would then make the efficientproduction choice. One reason why this doesnot happen is because property rights are weak: if the husband works on the wife’s landfor too long, he will eventually be recognizedas “owning” it, and will stop compensatingher. Anticipating this, women are not readyto surrender control to their husbands evenfor compensation, and both members con-

tinue to produce in their own corners. This isan example where the fact that women haveinsecure property rights leads to sheer waste,and literally makes families poorer.

Weak property rights for women also leadto an inefficiently low level of investment inGhana. Farmers in Ghana let their land liefallow for a few years to replenish its nutri-ents. This is a form of investment in thatfarmers forgo production for a few seasonsfor higher post-fallow production. The risk,of course, is that someone seeing the fallow-ing land may decide to start producing on it. Where property rights are secure, this doesnot happen. Property rights on agriculturalland in Ghana, however, are anything butsecure. In fact, a farmer only has, at best,usufructuary rights: the land belongs to boththe village and the lineage, so that even if apiece of land is attributed to someone by thelineage, there is always the possibility that

the village will reallocate it to someone else.The more powerful someone is within eitherthe village or the lineage, the more likely it isthat they can fight opposing claims on theirland, and thus can choose to fallow withoutrisk of being expropriated. Goldstein andUdry (2005) show that indeed, farmers whohave a position of power within either the vil-lage or the lineage are more likely to fallowtheir land, and fallow it longer. As a result,


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they have more productive land. Womenare less likely to hold a position of power.As a result, they fallow less often, and thisleads to a lower productivity for their land.Again, the lower position of women directlyresults in inefficient investment, and this isnot corrected by the transfer of propertyrights within the household, which mightsecure the claim of the household vis-à-visthe lineage or the village, but at the expenseof weakening women’s positions within theirown households.

3.2.3 . . . and within the Community:Women as Policymakers

We have seen that women and men havedifferent preferences, and that the house-hold does not efficiently bargain to choosethe actions that maximize the household’sutility, suggesting that women and men willhave different policy preferences. First, women will prefer policies that betterreflect their own priorities. Since they areparticularly concerned about child healthand nutrition, they should prefer policiesthat will help them achieve these objectives.Second, women should be in favor of poli-cies that will increase their bargaining power within the household, that is, policies thatimprove their situation in cases of divorce,and policies that increase their productivityin everyday work or improve their chancesto access the labor market. In practice, wedo see that women and men have differentpreferences over policies. Chattopadhyayand Duflo (2004) collect data on the types

of complaints brought by both men and women to the local village councils in twodistricts in the states of West Bengal andRajasthan, India. Village councils admin-ister local public goods in rural India. Thetypes of formal complaints differ by gender.For public works, women in West Bengalcomplained most about drinking water androads, and much less abut education andirrigation. Men complained most about

roads and irrigation and less about drinking water. In Rajasthan, over half the complaintsmade by women were about drinking water, while very few complained about education.Drinking water was also a big concern formen in Rajasthan, but it was not as predomi-nant an issue as for women. In contrast, mencomplained much more than women aboutroads and education. The pattern of com-plaints dovetails with gender responsibilitiesof men and women within the household andtheir employment opportunities. Womenare responsible for collecting drinking waterand, in West Bengal, they are the main ben-eficiaries of road works as they provide the

bulk of labor on roads. In Rajasthan, bothmen and women work on roads, but menuse the roads more as they travel more fre-quently in search of work.

This implies that giving women the right to vote makes a difference. And indeed, Miller(2008) shows that the introduction of womensuffrage in the United States was associated with a decline in infant mortality. In mostcountries however, women and men nowhave the right to vote, although they do notget elected. Thus, the next step to increase women’s political power is to directly affecttheir representation through quotas or reservation policies.

To understand the effect of having women as policymakers, Chattopadhyay andDuflo (2004) study the reservation policy for women in India mentioned above. A consti-tutional amendment required states to bothdevolve power over expenditure for local

public goods to rural village councils, and toreserve a third of all council seats and coun-cil presidencies for women. As a result, thepolitical representation and participation of women has increased. A comparison of thetype of public goods provided in reservedand unreserved village councils shows thatthe gender of the council president impactsinvestments. Women invest more in infra-structure that is directly relevant to the


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expressed development priorities of women.In West Bengal, where women complainedmore often than men about water and roads,reserved councils invested more in waterand roads. In Rajasthan, where women com-plained more often about drinking water butless about roads, reserved councils investedmore in water and less in roads. This result isin sharp contrast to the commonly held viewthat positions reserved for women usuallygo to the wife of the previous male leader who effectively continues to rule throughhis wife. The study also found that womenin reserved seats were less experienced, hadless ambition and lower prospects in poli-

tics, and were of lower socioeconomic status.There is no evidence, however, that thesedifferences drove the results. It appears thatonly the gender of the local leader explainsthe different investment decisions in vil-lages reserved for women. In other words, a world run by women would look decidedlydifferent. Women leaders do seem to betterrepresent the needs of women. This is trueeven in an environment (rural Rajasthan) where women traditionally have very littlepower, female literacy is very low, and wheremany believe women leaders simply imple-ment the wishes of their husbands. In fact,these women are changing the realities onthe ground.

3.3 Empowering Women: What PolicyInstruments?

The South African situation, where a radi-cal change in the political situation led to

the establishment of a permanent transferprogram of reasonably large magnitude foradults who live with children, is relativelyrare. Absent these rare situations, are therethings policymakers can do to shift powerto women in their community or in theirfamilies? Or do they need to rely, once again,on a natural process of development (per-haps accelerated a little bit by working onimproving access to education for girls or by

encouraging an economy where women havebetter access to market opportunities)?

The Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004)study in India suggests that it is indeed pos-sible to shift power within the community via a change in the electoral rules. Even if women and men were to have differentpreferences it is not sufficient to ensurethat women policymakers, particularly thoseselected through quotas, would act any dif-ferently than men. In fact, in a perfectlydemocratic system, they would not, sinceboth men and women would try to do whattheir constituents expect them to do in orderto be reelected. Additionally, even if we

thought women leaders did a better job ofunderstanding women’s needs, it would notnecessarily follow that policies designed toguarantee greater representation by women would be an effective way to achieve thisrepresentation. For example, if women arepolitically weak, they may find it difficult toinfluence actual decisions. In India, the res-ervation policy was (and is still, to a largeextent) met with a large measure of suspi-cion: women would not be powerful leaders;they would be eclipsed by their husbands; or worst, local elite would take advantage of thepolicy to reascertain their power against thePanchayat. And yet the quota policy made areal difference in actual outcomes.

Furthermore, this difference appears to bedurable, beyond the initial push, by affectingattitudes. The study by Beaman et al. justmentioned takes advantage of India’s reservation policy, which specifies that, at each

election, one-third of the villages are ran-domly selected and must elect a woman at thehead of the local council. They compare theresults of the implicit association test associ-ating women and politics and the responsesto the speeches. They find that, in men’sresponse to the speeches, all the bias against women is erased (and in fact it becomes abias in favor of women). The bias against women and leadership is also diminished.


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Although, interestingly, the response to theexplicit question is not affected, people do vote more for women after the seats losetheir reserved status. Beaman et al. (2011)examine another form of attitude: the aspi-rations that parents have for their children,and that teenagers have for themselves. Wehave already noted the gaps between boysand girls. This gap is reduced by 0.15 stan-dard deviations (one-fifth) in villages wherepositions have been reserved for females forten years. Moreover, even in the absence ofany additional investment in education infra-structure, this led into an increase in edu-cational attainment for teenage girls, and a

reduction in the gaps with boys. There arethus real effects on future gender equalityof giving more power to women then they would naturally be getting, over and abovetheir ability to directly influence outcomes.

To what extent can similar “top–down”policies affect the balance of bargaining within the household? One avenue is thelegal environment. A woman’s options out-side the marriage are also important forbargaining within the marriage. If a womanhas no options outside of the marriage, andboth she and her husband know that divorceis not possible or that in the case of divorceshe would be without any means of support,then the husband can impose decisions onthe household—he can threaten his wife with being left in a much worse position ifshe does not yield. This suggests that theinstitutional environment, such as the type ofdivorce laws that exist, and the ease of remar-

rying or of finding other ways of supportingoneself in case of divorce would affect deci-sion making within households, even whenthey do not end up divorcing. In Indonesia,each spouse retains ownership of theresources he/she brought into the marriage.Thomas, Contreras, and Frankenberg (2002)show that, even controlling for the house-hold resources today, the resources eachspouse brought into the marriage continue

to affect decision making within households.Specifically, children are in better health iftheir mother brought more resources intothe marriage. Field (2007) finds that whensquatters in Peru were given a property titlefor their land, fertility declined, but only inareas where the prescription to put both the woman’s and man’s name on the title waseffectively enforced.

In many developing countries, women are very poorly protected in the case of divorce,and stand to lose assets and the custody oftheir children. Even when divorce laws exist,it is frowned upon in society, and remarry-ing is difficult. Surprisingly, there is little

research on the effect of these institutionsin developing countries. Work from theUnited States suggests that the institutionsthemselves matter for the outcomes withinthe family. Chiappori, Fortin, and Lacroix(2002) show that the rights of each spousein case of divorce (which vary by state andhave evolved differently in different statesover time) affect the labor supply decisionsamong married couples. Angrist (2002)shows that the female children of Americanimmigrants have a higher marriage rate andlower labor supply (a sign of higher bargain-ing power, in the United States) when there were more males among the recent immi-grants of their age cohorts. The reason is thatmigrants tend to marry within their ethnicgroup. Immigration-induced sex ratios thatare not balanced across sexes thus increasethe likelihood of remarriage of the sex that isin short supply in case of a divorce, and thus

increases their bargaining power within thehousehold.

This suggests that policies seeking toincrease women’s welfare in case of divorce orto increase women’s access to the labor mar-ket may impact outcomes within the house-hold, in particular child health. But wouldthese effects extend to temporary transferprograms that do not profoundly changethe nature of the relative status of men and


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women? For example, do conditional cashtransfers given to a mother for a period of afew years have greater positive effects than ifthey had been given to a father? The answeris not obvious a priori. One might expect thehousehold to recognize that the transfers aretemporary. In this case, the transfer shouldhave no real effect on the recipient’s bargain-ing power in the decision making, since thehousehold knows that very soon it will revertto the prior situation, and that the woman would be punished if she tried to extracttoo much while her power lasted. In other words, instead of trying to extract as much aspossible at any point in time, the household

members should insure each other, and tem-porary transfers would not matter.

In practice, however, we observe thathousehold members do not seem able to provide efficient insurance to each other. Theymay face the same constraints that informalinsurance between households is subject to(moral hazard, hidden information, limitedcommitment, etc.). In Côte d’Ivoire, womenand men grow different crops and are there-fore affected differentially by the same rain-fall. Some years are good for men, and some years are good for women. One would expectthat the consumption in the family would notbe affected by the temporary, rain-inducedfluctuations in the share of income contrib-uted by each partner. Yet Duflo and Udry(2004) find that it is: in years when theproduction of women’s crops is higher, thehousehold spends a bigger share of its bud-get on food and also on private goods for

women. In years when the production ofmale’s crops is higher, the household spendsa bigger share of the budget on alcohol andtobacco and male private goods. Robinson(2011) has a similar finding from an experi-ment in Kenya, where husbands and wives were given small transfers over a period of afew weeks.

And indeed, the fact that conditional trans-fer programs are targeted to women, rather

than to men, seem to make a difference, even when they are both temporary and small.This was first demonstrated in a nice study byLundberg, Pollak, and Wales (1997), whichtakes advantage of a change in the alloca-tion of child benefits in the United Kingdomfrom a tax credit to a direct payment in thename of the mother. This transfer “from the wallet to the purse” was associated with anincrease in the consumption of women’s andchildren’s clothing in households with chil-dren. Surprisingly, despite the fact that mostof the recent CCT are targeted to women,there is very little evidence on whether thisis a factor in their effectiveness: since most of

them are just targeted to women, it is essen-tially impossible to distinguish the impact ofthe gender of the recipient from that of theeffect of the increased income, or the condi-tionality.3 An exception is a recent study byBenhassine et al. (2011), which exploits therandomization of the gender of the recipi-ent of a small conditional cash transfer inMorocco. They found that, despite the factthat the transfer was very small (it repre-sented only about 3 percent to 4 percent ofbeneficiary’s total consumption), householdsreported spending it differently when the woman was a recipient, and it had a somewhat larger effect on the education of youngchildren and girls when women received it.It seems unlikely that the program directlyaffected their bargaining power, and indeedthe study does not find any evidence thatother dimensions of women empowermenthave changed. However, they seem to have

been more likely to be in charge to spendthat money, and they were more likely tospend it on education.

There are two important lessons fromthese findings. First, even if they do notbring about radical changes in women’s

3 Although some studies try to do this by using a func-tional form for the impact of income on consumptionpatterns.


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status or in the way women are perceived insociety, policies targeted toward women canhave immediate consequences. Even smallerchanges that just give women control over asmall stream of resources affect at least the way that this money is spent. Increasing women’s control over resources, even inthe short run, will improve their say withinthe household, which will not only increasetheir welfare, but as research seems to haveshown repeat

women empowerment and wco dev 2012

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