EMPOWERMENT IN THE HOUSEHOLD

Ensuring that women have a greater voice in household and community decisions is critical to fulfilling their rights as well as the rights of children. While international agencies, governments, civil society organizations and women themselves have made significant progress in promoting a more egalitarian dynamic, much remains to be done. Some key areas that urgently require attention include: Increasing womens employment and income-earning opportunities Ending the wage gap, opening higher-paying fields to women and allowing female workers more decision-making power will greatly benefit children. As women become economically productive, their spheres of influence increase. They become able to make choices not only for themselves, but also for their children. When a woman brings assets and income into the household, she is more likely to be included in decisions on how the resources will be distributed. Historically, when women hold decision-making power, they see to it that their children eat well, receive adequate medical care, finish school and have opportunities for recreation and play. Women who have access to meaningful, income-producing work are more likely to increase their families standards of living, leading children out of poverty. Ownership or control of household assets and income is an important determinant of household bargaining power. Ensuring that women have opportunities to earn income or acquire land, a house and other property can help to strengthen womens bargaining power and influence in household decisions. Equal land and property rights would represent a significant step towards eliminating gender discrimination at the household level. For legal reform to change the lives of women and children, national laws based on human rights laws and principles must necessarily be upheld over malebiased customary laws and traditional practices. National legal reforms in property law and inheritance rights represent one of the most direct strategies for increasing womens access to land and property. In the wake of land reform in Costa Rica, for example, women represented 45 per cent of land-titled beneficiaries between 1990 and 1992, compared with only 12 per cent before the reform. Similarly, in Colombia, after a ruling in 1996 on joint titling, land titled jointly to couples made up 60 per cent of land adjudications, compared to 18 per cent in 1995. Involving men Men can make a crucial contribution to ending gender discrimination. Globally, men continue to dominate decision-making processes in households, economies and governments. In addition, mens participation in initiatives to promote gender mainstreaming and gender equality remains low. Such initiatives may be perceived as a threat to their status and power. By making child-friendly choices and supporting women in their capacities as decision-makers, men can be powerful allies in the struggle for womens equality. Evidence shows that men are more likely to be active, hands-on fathers when they feel positive about themselves and their relationship with the childs mother, when they have support for active involvement in their childrens lives from family and friends, and when they are in employment. Men are often the dominant household decision-makers, yet they tend to be overlooked by programmes that improve conditions for women and children. In one Indian state, for instance, researchers discovered that advocacy campaigns on nutrition were targeted to women, even though approximately 20 per cent of fathers made the decisions regarding childrens nutrition. UNICEFs experience shows that programmes that focus on males provide ways to promote positive gender socialization. Programmes that encourage the participation of both men and women can help to increase communication between the sexes and encourage a more even division of childcare responsibilities. In Viet Nam, for example, UNICEF has mobilized men to promote the use of oral rehydration salts to treat diarrhoea and to increase immunization coverage. Throughout Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, male and female activists are campaigning against gender-based violence. In Uganda and Zimbabwe, UNICEF programmes are attempting to foster the socialization of girls and boys as a means of stemming the spread of AIDS.

Another strategy for increasing mens support for gender equality involves policies that aim to redistribute benefits to men and women more equitably. Evidence from the Nordic experiment illustrates how this works. In Scandinavian countries, a combination of government and nongovernment initiatives contributed to a dramatic increase in the availability of paternity leave for men. In Sweden, for instance, fathers now assume responsibility for 45 per cent of childcare responsibilities, thanks in large part to the growing popularity of paternal leave. Advocacy initiatives designed to educate men and women on the benefits of gender equality and joint decision-making can help nurture a more cooperative relationship between men and women. Evidence shows that fathers are more likely to stop abusive treatment towards mothers if they have been exposed to information on how gender-based violence adversely affects their children. Supporting womens organizations One of the most important and effective avenues for womens empowerment is the dynamic of cooperation among women. Informal womens collectives organized around issues such as nutrition, food distribution, education and shelter help improve the standard of living for women, their families and communities. By standing up to discrimination and motivating other women, these groups begin the process of promoting the rights of girls and women for generations to come. Grass-roots womens movements have been the most vocal champions of womens equality and empowerment at the local level. Evidence drawn from Demographic and Health Surveys suggests that in some developing countries much of the impact of womens overall decision-making power is concentrated at the community level. Across the developing world, studies show that womens participation in community initiatives can have long-lasting benefits for women.

A CALL FOR EQUALITY

Gender equality is central to realizing the Millennium agenda, which risks failure without the full participation of all members of society. Within the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals, and at the heart of the United Nations itself, is the acknowledgement that the vulnerable, especially children, require special care and attention. Gender equality will not only empower women to overcome poverty, but also their children, families, communities and countries. When seen in this light, gender equality is not only morally right it is pivotal to human progress and sustainable development. Moreover, gender equality produces a double dividend: advancing the rights of both women and children. Healthy, educated and empowered women have healthy, educated and confident daughters and sons. The amount of influence that women have over decisions in the household has been shown to positively impact the nutrition, health care and education of their children. But the benefits of gender equality go beyond their direct impact on children. Without it, it will be impossible to create a world of equality, tolerance and shared responsibility a world that is fit for children. By upholding womens rights, societies also protect girl children and female adolescents. Gender equality means that girls and boys have equal access to food, health care, education and opportunities. Evidence has shown that women whose rights are fulfilled are more likely to ensure that girls have access to adequate nutrition, health care, education and protection from harm. Since the status of women and the well-being of children are deeply intertwined, advocates for children would be remiss if they failed to champion the cause of gender equality. The rights of women and children are mutually reinforcing The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is an internationally binding instrument that protects the human rights and fundamental freedoms of women. The treaty was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979; the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which focuses on the inalienable rights of children, followed a decade later. The two conventions are sister treaties, inexorably linked in moving communities towards full human rights. Each delineates specific entitlements that cannot be abrogated due to age, gender,

economic class or nationality. The two treaties are complementary, overlapping in their call for precise rights and responsibilities and filling in crucial gaps that may exist when either stands alone. The treaties are not perfectly harmonious: There are areas of tension. For instance, some supporters of gender quality believe that the CRC stereotypes women as mothers, limiting their life options. Some child rights advocates think that CEDAW focuses too much on a womans right to self-actualization and may unintentionally subvert the importance of motherhood. Despite these differences, the two conventions hold more in common than in opposition: They set the standards for an equitable world in which the rights of every human being female and male, old and young, are respected. Although both treaties have gained widespread endorsement, CEDAW has had the tougher road to acceptance and ratification. Some nations that readily accept the concept that children have rights are less willing to concede that women also have rights. And while 184 countries are parties to CEDAW, many of the signatures were submitted with reservations to specific articles. In fact, CEDAW contains among the highest number of reservations of any United Nations treaty, underscoring worldwide resistance to womens rights. Rhetorical support for CEDAW and the CRC has been strong. In practice, however, neither convention has been fully implemented. While giving lip service to equality, governments often fail to invest often limited public resources in women and children or to challenge discriminatory customs, attitudes and beliefs. The pernicious nature of gender inequality Gender discrimination is pervasive. While the degrees and forms of inequality may vary, women and girls are deprived of equal access to resources, opportunities and political power in every region of the world. The oppression of girls and women can include the preference for sons over daughters, limited personal and professional choices for girls and women, the denial of basic human rights and outright gender-based violence. Girls and women are frequently victims of physical and sexual violence inside and outside the home. Although such assaults are underreported because of the stigma of the crime, a recent multicountry study by the World Health Organization revealed that between 15 per cent and 71 per cent of women had experienced physical or sexual assault from an intimate partner. Domestic violence is the most common form of violence perpetrated against women. During armed conflict, rape and sexual assault are often used as weapons of war. When complex emergencies force people to be displaced from their homes, women and girls are at increased risk of violence, exploitation and abuse sometimes from the very security personnel or other persons charged with their protection and safety. As despicable as deliberate negligence or brutal violence can be, insidious gender inequality may be equally destructive. Institutional discrimination is harder to identify and rectify. Cultural traditions can perpetuate inequality and discrimination from generation to generation, as gender stereotypes remain accepted and unchallenged. The unequal division of household labour, such as requiring girls and women to trek many kilometres to fetch water and firewood, or the uneven allocation of household resources, such as giving women and girls less food or medical care, are examples of more subtle forms of inequality. These ingrained forms of discrimination often keep individuals, families and societies trapped in poverty and undermine economic, political and social development. If poverty is to become history, then gender inequality must first be eliminated. Bold initiatives and unflinching determination are required to end individual and institutional gender discrimination. Attitudes, customs and values that are detrimental to women and girls must be confronted. No history, legacy, religion or cultural tradition can justify inequality and disempowerment. It is estimated that women make up the majority of the worlds poor. To break the cycle of poverty, and to provide for themselves and their families, some choose to migrate. Yet this sometimes renders them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Coco, from Romania, travelled to Western Europe to work in a restaurant

INEQUALITY IN THE HOUSEHOLD

For children, the most important actors in the world are not world leaders or heads of government, but parents and caregivers who make crucial household decisions on a daily basis. How members of households decide to use their collective resources determines the levels of nutrition, health care, education and protection that each family member receives. Inequalities in decision-making When women, who are most often the primary caregivers for children, are excluded from household decision-making processes, their well-being as well as their childrens may be at risk. Evidence from 30 countries drawn from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), one of the most direct sources of information on household decision-making dynamics reveals that in many households, women have little influence over important household decisions. Overall, the data paint a picture of extreme gender inequality. In only 10 of the 30 countries surveyed did 50 per cent or more of women participate in all household decisions, including those taken in regard to their own health care, major household purchases, daily household spending and visits with family or relatives outside of the household. Lack of control over health-care needs: Although decisions on womens health care are vital to the health and well-being of both women and children, in many households, notably in those countries examined in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, women have little influence in healthrelated matters. In Burkina Faso, Mali and Nigeria, for example, almost 75 per cent of women reported that their husbands alone make decisions on their access to health-care services. The exclusion of women from these crucial decisions can compromise the health and well-being of all family members, particularly children. Limited management of daily household expenditure: Household decisions on daily expenditure have a decisive impact on childrens well-being, education and, particularly, their health. In many households across the developing world, men have a firm upper hand in decisions on these expenditures. In 7 of the 15 countries surveyed in sub-Saharan Africa, more than 40 per cent of women indicated that their husbands had exclusive control over household expenditures. In the countries examined in the Middle East and North Africa and South Asia, approximately 30 per cent of women felt excluded from decisions on household purchases. Exclusion from decisions on major household purchases: The DHS data also reveal that in the 30 countries surveyed, men dominate decisions on major purchases such as land, cars and livestock. These assets can be crucial for sustaining and increasing a familys wealth and income, and are often regarded as a sound long-term investment. However, the short-term cost of such purchases can consume a large share of household income that might otherwise be used for more immediate household needs, such as medicine, school supplies and food. Approximately 60 per cent of women in Egypt and more than a third of women in Bangladesh and Nepal felt excluded from such decisions. This contrasts with attitudes in the two countries surveyed in East Asia and Pacific, Indonesia and the Philippines, where fewer than 18 per cent of women in both countries felt they had no say in such matters. Restricted mobility and freedom: To provide for their own needs, as well as those of their children, women require the ability to move freely within and outside the household. Yet survey data from across the developing regions suggest that men often exert a high degree of control over womens mobility. In Burkina Faso and Mali, approximately 60 per cent of women reported that husbands alone decide when they can visit friends or relatives. One third of Bangladeshi husbands control their wifes mobility outside the home. In Latin America and the Caribbean, data from Nicaragua show that 18 per cent of women require a mans permission before leaving home to visit friends and family. In CEE/CIS, 16 per cent of Armenian women need to first secure their husbands permission. Key determinants of influence in household decision-making Gender discrimination in the household is often rooted in patriarchal attitudes that value the social status of men over women. A strikingly high proportion of men in the countries surveyed believe that wives should submit to their husbands authority on household decisions. But tradition is not the only factor determining bargaining power within families. Even within the most homogenous

societies, every family is unique, and there is no simple set of rules that can explain the dynamics of household decision-making. Nonetheless, recent studies on household decisions and gender shed some light on the major determinants of influence. These include control of income and assets, age, and access to and level of education. Examining these factors across a wide range of countries offers insights into the distribution of bargaining power in individual households. Control of income and assets: The strongest say in household decision-making often belongs to the family member who controls the largest share of household income and assets. Women are at a distinct disadvantage in terms of economic affluence because they earn less than men and tend to own fewer assets. Smaller salaries and less control over household income constrain womens abilities to accumulate capital. Gender biases in property and inheritance laws and in other channels of acquiring assets including state land distribution programmes leave women and children at greater risk of poverty. The consequences of exclusion from owning property or assets can be even more direct, particularly when a marriage breaks down or the husband dies. Levels of education: In addition to increased levels of knowledge, self-confidence and assertiveness, education confers social status and increases income-earning potential. The level of each spouses education varies among households. The findings of a study undertaken in 40 developing countries indicate that, on average, men tend to spend more time in education than women. The education gap tends to be widest in South Asia, where men spend an average 2.5 years more in school than women, declining to 1.3 years in sub-Saharan Africa and 1 year in Latin America and the Caribbean. Disparate levels of education may reinforce gender inequalities, ensuring that women remain disadvantaged. Age gaps: The distribution of household bargaining power is also influenced by a womans age at marriage and the age difference between a woman and her husband. Evidence from around the world shows that the age gap between husbands and wives can vary enormously among households. The average age at first marriage in Western Europe is estimated to be 27 for women and 30 for men. In developing countries, age differences are far greater. In South Asia, for example, husbands are approximately five years older than their wives; the gap rises to six years in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding southern Africa). In cases of child marriage, when the age gap between spouses is most extreme, the burden of domestic work and childcare severely constrains the life choices available to married girls and child mothers. This, in turn, affects the power that women have over household decisions. Education is key in the fight against discrimination and against practices that deny women a say in household decisions. Read how Fatna, a Sudanese girl living in a refugee camp in Chad, who is determined to continue her education to guarantee a better future for herself.

INEQUALITY IN EMPLOYMENT
While there has been progress in recent decades in engaging women in the global workforce, there has been considerably less advance on improving the conditions under which they work, recognizing their unpaid work, eliminating discriminatory practices and laws related to property and inheritance rights, and providing childcare support. Ensuring that men and women have equal opportunities to generate and manage income is an important step towards realizing womens rights and enhancing their development, self-esteem and influence both within the household and in society. Moreover, childrens rights are more likely to be fulfilled when women fully enjoy their social and economic rights. Women are working more... Whether they live in industrialized or developing countries, in rural or urban settings, in general, women work longer hours than men. While data on the way men and women use their time are sparse, surveys conducted in recent years confirm the validity of this assertion across developing countries. Oxfam estimates that women work around 60 to 90 hours per week, and time-use

surveys reveal that across a selection of developing countries in Asia, Latin America and subSaharan Africa, womens working hours exceed those of men, often by a wide margin. For many women, unpaid work in and for the household takes up the majority of their working hours, with much less time spent in remunerative employment. Data from urban areas in 15 Latin American countries reveal that unpaid household work is the principal activity for 1 in every 4 women; the corresponding ratio for men is 1 in every 200. But even when they participate in the labour market for paid employment, women still undertake the majority of the housework. Time-use surveys in six states in India reveal that women spend 35 hours on average on household tasks and caring for children, the sick and elderly, against 4 hours for men. The division of household labour is not dissimilar in industrialized countries. Although gender disparities in the overall work burden are less marked than in developing countries, women in the more affluent nations still spend a far greater proportion of working hours than men in unpaid work. ...but earning less than men When women work outside the household, they earn, on average, far less than men. Although disaggregated data on nominal wages are scarce, the available evidence shows that, across regions, womens nominal wages are roughly 20 per cent lower than mens. While the data show that gender wage gaps exist across countries, these can vary significantly and can even be inverted. In Brazil, for example, women under the age of 25 earn a higher average hourly wage than their male counterparts. Because much of the work women do is underpaid and because they often perform low-status jobs and earn less than men, womens per capita average earned income is far lower than mens. Estimates based on wage differentials and participation in the labour force suggest that womens estimated earned income is around 30 per cent of mens in the countries surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa, around 40 per cent in Latin America and South Asia, 50 per cent in subSaharan Africa and around 60 per cent in CEE/CIS, East Asia and industrialized countries. Where women work matters for children Womens participation in the workforce can be beneficial to children, because it often results in women gaining greater access to, and control of, economic resources. But paid employment for women does not automatically lead to better outcomes for children. Factors such as the amount of time women spend working outside the household, the conditions under which they are employed, who controls the income they generate and the cost and availability of quality childcare determine how their employment affects their own well-being and that of their children. Women are more likely than men to work in more precarious forms of employment with low earnings, little financial security and few or no social benefits. As growing numbers of women join the labour force, there has been a parallel increase in informal and non-standard forms of employment. Womens informal employment and its impact on children In nearly all developing regions, 60 per cent or more of women engaged in non-agricultural work activities are in informal employment. The exception is North Africa, where womens participation in the informal sector is 43 per cent. Of the developing regions, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of informally employed women (84 per cent). Women are more likely than men to be ownaccount workers, domestic workers, factory workers or unpaid workers in family enterprises. Women working in the informal sector often face difficult working conditions, long hours and unscheduled overtime. The lack of job security and benefits such as paid sick leave and childcare provisions can leave women and their children at a higher risk of poverty. When mothers are poor, engaged in time-intensive, underpaid and inflexible informal work, and have little control over their earnings and few alternative caregivers, children are significantly more at risk of poor health and growth. Such conditions are prevalent in many areas of both informal employment and low-income work in the formal sector.

One particular area that has received increasing scrutiny in recent years is domestic service. Women make up the majority of domestic workers, most of them informally employed. When mothers who work in domestic service take on childcare responsibilities for the employers family, this often results in a conundrum: The day-to-day security of the employers children is dependent on an employee who has to be away from her own children in order to work. A childcare crisis in the formal sector The increasing participation of women in the labour force is challenging the traditional breadwinnerhomemaker model of paid work by men and unpaid work by women. In its place, a new model is prevalent in many countries, such as the high-income countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, transition economies and the rapidly growing nations of East Asia, where both men and women engage in paid employment. In the United Kingdom and the United States, for example, two out of every three families are currently double-income families. In the Russian Federation, in 52 per cent of households in which there are young children, all adults between the ages of 25 and 55 are working. The corresponding figure for Viet Nam is 88 per cent. But even as this new model of household income generation steadily takes root, in general women are still expected to take on the majority of the housework and childcare. As a result, and in the absence of greater participation by men in both domestic chores and childcare, it is becoming increasingly difficult for working mothers to reconcile work and family responsibilities. For many women living in poverty, working in the informal sector is the only way to eke a living. Read how Ena, from Indonesia, managed to support her family and rebuild her life after the tsunami by opening her own kiosk.

INEQUALITY IN POLITICS
Children have a powerful stake in political outcomes, but they have little power to shape them. Unable to vote or directly represent their own interests in governing bodies, their ability to influence policy is limited. The advocates who speak on their behalf if there is anyone at all to do so can make a vast difference to the fulfilment of childrens rights to survival, development and protection. A growing body of evidence suggests that women in politics have been especially effective advocates for children at the national and local levels. They are equally powerful advocates when represented in peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction. Few women in government and politics, but signs of progress Womens participation in politics and government, however, remains limited. Although their parliamentary representation has steadily increased over the past decade, gender parity in politics at all levels is still a long way off. By July 2006, women accounted for just fewer than 17 per cent of parliamentarians worldwide. Ten countries have no women parliamentarians at all, and in more than 40 others, women account for less than 10 per cent of legislators. At current annual rates of growth in the proportion of women members of national parliaments about 0.5 per cent worldwide gender parity in national legislatures will not be achieved until 2068. The under-representation of women at the ministerial level and in local government is even more marked than in national legislatures. As of January 2005, women accounted for just over 14 per cent of government ministers worldwide. Nineteen governments had no women ministers at all, and among those governments that did include women, most had a token presence of around one to three women ministers. As of March 2006, only three countries Chile, Spain and Sweden had achieved gender parity in ministerial portfolios. At the local level, women account for less than 1 in 10 of the worlds mayors. There are, however, some encouraging trends in womens participation at the highest level of national politics. Sub-Saharan Africa has its first woman president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, and Michelle Bachelet was elected to the presidency of Chile in early 2006. Latvia became the first former Soviet Republic to choose a female president as chief of state in 1999. Finland, Ireland and the Philippines also currently have women presidents. Women are heads of government in Bangladesh, Germany, Jamaica, New Zealand, Mozambique, Netherlands Antilles and the Republic of Korea.

Advocating for women, children and families Though constrained by the limited and nascent nature of womens participation in national legislatures, the available evidence indicates that their involvement fosters direct and tangible changes in policy outcomes that reflect the priorities, experiences and contributions of women, children and families. Women in politics are making a difference in at least three important arenas: national legislatures, local government and post-conflict reconstruction. National politics: A better representation of women in parliament can make legislatures more gender- and child-sensitive and can influence legislation and policies that address the rights of both groups. Case studies confirm a strong commitment by women legislators to issues related to children, women and families. For example, a pioneering study of women legislators in Latin America found that in the 1993-1994 parliament, women deputies in Argentina were 9.5 per cent more likely to sponsor children and family bills than their male counterparts. Recent evidence suggests that this pattern held true over the subsequent decade, with women legislators in Argentina playing a crucial role in ensuring the passage of a law that modified that countrys penal code to explicitly define sexual crimes against women and children and toughen the penalties for such egregious acts. Initiatives to promote childrens rights often accompany efforts to advance the rights of women. Sub-Saharan Africa provides several examples of this advocacy. In South Africa, for example, women parliamentarians provided significant support to the 1998 Domestic Violence Act. This pattern of advocacy by women legislators on behalf of women and children is also found in industrialized countries. A recent examination of New Zealands parliamentary debates on childcare and parental leave over a 25-year period (1975-1999) reveals that women legislators, though only accounting for 15 per cent of parliamentarians, initiated two thirds of the debates on childcare and parental leave. Local politics: The presence of women leaders in local politics often serves to focus greater attention on issues related to women and children. Although evidence about the behaviour of local politicians is limited, a number of studies from industrialized and developing countries indicate that women in local government tend to prioritize social issues. In the United States, for example, a 1994 analysis of more than 9,800 bills introduced in three states over a two-year period found that women legislators were twice as likely as their male counterparts to sponsor child health bills. In Norway, childrens issues, and particularly the lack of childcare spaces, are one of the most frequently cited reasons for women entering local politics. In developing countries, research on the impact of women in local government is an emerging area of enquiry. Evidence from one important documented case in India shows that womens increasing participation in local politics has led to a more equitable distribution of community resources. In 1998, India reserved one third of all leadership positions in village councils for women. An extensive research project examining the impact of the reservation policy focused initially on 165 village councils in the state of West Bengal. The study found that the level of provision of public goods including highway maintenance, visits by health workers and investment in drinking-water facilities were markedly higher in villages with active reservation policies than in villages where quotas were not in operation. Peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction: There is increasing recognition that the contribution of women is critical both to the long-term success of peace processes and to postconflict stability. Womens participation in peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction is vital to ensure the safety and protection of children and other vulnerable populations. Experts suggest that peace agreements, post-conflict reconstruction and governance have a better chance of success when women are involved, in part because women adopt a more inclusive approach towards security and address key social and economic issues that might otherwise be ignored. Yet womens role in peace processes remains, at best, informal. While governments and other political actors appear to encourage engagement with womens groups that often cut across conflict

lines, women rarely make it to the peace table. Womens exclusion from formal peace negotiations means that their rights and interests, as citizens and as victims, are not fully represented. In addition, as one former mediator pointed out, women at the peace table tend to increase the likelihood that issues critical to the rights and well-being of children, women and families such as the reintegration of women and children, increased domestic violence as people return to their homes, landmines, and post-conflict accountability are included in negotiations. Despite these constrains, women have become increasingly involved in conflict-resolution processes across the world, including Afghanistan, Burundi, Darfur (Sudan), Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sri Lanka, among others. But they continue to have to fight hard to gain even limited representation and are often excluded entirely from negotiations or relegated to a parallel track. The presence of women in local politics often serves to focus greater attention on issues related to women and children. Read more about how Zahra, from Iran, uses her position in the governors office to empower women and help change mentalities.

EMPOWERMENT IN THE HOUSEHOLD

Ensuring that women have a greater voice in household and community decisions is critical to fulfilling their rights as well as the rights of children. While international agencies, governments, civil society organizations and women themselves have made significant progress in promoting a more egalitarian dynamic, much remains to be done. Some key areas that urgently require attention include: Increasing womens employment and income-earning opportunities Ending the wage gap, opening higher-paying fields to women and allowing female workers more decision-making power will greatly benefit children. As women become economically productive, their spheres of influence increase. They become able to make choices not only for themselves, but also for their children. When a woman brings assets and income into the household, she is more likely to be included in decisions on how the resources will be distributed. Historically, when women hold decision-making power, they see to it that their children eat well, receive adequate medical care, finish school and have opportunities for recreation and play. Women who have access to meaningful, income-producing work are more likely to increase their families standards of living, leading children out of poverty. Ownership or control of household assets and income is an important determinant of household bargaining power. Ensuring that women have opportunities to earn income or acquire land, a house and other property can help to strengthen womens bargaining power and influence in household decisions. Equal land and property rights would represent a significant step towards eliminating gender discrimination at the household level. For legal reform to change the lives of women and children, national laws based on human rights laws and principles must necessarily be upheld over malebiased customary laws and traditional practices. National legal reforms in property law and inheritance rights represent one of the most direct strategies for increasing womens access to land and property. In the wake of land reform in Costa Rica, for example, women represented 45 per cent of land-titled beneficiaries between 1990 and 1992, compared with only 12 per cent before the reform. Similarly, in Colombia, after a ruling in 1996 on joint titling, land titled jointly to couples made up 60 per cent of land adjudications, compared to 18 per cent in 1995. Involving men Men can make a crucial contribution to ending gender discrimination. Globally, men continue to dominate decision-making processes in households, economies and governments. In addition, mens participation in initiatives to promote gender mainstreaming and gender equality remains low. Such initiatives may be perceived as a threat to their status and power. By making child-friendly choices and supporting women in their capacities as decision-makers, men can be powerful allies in the struggle for womens equality. Evidence shows that men are more likely to be active, hands-on fathers when they feel positive about themselves and their relationship

with the childs mother, when they have support for active involvement in their childrens lives from family and friends, and when they are in employment. Men are often the dominant household decision-makers, yet they tend to be overlooked by programmes that improve conditions for women and children. In one Indian state, for instance, researchers discovered that advocacy campaigns on nutrition were targeted to women, even though approximately 20 per cent of fathers made the decisions regarding childrens nutrition. UNICEFs experience shows that programmes that focus on males provide ways to promote positive gender socialization. Programmes that encourage the participation of both men and women can help to increase communication between the sexes and encourage a more even division of childcare responsibilities. In Viet Nam, for example, UNICEF has mobilized men to promote the use of oral rehydration salts to treat diarrhoea and to increase immunization coverage. Throughout Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, male and female activists are campaigning against gender-based violence. In Uganda and Zimbabwe, UNICEF programmes are attempting to foster the socialization of girls and boys as a means of stemming the spread of AIDS. Another strategy for increasing mens support for gender equality involves policies that aim to redistribute benefits to men and women more equitably. Evidence from the Nordic experiment illustrates how this works. In Scandinavian countries, a combination of government and nongovernment initiatives contributed to a dramatic increase in the availability of paternity leave for men. In Sweden, for instance, fathers now assume responsibility for 45 per cent of childcare responsibilities, thanks in large part to the growing popularity of paternal leave. Advocacy initiatives designed to educate men and women on the benefits of gender equality and joint decision-making can help nurture a more cooperative relationship between men and women. Evidence shows that fathers are more likely to stop abusive treatment towards mothers if they have been exposed to information on how gender-based violence adversely affects their children. Supporting womens organizations One of the most important and effective avenues for womens empowerment is the dynamic of cooperation among women. Informal womens collectives organized around issues such as nutrition, food distribution, education and shelter help improve the standard of living for women, their families and communities. By standing up to discrimination and motivating other women, these groups begin the process of promoting the rights of girls and women for generations to come. Grass-roots womens movements have been the most vocal champions of womens equality and empowerment at the local level. Evidence drawn from Demographic and Health Surveys suggests that in some developing countries much of the impact of womens overall decision-making power is concentrated at the community level. Across the developing world, studies show that womens participation in community initiatives can have long-lasting benefits for women. Read more about how a group of adolescent girls are working to empower other girls in one of Bangladeshs slums by fighting child marriage and dowry demands.

RELATED LINKS

Millennium Development Goals Additional real-life stories Multimedia feature: Gender and the life cycle Photo essay: The double dividend of gender equality UNICEFs work in gender equality

YOUTH CENTRE

The State of the Worlds Children for young people Photo contest: Inspirational women Audio story: The Door to Freedom: One girl's journey Gender equality quiz

UNICEF 2006

EMPOWERMENT IN THE WORKPLACE

The workplace must be transformed to recognize the role that both parents play in child rearing, as required by article 18 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Social policies and programmes should be promoted to enable women and men to reconcile their work and family responsibilities and encourage men to take on an equal share of domestic chores and childcare. It is also important to implement policies aimed at altering stereotypical attitudes towards women at work, addressing underlying factors including sectoral and occupational segregation, and lack of education and training. The vital role of education One of the most important strategies for ensuring that boys and girls will have equal incomeearning opportunities as adults is to give them equal access to education. Several strategies have proved to be effective in increasing girls school enrolment in primary and secondary school, including the elimination of school fees. However, eliminating school fees is insufficient to ensure gender parity in education. Governments, parents and international donors must work together to ensure that schools are girl-friendly through several measures:

Encouraging local school authorities and teachers to adopt flexible scheduling Allowing married adolescents and unmarried parents to attend classes Making school facilities safe from gender-based violence Ensuring that schools have separate latrines for girls Building schools close to girls homes Encouraging parents and community leaders to be actively involved in school management.

In addition, it is important to emphasize that school curricula impress upon students the importance of gender equality. Eliminating gender disparities in legislation Critical measures to eliminate gender discrimination in womens land and property rights must include, but should not be limited to:

Bringing national legislation in line with international human rights standards Reforming land and property rights to eliminate discrimination against women Involving international agencies and non-governmental organizations in efforts to track and expose violations of womens property rights, and in monitoring government compliance with international human rights treaties. The role of government in supporting working families Governments should undertake legislative, administrative and financial measures to create a strong and enabling environment for womens entrepreneurship and participation in the labour market, including:

Improved employment conditions

Creating career development opportunities Eliminating pay gaps based solely on gender Providing safe, affordable, high-quality child-care arrangements.

A further step towards ensuring womens rights, greater public transparency and economic efficiency is the increasing use of gender-responsive budgets. This mechanism analyses the impact of government expenditure and revenue on women and girls compared to men and boys. It neither requires separate budgets for women, nor does it aim to solely increase spending on womenspecific programmes. Instead, it helps governments decide how policies should be adjusted, and where resources need to be reallocated to address poverty and gender inequalities. Budget initiatives aimed at eliminating gender disparities focus on national, provincial and municipal processes and may cover the overall budget or only selected parts of it. They can be carried out within government by the Ministry of Finance in conjunction with the Ministry of Womens Affairs or other branches of government related to social welfare, or by non-governmental organizations and independent researchers. The need for better data and analysis Although there are sufficient data to show that women tend to work more and earn less than men, a lack of sex-disaggregated labour statistics precludes a more detailed analysis of the disparities. Better data on employment and income disaggregated by sex could significantly improve the analysis underlying policies and programmes with benefits to women children, families and entire economies. To empower women in the workplace, it is important that men and women reconcile their work and family responsibilities and that men take on an equal share of domestic work and childcare. Read how Marisa, from the USA, successfully juggles

EMPOWERMENT IN POLITICS
Womens representation in national parliaments, local governments and peace processes is a critical measure of their political empowerment and of a countrys commitment to ensuring that powerful advocates for children can be heard. But while formal barriers to entering national and local parliaments have been eliminated in virtually every country, this has been insufficient to address gender imbalances in governance. Even when political spaces and processes have opened up, the number of women in decision-making positions has not automatically increased. Beginning in childhood, women face discrimination that ranges from lower levels of education to prevailing social attitudes doubting their competence as decisionmakers. This discrimination, as well as womens significantly greater work burden, discourages and prevents women from entering politics and leaves them less time and energy for public life. Governments, in conjunction with womens organizations and political parties, have a vital role in promoting womens political empowerment. They do so by promoting gender-sensitivity among officials or establishing comprehensive policy forums, such as womens ministries and equal opportunity bureaus. However, changed gender attitudes and practices in government and politics, even where successful, must be accompanied by adequate resources as well as the requisite skills. The importance of quotas Whether legally mandated through constitutional or electoral law, or based on voluntary actions by political leaders, quotas have led to dramatic changes in womens political participation throughout the world. Overall, of the 20 countries in the world with the most women in parliament, 17 are using some form of quota system. The impact of quotas in particularly noticeable in countries formerly ravaged by conflict such as Afghanistan, (where women now account for 27.3 per cent of legislators), Burundi (30.5 per cent), Rwanda (48.8 per cent) and Timor Leste (25.3 per cent).

Quotas are also gaining increasing recognition as a potentially effective vehicle for ensuring womens participation at the peace table. In 1999, for example, after women were key participants in helping settle hostilities in southern Sudan, the United Nations Development Fund for Women partnered with a local organization on the People to People peace process, which reserved a third of the seats in local and regional peace reconciliation meetings for women. Similarly, in South Africa, 41 per cent of the commissioners of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were women. Neither of these examples, however, involves formal peace processes. To be truly effective, however, quotas must be supported by political parties and electoral systems that are committed to encouraging womens participation in politics and government. The role of womens groups Womens groups are often powerful catalysts for change. They provide support to women who have been elected to political office, conduct their own advocacy efforts, and provide expertise and accountability mechanisms necessary to advance the rights of women and children. In Afghanistan, for example, womens groups have provided significant support in mobilizing other women to participate in the presidential and parliamentary elections and in monitoring the electoral process. They have also organized workshops for women refugees in order to expand their awareness of their rights. In Australia, womens groups advocate for the rights of children in immigration detention. In 2002, in Rwanda, women parliamentarians and community leaders worked together to draft a national convention supporting womens educational opportunities, small business loans provided by rural banks and the creation of a commission to help protect vulnerable young people. Inspiring the next generation Womens participation in national legislatures, local government and peace processes is not only transforming the politics of the present it is also altering its future, as women in politics are changing prevailing attitudes towards women and girls in decision-making roles. In Rwanda, for example, womens role in the transition to peace and democracy has paved the way for future generations of girls to assume public roles that would have been inconceivable only a generation ago. In India, new associations are strengthened by elected women representatives, as well as women who were previously elected but who no longer formally participate in local councils. These two countries represent just a sample of the growing involvement of women in politics across the world. Their influence is not just being felt in stronger legislation for children and women; they are also helping decision-making bodies become more democratic and sensitive. Despite discrimination and setbacks, young women and men who enter politics enter a realm significantly transformed by the presence of women. One way women can inspire the next generations and act as catalysts for change is by mobilizing resources to care for children and realize their rights. Read about Alade, from Brazil, and the organization she created to help families and children living with HIV/AIDS.

THE DOUBLE DIVIDEND

In recent decades, the goal of reducing gender discrimination has steadily grown in importance on the international agenda. But despite gains and commitments, for many women, adolescent girls and girl children, the promises have not materialized and violations of their right continue to reverberate throughout their life cycle. To address this challenge, a series of cross-cutting actions need to be taken. In addition to legislation, legislative quotas, and engaging men and boys, these measures include education, financing for development, and research and data. Education: Attacking gender discrimination at its root Ensuring that girls and boys have equal educational opportunities is one of the most important and powerful steps towards combating gender discrimination and advancing childrens rights. Enabling

girls to access basic education greatly enhances the range of life choices available to them as women, and has profound and long-lasting benefits for families and entire communities. Abolishing school fees: In many developing countries, the direct and indirect costs of schooling represent one of the most significant barriers to education for both girls and boys, particularly those from poor families living in rural areas. Abolishing school fees is one of the most effective policy measures for accelerating progress in this area. Encouraging parents and communities to invest in girls education: Even where schools fees are not an issue, the perceived and real opportunity costs associated with sending children to school can discourage parents from supporting girls education. Encouraging poor families to invest in their daughters education may require such incentives as conditional cash transfers, meals, subsidies and other types of income support. Conditional cash transfers provide families with food and compensate parents for the opportunity costs associated with child labour on the condition that parents send their children to school and take them to health clinics for regular vaccinations and check-ups. Girl-friendly schools: Children who are not in school tend to come from the poorest and most marginalized households and often live in remote rural areas. Parents may object to sending their daughters to school because they feel the facility is unsafe, or that the long journey to school exposes girls to risk of sexual assault or other forms of violence. Governments, parents and international donors must work together to promote flexible scheduling, increase the safety of school facilities, ensure that schools have separate hygiene and sanitation facilities for girls, and build schools close to their homes. In addition, the school curriculum must impress upon teachers, as well as students, the importance of gender equality, and address male bias in the classroom. Focusing more resources on achieving gender equality Equitable and efficient social investment to eliminate gender discrimination is a key strategy for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women the objectives of Millennium Development Goal 3. Estimating costs requires outlining concrete areas where investments are needed. Many exercises estimating the cost of MDG 3 have focused solely on eliminating gender disparity in education, which, however vital, is only part of the puzzle. A more complete cost estimation focuses on the seven strategic priorities identified in the Millennium Project task force report on gender equality and achieving the Millennium Development Goals:

Strengthen opportunities for post-primary education for girls while meeting commitments to universal primary education Guarantee sexual and reproductive health and rights Invest in infrastructure to reduce womens and girls time burdens Guarantee womens and girls property and inheritance rights Eliminate gender inequality in employment by decreasing womens reliance on informal employment, closing gender gaps in earnings and reducing occupational segregation Increase womens share of seats in national parliaments and local government bodies Combat violence against girls and women. How much additional financing in total is required to meet MDG 3 depends on how government resources change between now and 2015, and how much of those resources are dedicated to gender equality and womens empowerment. According to a realistic scenario, low-income countries would need an additional US$28 billion (measured in constant 2003 US dollars) in 2006 from donor countries, rising to US$73 billion in 2015. Available estimates suggest, however, that governments currently target fewer resources to gender equality than other MDG areas. Research and data on the situation of women and girls An overwhelming lack of sex-disaggregated statistics often results in scant or weak quantitative research on the issues that affect women and, in turn, children. Much more needs to be known

about many of the most important aspects of womens lives and the impact discrimination has on those around them. Research and data are sorely lacking in several key areas. Maternal mortality: While 111 countries produced data based on registration systems and other surveys, for 62 countries no recent national data were available and estimates therefore had to be based on models. Violence against women: Only 38 countries in the world have conducted at least one national survey on violence against women since 1995. A further 30 countries have surveys completed that cover parts of the country. Enrolment, school attendance and literacy: While there are significant data disaggregated by sex on school enrolment, sex-disaggregated data on literacy and school attendance are available for only 112 and 96 countries, respectively. Efforts to compile and release sex-disaggregated data on female completion rates at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels of education must also be strengthened. Labour force, unemployment and occupational distribution: Just over half the worlds 204 countries and territories provided sex-disaggregated data on these fundamental areas of work, with only 105 providing data on occupational segregation by sex. Wage statistics: This is a vital area where discrimination affects women and their children, and yet just under half (52) of the 108 countries or territories that reported wage data were also able to provide disaggregation by sex. Europe and Asia account for almost three quarters of these countries. Informal employment: Even with an internationally agreed-upon definition of informal employment, only 60 countries have produced data on informal employment, and in many cases these statistics are not fully comparable. Unpaid work and time use: Since 1995, 67 countries or areas have conducted time-use surveys, with the vast majority in CEE/CIS and South and East Asia. Only seven countries in Africa and three in South America have collected such data. Womens participation in national and local governments: The Inter-Parliamentary Union collects data on the number of women in parliaments and how the numbers have changed over time. Data on womens participation in local government are relatively scarce, however. Women in peace negotiations and peace-building: No systematic data are available on women participating as parties to peace negotiations. With the exception of the statistics made available by the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, no systematic data are available about women involved in different dimensions of peace-building. The time is now Eliminating gender discrimination will produce a double dividend, fulfilling the rights of women and going a long way towards realizing those of children as well. Effective partnerships, involving governments, donors and international agencies, can support this process through the design and implementation of human rights-based development strategies. For women, men, and for children, the time to refocus our efforts is now. One of the most important and powerful steps towards combating gender discrimination and advancing childrens rights, is giving boys and girls equal access to education. For girls in particular, going to school enhances the range of choices available to them. Read about Mulu, from Ethiopia, and how education saved her life.

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE Year : 2007 | Volume : 32 | Issue : 2 | Page : 123-127 Participation of adolescents in household decision-making process in Bangladesh Mizanur M Rahman1, M Kabir2, M Shahidullah3 1 Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Bangladesh 2 Department of Statistics, Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka, Bangladesh 3 Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University, Shahbag, Dhaka, Bangladesh Date of Submission 06-Oct-2005 Correspondence Address: Mizanur M Rahman 8/B Indira Road, Tejgaon, Dhaka - 1215 Bangladesh Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None Abstract Background: The decision-making authority is one of the ways of measuring the female empowerment, although mere participation in any matter does not corroborate full empowerment of women. However, participation in decision-making process in household matters considers that a female is accounted in the family. Objective: The Similar in PUBMED Search Pubmed for - Rahman MM - Kabir M - Shahidullah M Article in PDF (145 KB) Citation Manager Access Statistics Reader Comments Email Alert * Add to My List *
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Abstract Materials and Me... Results Discussion Acknowledgement References Article Tables

Article Access Statistics present study investigated to the extent at which the female adolescents participated in Viewed 1162 decision-making process in household matters and assessed the factors influencing them. Printed 31 Study Setting: Both rural and urban areas of Bangladesh. Study Design: A quantitative Emailed 0 and a qualitative study designs were adopted for this study. Sample Size and Sampling: PDF A cluster sampling technique was used to select the sample. A sample of 3362 female 127 Downloaded adolescents irrespective of their marital status was selected using a cluster sampling technique. To complement the results found in quantitative analysis, a series of focus Comments [Add] group discussions were also conducted among the adolescents. Results: The analysis revealed that a large proportion of the study adolescents did not participate in any decision-making process in their household matters. Only about one-third (31.1%) of the Gadgets powered by Google adolescents participated in any household matter; however, the acceptance of their opinions was minimal. In spite of little participation of adolescents in family matters, multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that older adolescents aged 15-19 years, years of schooling, work status, and the family members with a positive attitude toward female education appeared to be the influencing factors for adolescent participation in household affairs ( P < 0.05 ). Conclusions : The study concluded that gainful economic activities of adolescents and female education are the key elements for participation of female adolescents in different household matters.

Keywords: Adolescents, Bangladesh, household matters, participation How to cite this article: Rahman MM, Kabir M, Shahidullah M. Participation of adolescents in household decision-making process in Bangladesh. Indian J Community Med 2007;32:123-7 How to cite this URL: Rahman MM, Kabir M, Shahidullah M. Participation of adolescents in household decision-making process in Bangladesh. Indian J Community Med [serial online] 2007 [cited 2008 Oct 29];32:123-7. Available from: http://www.ijcm.org.in/text.asp? 2007/32/2/123/35650 Different national and international organizations have shown interest in child and adolescent participation in socio-cultural activities. This is largely due to ratification of the convention on the rights of the child (CRC). Section 3 of the CRC emphasizes on several key aspects of participation. [1] Participation can indicate many different things in different circumstances and contexts. In its most basic sense, "adolescent's participation can be defined as adolescent's partaking in and influencing processes, decisions, and activities". In the CRC, participation is a legal right of all adolescents and an end in itself. Because it is a right, it is an inalienable entitlement, not a matter of goodwill or charity. However, is a right, not an obligation? Therefore, participation must always be voluntary and never coerced. One of the universal disadvantages of women that are commonly cited

is their under-presentation in the decision-making positions and lack of involvement in decisions in many important spheres. This has been traced primarily to the historically preferential treatment given to boys and men in a broad range of life matters such as decision-making authority. In fact, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD, 1994) has been considered a major breakthrough insofar it emphasized the more defined framework of women's role in population policy and in general development concerns and identification of gender equality, equity, and women's empowerment as the key indicators of advancing women's concerns in the context of population and development. To address the concerns of the advancing women, ICPD established a consensus on two fundamental basic points-first, that the empowering women is an important end in itself, not only as a human right but also as a potential to enhance human well-being, and second, that empowering women and improving their status are essential ingredients of realizing the full potential of economic, political, and social development and ensuring sustainable development. [2] Empowering women is usually represented by the participation of women in certain activities such as holding of managerial and administrative positions and the seats in parliament and other elective positions, since these positions are related to higher levels of decision making. Data on participation of individuals in decision-making process at household level is lacking. Considering this view, in this study, an attempt was made to understand to the extent at which a female adolescent can take part in the decision-making process of different issues in household matters and to find out the factors influencing the females to participate in the decision-making process in household matters. Materials and Methods This was a cross-sectional study conducted in both rural and urban areas of Bangladesh during 2000. Female adolescents aged 10-19 years constituted the study population. The World Health Organization (WHO) has defined adolescents as individuals in the age range of 10-19 years. A cluster sampling technique was adopted. At the first stage, the mauzas (clusters) were selected, and at the second stage, all the households were covered under the study. A total of 64 clusters (on an average, a cluster had 200 households) were randomly selected from the list of the clusters. All married and unmarried adolescents were selected in a cluster with a ratio of 2:1. A total of 3362 adolescents were included in the sample. Data were collected through a face-to-face interview using a pre-designed interview schedule consisting of questions related to household decision-making process, their participation, and acceptance of their decision etc. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to identify the socio-economic and demographic factors significantly related to participation in household matters. Data analysis was performed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS, version 11.5). Both uni-variate and bivariate analysis were performed. Logistic regression analysis was used to identify the socio-economic and demographic variables significantly related to participation on selected variables. To complement the quantitative findings, a series of focus group discussions (FGDs) were also conducted among the adolescents. On an average, 4-5 female adolescents having similar backgrounds participated in each FGD. The adolescents were selected from the same cluster, which was not selected for detailed interview, and

the adolescents were selected randomly using the sampling frame. Six FGDs were conducted, one in each geographical division, using unstructured guidelines. To maintain the uniformity and consistency of the discussions, trained and experienced female field investigators were recruited and were supported by note takers. The same investigators conducted all FGDs using the same unstructured guidelines to maintain the uniformity of information. Results Socio-demographic characteristics The mean age of the respondents was 16.2 1.9 years with an age range of 10-19 years. Among the respondents, 32.9% were unmarried and 67.1% were married. Their mean years of schooling were 4.7 3.3 years. Among them, 23.3% were illiterate, 35.8% had 15 years of schooling, and the remaining had six and above years of schooling. Regarding parental education, more than two-fifths (43.9%) fathers were illiterate as against more than two-thirds (70.7%) mothers, indicating that more mothers were illiterate than the fathers. The mean family size was 5.2 persons. About one-third (30.7%) of the adolescents were currently engaged in different income generating activities other than household work. Brute majority of the respondents were Muslims (89.4%) and only 10.6% were non-Muslims. More than half of the adolescents (56.4%) were from nuclear families and the rest from joint/or extended families (43.6%). The median family income was Tk. 2500.0 and about three-fifths (59.0%) had a family income of less than Tk. 3000.0 [Table - 1]. Participation in household decision making Expressions of expectations about household matters reveal the other ideas that embody the cultural values. It increases the capacity of one's strength of arguments. The cultural values and norms do not permit the younger people to participate in household matters owing to their physical and mental immaturity. It was found that about one-third of the adolescents (1047, 31.1%) participated in decision-making process in household matters. Pattern of household matters Among the adolescents who participated in household matters, about two-fifths (39.8%) participated in decision-making process for their personal needs; 37.8% were able to decide what kind of food should be cooked or the meals they preferred; 25.2%, 18.9%, 5.2%, and 1.3% could make decisions with regard to purchasing their favorite items or cosmetics, their educational materials, their desire to service or work, and participate in other family matters, respectively. We have limited access to make any decision making process. Only in limited household work like choice of meals (even in most of the cases it is determined by mother-in-law or other elder members) or mere purchase of goods for personal use such as cosmetics.

Participation in decision making for purchasing valuable goods like jewellery or any other things joint decision is preferable. Married adolescents (FGDs) Acceptance of decision Although about one-third of the adolescents participated in household matters, the acceptance of their opinions was minimal; only 7.0% of their opinions were accepted, less than two-thirds (62.3%) of their decisions were occasionally accepted, and in 30.7% cases the decisions were very rarely accepted. Reasons for not participating in the decision-making process Regarding the reasons for not participating in the decision-making process, more than four-fifths (81.7%) opined that the seniors or guardians did not find the need to take opinions from the adolescents. Of all, 9.2% of the adolescents did not feel liberal enough to share their opinions regarding the household matters, and 5.0% mentioned that they were considered immature to give opinions in such matters. Correlates of adolescent's decision-making participation: Multivariate analysis Undoubtedly, participation implies decision making and is viewed as a strategy for human development as it is closely linked to the promotion of leadership, i.e., ensuring transforming capacities at the social level, that empower adolescents, adolescent groups, communities and the country to get involved in the process towards individual and collective developments. [3] Scales and Leffen opined that fruitful participation increases the competence and achievements, positive relationships with adults and peers, clear structure and opportunities for self definition, creative expression, recreation and meaningful participation in family, school, and community. [4] Considering this view, this study examined the relationship of the adolescent participation in decision-making process in household matters with selective socio-demographic characteristics and personal factors pertinent to women autonomy. [Table - 2] shows the adolescent participation in decision-making process in the context of demographic variables. Bivariate analysis revealed that the age of the adolescents, their current marital status, years of schooling, father's level of education, work status of the adolescents, family size, monthly family income, and positive attitude towards female education have shown significant association with adolescent's participation in decision-making process in household matters ( P < 0.05 ). However, no statistically significant association was found between residence, religion, mother's education, and type of family and adolescent's participation in decision-making process ( P > 0.05 ). To assess the factors influencing the adolescent's participation in decision making in household matters, multi-variate logistic regression analysis was carried out in which the dependent variable, 'whether the adolescent participated in any decision making process in household matters' was dichotomized (yes/no). For prediction of influencing factors for participation in decisionmaking process, variables that showed significant association with adolescent's

participation in household matters in bi-variate analysis, were entered into logistic regression analysis. Out of 12 variables, 8 variables that showed significant association in bi-variate analysis were included in the logistic regression model. The analysis revealed that age of the adolescents, years of schooling, work status, and positive attitude towards female education appeared to be important predictors for adolescent's participation in household matters ( P < 0.05 ). Adolescent's years of schooling appeared to be an important predictor for participation in household matters and it was 3.0 times higher among the adolescents having 1-5 years of schooling and 3.9 times higher among the adolescents with 6 years or more of schooling. The work status of the adolescents appeared to be another predictor for participation in the household decision-making process. Adolescent's participation was 1.7 times higher among the adolescents who were engaged in any gainful work. Although, the contribution of the adolescents to the family income was minimal, their work status ensured their voice in the family. The analysis also revealed that older adolescents aged 15-19 years were 1.6 times more likely to participate in the decision-making process in the household matters than their younger counterparts. Most importantly, the family members having optimistic attitude towards female education (as expressed by adolescents) were 1.4 times more likely to participate in decision-making process. ..In our society, women do not have any value, women have no power to take decision; it is culturally defined that men has the authority to control everything Married adolescents (FGDs). .If an adolescent is educated, she can make positive contribution to the family, not only she can shape the family, if she has money in her hand, the money gives her voice, which ultimately can control the family. Married and unmarried adolescents (FGDs). Discussion Growing body of researches support the idea, that improvement of women status is an important indicator of development. The empowerment of women is generally accepted as a crucial element in any strategy seeking to solve social, economic, and environmental problems. Past studies have confirmed that the women have limited control over material and other resources; restricted access to knowledge and information; constrained authority to make independent decisions; they lack physical mobility; and are unable to forge equitable power relationships within the families. [5] Raymundo cited the status of women in five Asian countries and revealed a considerable variation in measures of power and autonomy, which include decision-making process of the women in the economic and personal spheres. In the more patriarchal and less socio-economically developed societies, such as India and Pakistan, fewer women making decisions than the women in Philippines and Thailand, and they are tied closely to their societies and culture and have lesser say in the individual purchases in the household. For example, 86.5% of Filipino women were

reported as having a major say in deciding on the major purchases in the household, compared with 16.5% in Pakistan. In Thailand, 55% of women are able to make decisions such as choice of jewellery to be purchased by them, compared with the lower level of 16% of women in India and Pakistan. [2] The present study revealed a very poor level of participation of women in decision-making process and that their decisions were seldom accepted. Hadi opined that women involvement in income generating activities showed a significant association with their reproductive decision. The programme participation appeared to have a positive influence on joint-decision making with regard to child bearing. [6] Although this study was not designed to explore the reproductive decision, it determined a positive association in household decision-making process. However, Kantor found that in India, women's contribution in the family through income does not always predict greater say in property-related decisions. [7] This study revealed a positive association of work status of the adolescents with participation in decision-making process; however, the family income did not predict the participation in decision making in household matters ( P > 0.05 ). Kantor opined that the women gained their status in the family through ageing, i.e., after attaining a certain age the women developed voice and older women had a significantly greater likelihood of being involved in different decision-making processes. These findings corroborate with the findings of this study and this might be due to the fact that older adolescents are more conversant with other family members. Jejeebhoy opined that access to education and the years of schooling completed are believed to be powerful predictors of many subsequent behavior and attitudes. [8] The study revealed that adolescents having schooling of 6 years and more had 3.9 times more capability in decision-making process. Hunte, in a qualitative study in Afghanistan, found that the male members dominated the household decision-making processes. Although in some of the issues, younger members in the family could sometimes participate; however, their decisions were generally not considered. In that context, the participation of young adults was very negligible and in most of the cases it was dubious. [9] Policy implications The present study demonstrates that the changing perceptions of different households are possible. Additionally, it is argued that the productive role of women and increased level of education can create environment for them to think, make their own choices, and participate in decision-making process in different matters of household with their spouses and with other family members. Opportunity to be educated and participate in the productive activities will empower them to think when they should marry; whether they should have children; when they should have children, and have the negotiating power whether or not to use contraception in case of need. All these have important policy implications on reproductive health of the adolescents. The participation of all adolescents should be respected as of equal value although adolescents have had different abilities of understanding, will require different levels of support and will contribute in different ways. Furthermore, it is important that all adolescents ensure their full participation in their respective capacities and not be treated as "invisible" members of the family. The study suggests that in economic, cultural, and productive activities, the participation of

educated females in different household matters needs to be ensured. Acknowledgement The research was funded by a grant from Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Ministry of Planning, Government of the Peoples Republic of Bangladesh. We acknowledge Director, SSRC for financial assistance. References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. United nations. Convention on the rights of the child; United Nations General Assembly resolution 44/25, 20 November 1989. Raymundo CM. Gender equality, equity and the empowerment of women. Available from: http://www.unescap.org/pop/icpd/raymundo.htm. [Last updated on 2004 Nov 3]. UNICEF. The participation rights of adolescents: A strategic approach. Working paper series. United Nations Children's Fund: New York, USA; 2001. Scales PC, Leffen N. Development assets: A synthesis of the scientific research on adolescents development. Scarch Institute: Minneapolis; 1999. Jejeebhoy SJ. Convergence and divergence in spouse's perspectives on women's autonomy in rural India. Studies Fam Planning 2002;33:299-308. Hadi A. Effects of the productive role of Bangladeshi women on their reproductive decisions. Asia-Pacific Population Jr 2001;16:17-30. Kantor P. Women's empowerment through home based work: Evidence from India. Available from: http://www.uwlax.edu/ba/eco/MIAFFE/Kantor.pdf. [Last updated on 2003 Nov 3]. Jejeebhoy SJ. Women's education, autonomy and reproductive behaviour: Experience from developing countries. Clarendon Press: Oxford; 1995. Hunte P. Household decision-making and school enrolment in Afghanistan. Case study series. Case study 3: Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit: Nesher villages, Belcheragh district, Faryab province; 2005.

Tables [Table - 1], [Table - 2]

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ISSN: Print -0970-0218, Online - 1998-3581

1. Title: Female participation in household decision-making: an analysis of consumer durables' acquisition in Pakistan. Author: Mujahid-Mukhtar E; Mukhtar H Source: PAKISTAN DEVELOPMENT REVIEW. 1991 Winter;30(4 Pt 2):953-62. Abstract: Investigating the nature and degree of female household decision-making in Pakistan, this paper analyzes the influence of women in the purchase consumer durables. The paper also identifies those factors which enable women to play a more active role in the decision-making process. Because women in Pakistan are generally excluded from the public sphere, their level of emancipation is better assessed according to the degree of participation in household decision-making. A good measure of women's power within a household is their influence in the purchase of consumer durables (cars, appliances, etc.), whose expense and life-long nature makes their purchase an important decision. For this study, the authors relied on data from a 1989 nationwide household survey conducted by AERC, which included a information concerning the acquisition of 12 consumer durables as expected. As expected, men make more decisions on the purchase of all consumer goods than women, even for items in which women feel more need than men (e.g. sewing machines, washing machines). The study found that for the needs felt by women for all durable goods, men make 2/3 of all decisions, while women make only 1/3 of decisions. And in cases where the need is felt by men, the men make 93% of the decisions, while women decide only 3 % of the times. The study identified various cultural and economic factors that affect women's decision making power: urban women, women in nuclear families, educated women, and working women generally have more decision making power than rural women, women in extended families, illiterate women, and unemployed women. Language: English Keywords: PAKISTAN | RESEARCH REPORT | DATA ANALYSIS | WOMEN'S STATUS | DECISION MAKING | HOUSEHOLD CONSUMPTION | HUSBAND-WIFE COMMUNICATION | POWER | Asia, Southern | Asia | Developing Countries | Research Methodology | Socioeconomic Factors | Economic Factors | Behavior | Microeconomic Factors | Partner Communication | Interpersonal Relations | Political Factors Document Number: 073328

Rural Women's Work and Capabilties: Information for Gener-Responsive Development Policies by Govind Kelkar
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With our increased knowledge on the feminization of agriculture and of the informal sector, as it became more evident in the recent Asian economic crisis, it is now quite widely accepted that the goal of development is not simply one of increasing income (or GDP) but one of transforming economic and social relations, including, in particular, gender relations. Further the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) are sweeping through the region and will soon become as important as land and capital. I will, if I may, reflect on three basic themes:

First, to argue that the central goal of public policy and planning is capability equality, to achieve basic individual capability - particularly in its application to the assessment of women's quality of life. Second, to consider the necessity of transforming intra-household and intra-community distribution of resources and improve the efficiency with which a community can use its natural and other resources. Third, to offer a few reflections on rural specific role of information technologies in rural areas in organizing professional roles of women and men along gendered lines rather than challenging culturally and politically embedded gender relations. Some of the capabilities are primary, like adequate nourishment, good health, shelter, and say, basic education. Some other capabilities are more complex, but also important in determining social well-being, like managing natural resources at household and community levels. The distribution of capabilities within a household is subject to variation, depending on the way in which income and resources are controlled within the households, i.e. on relations of power and hierarchy (gender and age relations) within a household. Income and resources of a household are not equally shared and enjoyed by its members. Even when a household income per member is above the `poverty line', the less advantaged members (women, children and the aged) of a household might live in sheer poverty (without enough food, time to rest, health care, education, decision-making power in natural resource management). It is well known that the manner in which household income is used for meeting basic needs of the members of a household varies depending on whether income is controlled by men or women. Many studies have shown that women spend more of the money they control on children and household needs than men. Thus, in order to improve the achievement of basic capabilities it is necessary for a program to advance women's control over household income, which itself depends on ownership and management rights over property and self-earned income. The development of more complex capabilities (like managing natural resource, skills of decision-making, and new technological knowledge) is related to the functions that persons perform. Carrying out functions develops corresponding capabilities. In rural Asia women are basically excluded from participation in community-level management of natural resources, from relations with external agencies and from political representation. Exclusion of women from management functions has a double effect. On the one hand, it does not allow the development of a community's capabilities. On the other hand, it ignores an important portion of social knowledge and thus leads to inefficiency in natural resource use and retards the development of the community's overall social capital.

Studies of `Village Pay Phones' in rural Bangladesh, recent spread of computer aided technologies and teleworking in Malaysia and India argued that gendered division of labor have been maintained and in some cases even magnified with the introduction fo new ICTs. The new cyberculture of rural Asia did not bring in new relations between women and men in the home, the workplace and in cyberspace. It is well known that communication via the internet is itself cultured: it is strongly shaped by communication needs and styles of class and gender factors. Although the introduction of new ICTs in rural Asia seem to offer women access to skilled employment, and a means of control over their own lives and hence increase their capabilities, it does so in severely limited terms. In an indicative manner, I would propose that development projects, including new ICTs projects, among rural people should pay attention to: Women's control over household resources and income, which depends on ownership and management of property, and self-earned income, e.g. credit programs (such as those of the Grameen Bank) though disbursed mainly to women, have limited benefits for women, because the loans enter into the gender relations within the household and women largely lose control of the loans invested by male relatives, with women borrowers bearing the liability of repayment, though not necessarily directly benefiting from loan use. Women's participation in household and community decision-making and management of natural and other resources, since even independent income of women does not necessarily translate into greater decision-making power for women within their households (except amongst the very poor). For an effective gender-responsive policy and its implementation, there is need for macro-level data on gender-specific division of labor, access to and control over property and resources; gender division of decision-making within small and major matters in the household and community land; women's mobility; external relations, contact with officials and development agencies; women's and men's participation in market - types of commodities, distance to market; language and numeracy in home and market; gender access to training and new technologies and cultural norms regarding gender roles and responsibilities. Addressing the complexity of gender subordination in various sociocultural systems which means challenging `cultural sensitivity' in terms of gender inequality. Lack of intervention in gender matters is often justified in terms of `cultural sensitivity', even where equally alien programs are being promoted in areas, for example, of caste, class, indigenous/ethnicity, environment and population control. The new ICTs are able to recognize the conditions needed for the development of women's autonomy and liberty; to challenge gender stereotypes and undo hierarchy and power between women and men, to achieve basic individual capabilities; to promote democratic processes of homes and local communities and improve opportunities for skill development, employment and participation in political life. That women (and other socially, culturally subordinate groups) are able to engage in critical reflection about planning `one's

own life in one's own surroundings'. Subsidiary factors may also be considered, for example (1) the distribution of leaisure between women and men; and (2) girl's participation in education. Both leisure and education are necessary for the development of more complex capabilities. Development action and support for change in gender relation cannot be seen as "soft alternative" to macro level change in poverty and environment.

Rural Women and Information in Uganda by Ruth Ojiambo Ochieng

*

Introduction
Information, in a broad context, refers to organized data recorded in various forms. It is a raw resource for knowledge. Information could also be messages that have perceivable and recognisable value to the receiver. Information is therefore a vital tool for the empowerment of individuals to enable them take an informed decision or action for self or community development. Information however, only becomes useful if it is relevant, timely and appropriate. The choice of carrier or channel, which transmits information, must also be appropriate, perceivable and affordable to the user. It must also allow a twoway communication to occur. Human beings are not homogenous, given the differing gender needs. Neither are women themselves homogenous due to their differing status in society. In this paper the focus is on the rural women's generation of and access to information for development due to the specific problems faced by this group of women in this area. Therefore, there is an ever-increasing need for intervention in order to correct the situation.

Status of Rural Women in Uganda

About 10.7 millions of the population of Uganda are women. Education and literacy are preconditions to development and determines the status of men and women with strong benefits in the areas of health agriculture and economics. Female education has remained lower than that of male causing illiteracy levels among women (61.3%) with rural-urban differentials. Government of Uganda acknowledges that women (especially those living in rural areas and female heads of households) are the poor of the poorest. Despite the Uganda Governments efforts to come up with gender sensitive policies and laws (i.e. the National Constitution and the National Gender Policy), the inequalities between men and women have continued to prevail. Female decision making positions Female ownership of land Female access to credit Female control over food crops 9% 7% < 1% 30%

Female control over cash crops Female extension staff The gender inequalities limit women's capabilities and capacities especially in the agricultural sector where they play crucial roles.

9% 12.7%

Role of Rural Women in the Agricultural Sector

Despite the above inequalities, women contribute to 88% of agricultural labour force an activity that contributes to 76% of Uganda's economy. Women's traditional roles in Agriculture are still influenced by their reproductive roles therefore, taking on responsibility for food production and security for their families. Women in Uganda have also taken up to cash crop farming within their small-scale farms although, majority do not control the earnings of the produce.

Key Barriers that hinder Rural Women from Accessing and generating Information for their development.
The socialisation belief that women are the custodians of homes especially in rural areas has restricted most women in rural areas from moving beyond their villages. Hence adding to the limitations in exposure and access to knowledge that would enhance their social and economic development. The cultural and religious attitudes about gender roles and relationships has continued to deter most women in rural areas from participating actively in decision-making and interaction with men i.e. extension workers. As a result most of them depend only on the knowledge they have acquired in their lifetime and that from their friends to improve on their agricultural production. Rural women have very limited opportunity to share their ideas, views and suggestions on how to improve their activities. The high illiteracy rate among rural women, let alone the language barrier has hindered women from accessing the available information that would help them improve on their agricultural activities i.e. NARO and NARI literature, T.V. and Radio Agricultural programmes etc. Marginalisation and lack of information and communication components in national policies has aggravated the problem of accessibility and generation of information related to rural women. Failure to consult the rural women on many issues regarding their priorities in agricultural activities has limited the opportunity of availability of gender specific information that would be relevant to rural women's needs.

Available sources of agricultural information to rural women and their inadequacies

The following research findings identify sources of agricultural information to rural women in Uganda and illustrate the inadequacies of these sources:

UNESCO study on A National Information and Communication Policy Framework for Uganda (1998); Isabel Carter, PhD research on Agricultural Information Sources in Uganda 1994.

Strategies used by NGOs and development agencies to disseminate and generate information to/from rural women
Isis-WICCE's approach:

Tape recordings Fact sheets for group discussions Packaging of women's views for broadcasting Exchange programmes Establishment of rural information units.

Recommendations

Integration of available sources of information to enhance the accessibility and visibility of information needs of the rural women; Coordination of information generated and disseminated by key stakeholders in the agricultural sector. Every development policy should include an information and communication component.

Conclusion
Information being a multiplier of development efforts, regular assessments of information needs of rural women especially concerning the agricultural sector is crucial. It is therefore important that policy makers need to pay attention to information generation and dissemination for rural development. In particular, due to the role played by women in agricultural activities, it is important that the women be given a central role in the generation and dissemination of this information
International Family Planning Perspectives Volume 32, Number 1, March 2006

Women's Position Within the Household as a Determinant Of Maternal Health Care Use in Nepal
By Marie Furuta and Sarah Salway
CONTEXT: Although gender inequality is often cited as a barrier to improving maternal health in Nepal, little attention has been directed at understanding how sociocultural factors may influence the use of health care. In particular, how a woman's position within her household may affect the receipt of health care deserves further investigation.

METHODS: Data on ever-married women aged 1549 from the 2001 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey were analyzed to explore three dimensions of women's position within their household decision making, employment and influence over earnings, and spousal discussion of family planning. Logistic regression models assessed the relationship of these variables to receipt of skilled antenatal and delivery care. RESULTS: Few women reported participation in household decision making, and even fewer had any control over their own earnings. However, more than half reported discussing family planning with their husbands, and there were significant differences among subgroups in these indicators of women's position. Though associations were not consistent across all indicators, spousal discussion of family planning was linked to an increased likelihood of receiving skilled antenatal and delivery care (odds ratios, 1.4 and 1.3, respectively). Women's secondary education was also strongly associated with the greater use of health care (5.15.6). CONCLUSIONS: Gender inequality constrains women's access to skilled health care in Nepal. Interventions to improve communication and strengthen women's influence deserve continued support. The strong association of women's education with health care use highlights the need for efforts to increase girls' schooling and alter perceptions of the value of skilled maternal health care. International Family Planning Perspectives, 2006, 32(1):1727

Maternal mortality in Nepal is estimated to be around 540 deaths per 100,000 births.1 One major factor is low use of maternal health care, despite government efforts to improve services, including an expanded network of rural clinics and the training of auxiliary nurse midwives.2 Fewer than 40% of women receive any antenatal care from a trained provider, and fewer than 10% of births take place in a health facility.3 In seeking to explain these low levels of health care use, most research has focused on the provision and geographic accessibility of services. However, no studies have looked at how sociocultural factors, such as inequitable gender roles and women's position within the household, have influenced use of services. Earlier work in South Asia has suggested various ways in which gender roles and relations may operate to restrict women's access to health care during pregnancy and at the time of delivery. These include heightened restrictions on women's movement because the pregnant state is considered "shameful," young women's lack of say within the family and the fact that pregnancy-related knowledge and decision-making authority are commonly vested in older women, young women's lack of influence over material resources, and the exclusion of men, who are often the primary decision makers in the use of material resources, from the "polluting" event of childbirth.4 In addition, a growing body of literature has explored the links between indicators of women's household position and contraceptive use in South Asia.5 However, little of this research

has examined whether and how dimensions of women's position are related to their use of maternal health care services. It is widely asserted that increased gender equality is a prerequisite for achieving improvements in maternal health. The Programme of Action adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development claimed that "improving the status of women also enhances their decision-making capacity at all levels in all spheres of life, especially in the area of sexuality and reproduction."6 In Nepal, the low social status of women has been identified as a hindrance to progress toward national health and population policy targets.7 Although it seems reasonable to assume that greater equality within the household leads to higher use of maternal health care services, this factor has not been explored for Nepal. We know little about how intrahousehold relations constrain or facilitate access to health care, or about the dimensions of women's position that are most critical for achieving increased use. In this study, we examine the influence of four indicators of women's household position on the receipt of skilled antenatal and delivery care: their involvement in decision making about their own health care and about large household purchases, their employment and control over their own earnings, and their discussion of family planning with their husbands.

BACKGROUND Sociocultural Context

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in Asia, and one of the few countries where women's life expectancy is lower than men's.8 Although Nepal is extremely culturally diverse, its population can be divided roughly into two language groups, Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman. The Indo-Aryan group is politically and culturally predominant and mainly Hindu, living mostly in the hills and southern plains (the Terai). Norms and values relating to women are generally conservative among the Indo-Aryans. The practice of purdah (seclusion of women) is prevalent, especially for newly married women from the high castes and wealthier households, and sexual purity is highly valued for women. The Tibeto-Burman group is mainly Buddhist and lives in the hills and mountains of Nepal. It has been argued that in this group women have more freedom of mobility and somewhat higher social status. The Indo-Aryans prefer to marry outside their own villages, whereas the Tibeto-Burmans prefer to marry within the same village, thus allowing women greater access to familial and economic resources after marriage.9 However, across all Nepali cultural groups, marriage is considered to be a social contract between clans rather than a personal one

between individuals.10 Following marriage, a daughter-in-law is expected to perform domestic duties under the supervision of her mother-in-law, who is usually the primary decision maker in matters of child-rearing and care of the family.11 In addition, the majority of communities in Nepal are patriarchal, and property is passed from father to son. Women lag far behind men in education, economic resources and nonagricultural employment.12

Maternal Health Care Services

Primary maternal health care is provided by the government through health posts and subhealth posts (3,873), and through primary health care centers (191). At the secondary level, there are district hospitals (67), and at the tertiary level, there are zonal hospitals (10), regional and central hospitals (10) and one specialized maternity hospital. The government currently considers the numbers of facilities offering specialized maternal, newborn and child health care to be adequate, but recognizes a need to strengthen capacity, especially in terms of quality of care and management of major obstetric complications.13 The affordability of maternal care depends on the type of care and the level of the health facility. In the rural Banke district, for example, the cost of a vaginal delivery in a hospital ranges from 300 to 3,000 rupees (mean, 600 rupees, or US$11).14 The cost of a cesarean delivery is much higher, between 1,000 and 13,000 rupees (mean, 5,360 rupees, or US$96). It is government policy to provide antenatal care free of charge, except for medicine.

METHODS
This study analyzes data from the 2001 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), which employed a nationally representative sample of 8,400 ever-married women aged 1549. The present analysis is restricted to the 4,695 women who were currently married and had given birth in the three years preceding the survey. The study variables can be grouped into four categories: indicators of women's household position, women's social and demographic characteristics, their perceptions of the geographic and economic accessibility of maternal health care, and the receipt of skilled antenatal and delivery care.

Women's Household Position

Recent attempts to define the relationships between indicators of women's social position and their reproductive health, particularly use of contraceptives, have identified a number of complexities. First, women's position is multidimensional, and different dimensions commonly show diverse relationships with reproductive health outcomes.15 Second, because these indicators may have different meanings in different sociocultural

contexts, they must be carefully conceptualized, understood and interpreted.16 In particular, a predominant focus on "autonomy" in the demographic and reproductive health literature has been criticized as inappropriate in the context of South Asia.17 Third, contextual factors modulate the effect of individual characteristics, so the implications of particular indi- cators of women's position may vary significantly between settings.18 Drawing on these conceptual insights, we selected three dimensions of women's position for which information was collected in the Nepal DHS: their participation in household decision making, whether they were employed and had influence over the use of their earnings, and whether they discussed family planning with their husbands. Other reproductive health research in South Asia has considered women's involvement in decision making to be an important aspect of their household position.19 The 2001 survey asked women whether they were involved in decision making in four areas: the kinds of food to cook each day, daily household purchases, their own health care and large household purchases. More than 80% of DHS respondents reported deciding what food to cook either alone or in conjunction with another family member. More than 40% of women reported being involved in decisions on daily household purchases. These data are indicative of women's influence over routine household activities. In contrast, women's participation in decisions on their own health care and on large purchases was less common. Therefore, we focused on these two decision-making variables, for which we created the dichotomous categories of "involved in final decision (has the final say alone or jointly)" and "not involved in final decision (another individual has the final say)." In Nepal, there is a strong sense of family "togetherness" and individual identity is closely tied to the family, so decisions often involve complex negotiations.20 Measuring whether a woman is involved in the final decision making is therefore a more suitable measure than whether or not she is the sole decision maker. Women's economic dependency has long been understood to be a major factor in structuring inequalities between men and women.21 Hence, control over financial resources is often considered a central dimension when measuring women's household position. Getting access to maternal health care may require a financial outlay (for transportation, medicines and, in some cases, consultation), so we hypothesize that a woman's ability to pay for these services with her own earnings is an important determinant of access. The DHS asked women four questions relating to employment and control over earnings: "Aside from your own housework, are you currently working?"; "Have you done any work in the past 12 months?"; "Are you paid in cash or

kind for this work or are you not paid at all?"; and "Who mainly decides how the money you earn will be used?" Answers were categorized into a trichotomous variable: not working, working and had no control over earnings (including those who worked without earning any cash income), and working and had control over earnings. Women who were currently working or who had worked within the 12 months prior to the survey were considered to be working. The closeness of the husband-wife bond and the degree of communication between spouses have also been suggested to be an important dimension of women's household position,22 because conjugal intimacy is generally discouraged in South Asia and the husband represents a direct avenue to household resources. The survey asked women how often they had talked to their husbands about family planning in the past year, and answers were dichotomized as never and once or more. Discussion of this topic obviously depends on a number of factors, including exposure to information on reproductive health and the desire for fertility control. However, because our sample consisted of women who had recently given birth, and because contraception is widely promoted in Nepal,23 whether the couple had discussed family planning is likely to be a reasonable proxy for communication.

Social and Demographic Characteristics

A number of social and demographic characteristics were considered in the analysis, including women's age and number of children ever born. Because community norms and values influence individual behavior, we also assessed the place of residence (urban or rural) and region of residence (Terai, hill or mountain). Education has been consistently related both to use of maternal and child health services and to positive health outcomes, though the routes of causation are not always clear.24 We categorized women's education levels as none, primary, and secondary or higher. Indicators of the household's socioeconomic circumstances included husband's education and occupation, as well as a computed index of socioeconomic status based on access to piped water and electricity and ownership of a radio.

Perception of the Accessibility of Care

The distance women must travel to health facilities and the availability of transport options can have a significant impact on appropriate and timely use, as can user fees and household economic status.25 However, perceptions of accessibility can be affected by sociocultural factors. To control for all of these factors, we assessed responses to the following question: "When you are sick and want to get medical advice or treatment, is each of the following a big problem, a small problem or not a problem for you? 1)

distance to the health facility and 2) getting the money needed to go." Answers were dichotomized as a big problem versus a little problem or not a problem.

Use of Maternal Health Care

We assessed the outcome variables of receipt of skilled antenatal care (at least once during the last pregnancy) and receipt of skilled delivery care for the last birth. The definition of skilled personnel was based on World Health Organization guidelines and included obstetricians and gynecologists, general practitioners, medical officers (with five years of training), midwives and nurses (with three years of training) and auxiliary midwives (with 18 months of training).26

Statistical Analysis
We first examined the bivariate relationships of women's social and demographic variables and their perceptions of health care accessibility with the four indicators of their household position and with their use of skilled antenatal and delivery care. We then looked for potential bivariate associations between the indicators of women's household position and the two health care outcomes. Next, multivariate logistic regression models were developed to identify associations between the indicators of women's household position and their use of skilled maternal health care, as well as between women's education level and use of care. Our models controlled for a series of variables, including age and number of children ever born, residence, education, socioeconomic status and accessibility of health care. The weighted and clustered nature of the sample was accounted for by using the svylogit command in Stata version 7.27

RESULTS Bivariate Analysis

Social and demographic characteristics and household position. In all, 25% of women reported being involved in the final decision (either alone or with others) regarding their own health care, and 28% reported involvement in large household purchases (Table 1, page 19). Although 84% of all respondents were working, the vast majority of these women (91%) had no influence over the use of earnings, most being unpaid agricultural workers (not shown). Only 7% of all women were working and had influence over how their earnings were spent. About half reported having discussed family planning with their husbands in the past year. Each of the four measures of women's household position varied significantly according to social and demographic characteristics. The percentage of women involved in decision making on their own health care or on large purchases rose with increasing age, ranging from 9% for 1519-year-olds to 3338% for women aged 35 or older. The percentage of women who worked and had influence over how their earnings were spent increased

with age up to 3034 years (rising from 3% to 10%), but declined for the oldest agegroup. Discussion of family planning showed a different pattern, with the highest proportion of women reporting discussion being in the middle age-groups (5356%). Findings for the number of children ever born were similar to those for women's age: Women reporting only one child were significantly less likely to be involved in decision making or to have influence over the use of their earnings than were women reporting two or more children. Higher proportions of urban women than of rural women reported working and having influence over use of their earnings (19% vs. 6%), and having discussed family planning with their husbands (66% vs. 50%), though there were no differences between the groups in the measures of decision making. Region of residence, however, showed significant differences for all indicators except the discussion of family planning. Women who lived in the hills were the most likely to report involvement in decision making (30% for each measure). The proportions of hill and Terai residents who worked and had influence over earnings (78%) were similar; the proportion among mountain residents was much lower (3%). Women's education showed a positive association with all measures, though the patterns varied. Compared with women who had no education or only primary schooling, those with a secondary or higher education were more likely to report involvement in decisions on their health care (36% vs. 2425%) and on large purchases (50% vs. 3940%). In contrast, the proportion working and having influence over earnings and the proportion reporting discussion of family planning rose with each level of education. Husband's level of education showed fewer significant relationships. The proportion of women who worked and had influence over earnings was slightly (and significantly) higher among those whose husbands were better educated, though the proportion of women who did not work at all was also higher in these subgroups (not shown). The discussion of family planning was more common among women whose husbands had a secondary or higher education than among those whose spouses had no education or only primary schooling (60% vs. 4251%). Husband's occupation showed significant differences with all four indicators of women's household position. Women whose husbands were unskilled workers were the least likely to report involvement in either type of decision making (2125%), working and having influence over earnings (5%) and discussing family planning (50%). For the measure of socioeconomic status, women in high-status households were more likely than those in low- and middle-status households to report involvement in either type of

decision making (4346% vs. 2531%), influence over use of their earnings (26% vs. 7%) and discussion of family planning (68% vs. 4754%). Women's perceptions of the geographic and economic accessibility of maternal health care were associated with all four indicators of women's household position, possibly reflecting the confounding influence of the socioeconomic variables. Women who characterized accessibility as a "big problem" were significantly less likely to report decision-making involvement, influence over use of their earnings or discussion of family planning. Social and demographic characteristics and maternal health care. Overall, the percentage of women receiving skilled maternal health care is low in Nepal, with 39% using antenatal care and 13% delivery care (Table 2). Large disparities are evident across subgroups of women, although the patterns of use are similar for the two types of care. The variables of women's age and number of children ever born show similar trends of health care use. The proportion of women using skilled antenatal care and skilled delivery care fell from 49% and 20%, respectively, among 1519-year-olds to 22% and 6%, respectively, among women aged 35 or older. Likewise, the proportion using these two types of care dropped from 56% and 27%, respectively, among women who had had one child to 19% and 4%, respectively, among those who had had six or more children. As expected, higher proportions of urban women than of rural women received antenatal care (79% vs. 36%) and delivery care (53% vs. 10%). Differences in use across regions were also significant, with women living in the Terai being more likely than those living in the mountains or hills to receive antenatal (43% vs. 2637%) or delivery care (15% vs. 513%). Women's education had a strong, positive association with the receipt of skilled care. The proportion of women using antenatal care and delivery care rose from 32% and 8%, respectively, among those with no education to 91% and 66%, respectively, among those with secondary or higher education, though there was a large differential between the two types of care. Husband's education showed a similar pattern. Receipt of skilled care also varied with husband's occupation, with the proportion of women receiving such care being highest among those whose husbands were professional or skilled workers. Particularly large differentials were found according to socioeconomic status. Women in high-status households were more likely than those in low- and middle-status households to use either antenatal care (90% vs. 2945%) or delivery care (62% vs. 618%).

Receipt of services was also associated with their perceived accessibility. Women who reported that geographic or economic accessibility was a "big problem" were significantly less likely to receive skilled maternal health care, especially during delivery. Household position and maternal health care. Our bivariate analysis examining the relationship between the indicators of women's household position and the receipt of skilled maternal health care (Table 3, page 21) revealed that women's involvement in decision making for their own health care was not associated with the use of skilled antenatal care; this indicator did show an association with skilled delivery care, but the differential was small. In contrast, the variable of employment and influence over earnings showed significant differences for both antenatal and delivery care. Women who worked and had no influence over earnings were the least likely to have received either type of care (33% and 9%, respectively), whereas levels of use were much higher among nonworkers (58% and 29%) and women who worked and had influence over earnings (59% and 26%). The remaining indicator of women's household positiondiscussing family planning also showed significant differences in health care use. Forty-six percent of women who had discussed family planning at least once received antenatal care and 17% received delivery care; among those who did not discuss it, 32% and 10%, respectively, received care.

Multivariate Analysis
To control for the confounding influence of the social, demographic and accessibility variables, we developed a series of multivariate logistic regression models to identify the independent associations between the indicators of women's household position and the receipt of antenatal and delivery care. Similar models were used to identify associations between women's education level and use of maternal health care. Household position and antenatal care. For each of the four indicators of women's household position, we conducted a series of regression models assessing the odds of receipt of skilled antenatal care while controlling for different sets of confounding variables (Table 4). Compared with women who were not involved in decision making on their own health care, those who were involved did not have significantly elevated odds of using antenatal care either before or after controls were added for potential confounders. However, after adjustment for all potential confounders, women who were involved in decision making regarding large purchases had significantly higher odds of receiving such care than did those who were not involved (odds ratio, 1.3).

Two sets of odds ratios were derived from the regression series for the indicator of women's employment and control over earnings. Working women who had influence over how their earnings were used were significantly more likely to receive antenatal care than were those who worked but had no control over their earnings, before and after the effects of confounding variables were accounted for (odds ratios, 2.9 and 1.8, respectively). Nonworking women were also more likely to get such care than were workers with no influence over use of their earnings, though the odds (and the level of significance) declined sharply after adjustment for all potential confounders (1.5). When compared with nonworking women, those who worked and had influence were no more likely to have received skilled antenatal care (not shown). The discussion of family planning also showed a consistently significant association with receipt of antenatal care. In the final model, the odds of receiving care were 41% higher among women who reported some discussion with their husbands than among those who reported none (1.4). Household position and delivery care. The relationships between the indicators of women's household position and receipt of skilled delivery care were broadly similar to those between the indicators and antenatal care (Table 5). Neither decision-making indicator was associated with receipt of skilled delivery care after we controlled for all confounders. Both workers who had some control over earnings and nonworkers had higher odds of receiving skilled delivery care than did women who worked but had no control over their earnings (1.6 and 1.8, respectively). Discussion of family planning was found to be consistently associated with delivery care, with women who had discussed it with their husbands having 34% higher odds of receiving such care than those who had not once the effects of all potential confounders were accounted for. These findings suggest that a woman's receipt of skilled maternal health care may be related to her position within her household. However, the associations are not consistent across the indicators of household position, and they require careful interpretation. Furthermore, whatever effects are present are moderate. Several other variables, notably women's education, household socioeconomic status, the economic accessibility of health care and urban-rural residence, showed far stronger associations with receipt of skilled care (not shown). Women's education and maternal health care. Regression analysis of the associations between women's education level and their receipt of skilled antenatal and delivery care yielded very strong findings (Table 6). Even in the models that controlled for all confounding variables, women with secondary or higher education had dramatically higher odds of using antenatal or delivery care than did women having no

schooling or an incomplete primary education (5.6 and 5.1, respectively). Likewise, women with a primary school education were more likely than those without one to receive antenatal or delivery care (2.4 and 2.1, respectively). Clearly, women's schooling has played an important role in their use of health care, but how it does so is a complex question. Compared with the unadjusted models in Table 6, models that controlled for the discussion of family planning showed reduced odds ratios, particularly for the regression series that examined secondary schooling. This suggests that part of the effect of education operates via differences in communication patterns between partners. However, the large residual effects indicate that education acts through other factors as well. Though space limitations preclude detailed presentation of the results, it is important to highlight the role of the household financial situation in influencing women's use of maternal health care. After controlling for all confounders, women of high socioeconomic status had odds of using antenatal care that were more than four times as high as those of women of low socioeconomic status, and their odds of using delivery care were more than three times as high (not shown). Furthermore, although the geographic accessibility of health care lost its significance after the effect of potential confounders was accounted for, the economic accessibility of health care retained its association with receipt of maternal care.

DISCUSSION
Many studies and policies have been based on the assumption that if women were more involved in household decision making and had more control over financial resources, they would be more likely to use health services and, hence, to have better health outcomes. However, results from this study reveal a more complex picture, showing diverse relationships between the outcomes of interest and the four indicators of women's household position. Our findings help identify both the changes in women's position needed to improve health care use and the usefulness of various empirical measures of their position. These results also identify the most important current barriers to the uptake of maternal health care services in Nepal. The uptake of skilled health care depends on both demand (which implies a perceived need and the recognition that available services are valuable and appropriate) and the ability to act on that demand. The gender relations in any particular setting will affect these factors. Other elements, largely unrelated to gender relations, may also exert a critical influence on demand and the ability to act. Furthermore, increases in the uptake of reproductive health services may occur in the absence of any significant change in women's position, as shown by the rise in contraceptive use in northern India.28

Differences between groups of women in their use of maternal health services may be further influenced by factors unrelated to differences in their household position. Our analysis found a positive association between a woman's discussion of family planning with her husband and the receipt of both antenatal and delivery care. This association could be explained by the fact that individuals who discuss family planning tend to be more open to modern ideas and therefore more likely to opt for skilled maternal health care. That is, the route of causation could be unrelated to intrahousehold gender relations. However, a plausible argument supported by recent qualitative work in Nepal29 is that women who discuss family planning with their husbands also communicate more about other matters, reflecting a more open, egalitarian relationship. Communication between partners about contraception may also indicate greater male involvement in matters that are traditionally identified as belonging in the "female" realm and therefore potentially stigmatizing for men. Thus, at least part of the association may reflect improvements in household gender relations that are translated into increased use of maternal health care. It seems likely that such communication would largely operate by increasing the chance that women (or couples) would act on preexisting demand for care, although it may also act to create, or solidify, demand through the exchange of information and support. In light of this association between communication and the use of skilled health care, it is striking that the decision-making variables showed such weak associations. We suggest that the formulation of the questions may offer a partial explanation. Survey questions asked about who has the "final say" in decisions, and though we combined responses of "myself alone" and "joint" decision making, it is likely that the emphasis on final decision making is inappropriate in the Nepali context. Because decisions regarding the management of pregnancy are within the domain of older female relatives, and because younger females tend to exert influence in subtle, nonconfrontational ways, it is possible that women who report being involved in final decision making are actually relatively isolated, unsupported individuals, and not autonomous agents who are able to garner the household resources to meet their own needs. In our study, women's employment did not translate clearly into greater use of maternal health care. Nepali women who work but have no control over the use of their earnings are the least likely to receive skilled antenatal or delivery care. This is not surprising, as most are from poor households and are working for the family's survival. However, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, urban or rural residence and other confounders, women who work and have influence over their earnings are no more likely to receive skilled care during pregnancy or delivery than are women who do not work.

We expected that working women with influence over earnings would have greater influence over their health care than would nonworkers, and would also be exposed to knowledge and attitudes about modern health care at their workplaces, thus leading to higher use of skilled services via both increased demand and an increased ability to act on that demand. Perhaps working women experience time constraints that reduce their opportunities for receiving antenatal care. However, this would not explain why they are no more likely than other women to get skilled delivery care. Clearly, the relationship between employment and health care use is complex, and initiatives aimed at increasing employment opportunities may not generate the assumed benefits of either improved intrahousehold gender relations or greater health care utilization. We conclude that some dimensions of a Nepali woman's household position, particularly the extent of communication with her husband, do positively affect her receipt of skilled maternal health care, but that the effects are small. Another issue that we examined was the extent to which the current low levels of skilled maternal health care use in Nepal are explained by women's weak household position. Our findings strongly suggest that factors other than household gender inequality are the main determinants of use at the present time. Household economic status, in particular, emerged as an important factor associated with use. Although this no doubt reflects the ability to pay for services, the fact that a significant association remains after controlling for geographic and economic accessibility, and for urban or rural residence, suggests that better-off socioeconomic groups differ from their poorer counterparts in more than just disposable income. It seems likely that an important aspect of this difference lies in their perceptions regarding the need for and value of skilled maternal health services. Recent research has noted that a major shift in attitudes and aspirations among better-off families in rural Pakistan played an important role in their increased demand for antenatal care. The very strong relationship between women's education and use of maternal health care also suggests that the financial and geographic accessibility of services is not the only factor. This association draws our attention to how the broader gender system, operating beyond the household, may affect care. A number of routes of causation might explain this strong effect. Earlier work in South Asia has suggested that this association may be due at least in part to a fostering of new values and attitudes that are favorable to the use of modern health care.30 Education may impart feelings of self-worth and selfconfidence, which some have argued are more important in bringing about changes in health-related behavior than exposure to relevant information.31 Schooling may also increase women's receptivity to new health-related information.32 One study found that

even when women knew about their obstetric complications, many chose not to seek care because of the poor quality of care they expected to receive.33 Greater education may reduce the power differential between providers and clients and lower women's reluctance to seek care.34 In addition to increasing the likelihood that women will value and desire skilled care, education may strengthen women's ability to act on this demand. The results of our multivariate models suggest that the effect of education operates in part via increased discussion between husbands and wives. Research in Nepal and elsewhere in South Asia has indicated that women seek influence within their households in subtle ways, rather than by challenging established gender and age hierarchies. Chanana pointed out that younger, educated women have a greater capacity to use "the weapons of the weak,"35 while Basu described educated women as having hidden power to influence decisions "without rocking the boat."36 Our own analysis reveals that a low percentage of even highly educated women were involved in decision making regarding their own health. In Nepal, decisions about the management of pregnancy and childbirth traditionally come under the authority of older women, especially the mother-in-law.37 It seems likely that an educated woman would be able to use subtle means to influence her mother-in-law's decisions and at the same time introduce the family to new ideas about the value of skilled health care. A more communicative marital relationship may also increase a woman's influence within the household.38 Much of this discussion is based on informed speculation and requires additional, indepth research for support. However, it is clear that gender relations influence the use of maternal health care in diverse ways. Though spousal communication does seem to be important, other aspects of gender relations do not relate specifically to the husbandwife relationship. A focus on women's autonomy and independence from her husband and family, which is predominant in much of the reproductive health literature, is inappropriate to this cultural setting and overlooks important dimensions of women's experience. Greater attention should be directed to the ways in which intrahousehold decision-making processes play out and to how younger women can gain influence over those familial spheres that directly affect their well-being.

Conclusions
Despite the recent efforts of international organizations and women's groups to raise the profile of maternal health as a key public health issue, this study shows a persistently grim situation for the women of Nepal. In the difficult context of debilitating structural adjustment policies and limited resources, the Safe Motherhood Initiative of the Nepal

Ministry of Health has focused on the accessibility and availability of maternal health care by increasing the quality and quantity of trained health workers, and by ensuring the functioning of referral systems.39 Although these are important measures, our findings indicate that such efforts will have greater impact if the sociocultural determinants of service uptake are also addressed. This study, as well as other recent work in the region,40 suggests that interventions to improve husband-wife communication and strengthen women's influence within households are important efforts that deserve sustained support. Yet the large effect of women's education on health care use highlights the need for programs that promote greater schooling for Nepali girls. In addition, this finding draws attention to the need to raise knowledge levels about and alter perceptions of the value of skilled maternal health care among both pregnant women and other key actors. Such shifts in perception will depend not only on changing how modern, preventive health care is viewed, but also on raising the value attached to women's health.

References
1. Asian Development Bank (ADB), Women in Nepal, country briefing paper, Kathmandu, Nepal: ADB, 1999. 2. Ibid. 3. Nepal Ministry of Health, New ERA and ORC Macro, Nepal Demographic and Health Survey 2001, Calverton, MD, USA: ORC Macro, 2002. 4. Jeffery P, Jeffery R and Lyon A, Labour Pains and Labour Power: Women and Childbearing in India, London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ, USA: Zed Books, 1989; Goodburn EA, A prospective study of maternal morbidity related to delivery and the puerperium in Bangladesh, unpublished dissertation, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, 1997; and Mumtaz Z and Salway S, Gender, pregnancy and uptake of antenatal care services in Pakistan, Sociology of Health and Illness, 2006 (forthcoming). 5. Schuler SR, Hashemi SM and Riley AP, The influence of women's changing roles and status in Bangladesh's fertility transition: evidence from a study of credit programs and contraceptive use, World Development, 1997, 25(4):563575; Cleland J, Kamal N and Sloggett A, Links between fertility regulation and the schooling and autonomy of women in Bangladesh, in: Jeffery R and Basu AM, eds., Girls' Schooling, Women's Autonomy and Fertility Change in South Asia, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996, pp. 205217; Durrant VL and Sathar ZA, Greater investments in children through women's empowerment: the key to demographic change in Pakistan, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Mar. 23 25, 2000; and Hakim A, Salway S and Mumtaz Z, Women's autonomy and uptake of contraception in Pakistan, Asia-Pacific Population Journal, 2003, 18(1):6482. 6. United Nations International Conference on Population and Development, Programme of Action, 1994, , accessed Feb. 24, 2006. 7. Tuladhar J, Women, health and population policies, Nepal Population and Development Journal, 1997, special issue, pp. 1936; and Rimal N, Hindrances to family planning program: findings from Banke, Nepal, Rural and Remote Health, 2003, Vol. 3, No. 3, article no. 227. 8. ADB, 1999, op. cit. (see reference 1). 9. Acharya M and Bennett L, Women and the Subsistence Sector: Economic Participation and Household Decision-making in Nepal, Working Paper, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1983, No. 526; and Morgan SP and Niraula BB, Gender inequality and fertility in two Nepali villages, Population and Development Review, 1995, 21(3): 541562. 10. ADB, 1999, op. cit. (see reference 1). 11. Dali SM, Thapa M and Shrestha S, Education for Nepalese women to provide improved care for their childbearing daughters-in-law, World Health Forum, 1999, 13(4):353354.

12. ADB, 1999, op. cit. (see reference 1). 13. World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for South-East Asia, Improving Maternal, Newborn and Child Health in South-East Asia, New Delhi: WHO, 2005. 14. Jahn A et al., Maternity care in rural Nepal: a health service analysis, Tropical Medicine and International Health, 2000, 5(9):657665. 15. Hakim A, Salway S and Mumtaz Z, 2003, op. cit. (see reference 5); Malhotra A, Schuler S and Boender C, Measuring Women's Empowerment as a Variable in International Development, New York: Gender and Development Group, World Bank, 2002; and Sathar ZA and Kazi S, Women's Autonomy, Livelihood and Fertility: A Study of Rural Punjab, Islamabad, Pakistan: Pakistan Institute of Development Studies, 1997. 16. Malhotra A, Schuler S and Boender C, 2002, op. cit. (see reference 15); and Kabeer N, Resources, agency, achievements: reflections on the measurement of women's empowerment, Development and Change, 1999, 30(3):435464. 17. Jeffery P and Jeffery R, What's the benefit of being educated? girls' schooling, women's autonomy and fertility outcomes in Bijnor, in: Jeffery R and Basu AM, 1996, op. cit. (see reference 5), pp. 50183; and Mumtaz Z and Salway S, I never go anywhere: extricating the links between women's mobility and uptake of reproductive health services in Pakistan, Social Science & Medicine, 2005, 60(8):17511765. 18. Kabeer N, 1999, op. cit. (see reference 16). 19. Schuler SR, Hashemi SM and Riley AP, 1997, op. cit. (see reference 5); Cleland J, Kamal N and Sloggett A, 1996, op. cit. (see reference 5); Durrant VL and Sathar ZA, 2000, op. cit. (see reference 5); and Hakim A, Salway S and Mumtaz Z, 2003, op. cit. (see reference 5); 20. Acharya M and Bennett L, 1983, op. cit. (see reference 9); and Mullany BC, Hinde MJ and Becker S, Can women's autonomy impede male involvement in pregnancy health in Kathmandu, Nepal? Social Science & Medicine, 2005, 61(9):19932006. 21. Standing H, Dependence and Autonomy: Women's Employment and the Family in Calcutta, London and New York: Routledge, 1991. 22. Jejeebhoy S, Women's Education, Autonomy and Reproductive Behaviour: Experience from Developing Countries, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995. 23. Sharan M and Valente TW, Spousal communication and family planning adoption: effects of a radio drama serial in Nepal, International Family Planning Perspectives, 2002, 28(1):1625. 24. Cleland J, Maternal education and child survival: further evidence and explanations, in: Caldwell JC et al., eds., What We Know About Health Transition: The Cultural, Social and Behavioural Determinants of Health, Canberra, Australia: Health Transition Centre, Australian National University, 1990, pp. 400419. 25. Thaddeus S and Maine D, Too far to walk: maternal mortality in context, Social Science & Medicine, 1994, 38(8):10911110; Maine D, Why did maternal mortality decline in Matlab? Studies in Family Planning, 1996, 27(4):179187; and Anwar ATMI, Killewo J, Chowdhury MK and Dasgupta SK, Bangladesh: Inequalities in Utilization of Maternal Health Care ServicesEvidence from Matlab, Reaching the Poor Program Paper, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004, No. 2. 26. WHO, United Nations Population Fund and UNICEF, Definition of traditional birth attendant, joint statement, Geneva: WHO, 1992. 27. StataCorp, Stata Statistical Software: Release 7.0, College Station, TX, USA: StataCorp, 2001. 28. Jeffery P and Jeffery R, Killing my heart's desire: education and female autonomy in rural north India, in: Kumar N, ed., Women as Subjects: South Asian Histories, Charlottesville, VA, USA: University of Virginia Press, 1994. 29. Mullany BC, Hinde MJ and Becker S, 2005, op. cit. (see reference 20). 30. Kazi S and Sathar ZA, Gender and development: searching for explanations for fertility changes in rural Pakistan, paper presented at the IUSSP seminar on comparative perspectives on fertility transition in South Asia, Islamabad, Pakistan, Dec. 1720, 1996; and Sathar ZA and Kazi S, 1997, op. cit. (see reference 15). 31. Chanana K, Education attainment, status production and women's autonomy: a study of two generations of Punjabi women in New Delhi, in: Jeffery R and Basu AM, 1996, op. cit. (see reference 5), pp. 107132. 32. Lindenbaum S, The education of women and the mortality of children in Bangladesh, in: Alan C et al., eds., Disease in Populations in Transition: Anthropological and Epidemiological Perspectives, New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1990, pp. 353370. 33. Maine D et al., The Design and Evaluation of Maternal Mortality Programs, New York: Center for Population and Family Health, School of Public Health, Columbia University, 1997.

34. Basu AM, Girls' schooling, autonomy and fertility change: what do these words mean in South Asia? in: Jeffery R and Basu AM, 1996, op. cit. (see reference 5), pp. 4871; Jejeebhoy S, 1995, op. cit. (see reference 22); and Starrs A, ed., The Safe Motherhood Action Agenda: Priorities for the Next Decade, New York: Family Care International, 1998. 35. Chanana K, 1996, op. cit. (see reference 31). 36. Basu AM, 1996, op. cit. (see reference 34). 37. Mullany BC, Hinde MJ and Becker S, 2005, op. cit. (see reference 20). 38. Ibid. 39. Nepal Ministry of Health, Safe Motherhood Programme in Nepal: A National Plan of Action (19941997), Kathmandu, Nepal: Family Health Division, Department of Health Services, Ministry of Health, 1993. 40. Mumtaz Z and Salway S, 2006, op. cit. (see reference 4).

RSUM
Contexte: Bien que l'ingalit entre les sexes soit souvent cite comme obstacle l'amlioration de la sant maternelle au Npal, l'attention est rarement dirige sur la comprhension de la manire dont les facteurs socioculturels peuvent influencer le recours aux soins de sant. En particulier, l'effet de la position de la femme au sein de son mnage sur la mesure dans laquelle elle bnficie de soins de sant mrite une tude plus approfondie. Mthodes: Les donnes de l'EDS npalaise de 2001 relatives aux femmes de 15 49 ans maries ou l'ayant jamais t ont t analyses en vue de l'examen de trois dimensions de la position des femmes au sein du mnage: prise de dcision, emploi et influence sur les revenus, et discussion du planning familial avec le conjoint. Le rapport entre ces trois variables et la rception de soins prnataux et obsttricaux qualifis a t valu par modles de rgression logistique. Rsultats: Peu de femmes ont dclar participer aux dcisions du mnage, et moins encore disposaient du moindre contrle sur leur propre revenu. Plus de la moiti ont toutefois dclar avoir parl du planning familial avec leur poux et des diffrences significatives sont apparues, dans les sous-groupes, au niveau de ces indicateurs de rang de la femme. Malgr l'inconstance des associations sur tous les indicateurs, la discussion du planning familial avec le conjoint s'est avre lie une probabilit accrue de rception de soins prnataux et obsttricaux qualifis (rapports de probabilits 1,4 et 1,3, respectivement). L'instruction des femmes au niveau secondaire s'est galement rvle fortement associe un recours accru aux soins de sant (5,15,6). Conclusions: L'ingalit entre les sexes limite l'accs des femmes aux soins de sant qualifis au Npal. Les interventions aptes amliorer la communication et renforcer l'influence des femmes mritent un soutien continu. L'association forte entre l'ducation des femmes et le recours aux soins de sant souligne la ncessit d'efforts d'accroissement de la scolarisation des filles et de modification des perceptions de la valeur des soins de sant maternelle qualifis.

Acknowledgments
This article is based on Marie Furuta's master's thesis, completed at the Centre for Population Studies, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London. Her time preparing the manuscript was funded by the UK Department for International Development's Sexual and Reproductive Health Knowledge Programme. At the time of writing, Sarah Salway was a Nuffield Foundation New Career Development Fellow at the Centre for Population Studies.

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Marie Furuta is lecturer, Department of Community Health Nursing, St. Mary's College, Kurume, Japan. Sarah Salway is senior lecturer, Department of Community, Ageing and Rehabilitation, School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK.

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Women's Participation in Decision-Making and Leadership A Global Perspective

Dr. Lorraine Corner Regional Programme Adviser, UNIFEM E&SEA, Bangkok This paper was delivered at a Conference on Women in Decision-Making in Cooperatives held by the Asian Women in Co-operative Development Forum (ACWF) and the International Co-operative Alliance Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (ICAROAP) on 7-9 May 1997 at Tagatay City, Philippines and published in a report on conference proceedings entitled

Women in Decision-Making in Co-operatives: Report of a Regional Conference 7-9 May, 1997 Tagatay City, Philippines published by ACWF and ICAROAP. For those of us who were privileged to attend both the NGO Forum in Huairou and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing proper, an outstanding feature of the experience was the very marked contrast in decision-making and leadership at the two events. The NGO Forum really was a women's forum, run by women, focussed on women's issues and concerns and attended by a predominantly female audience. Although the comparatively small number of men who attended the Forum often participated quite actively and enthusiastically in individual events, overall they played a very peripheral and marginal role. Had they not been there, little would have changed. By contrast, at the UN Conference in Beijing the picture was substantially reversed. Although it was an event on which women and women's issues ostensibly comprised the entire agenda, the players, the environment and the sub-text were quite different. Although many of the delegations to the Conference included significant numbers of women and many of the NGO women from Huairou also attended, dark suits predominated. More than half of the official government speakers were men and one soon realized that their decisions would carry the day rather than those of the women. I was surprised to see that the women with whom we had worked in Huairou who also attended the Conference suddenly looked different. They dressed differently, more sombrely and more formally. They also behaved differently. Where colourful, laughing and informal cross-national groups had sprung up out of new friendships and common interests in Huairou, in Beijing national groups representing more specific country interests dominated. Delegates clustered around their (often male) leaders with serious expressions, lobbying, negotiating and dealing for the outcome they (that is, their country, the male leaders) desired. The emphasis on substantive issues at Huairou was replaced by a concentration on more symbolic and superficial concerns - how will the action be perceived by others rather than does it address the problem. Although the Beijing Platform for Action included very specific provisions advocating the equal participation of women in decision-making and leadership at all levels, it was far from practising what it preached. As I observed this rather startling contrast, it occurred to me that the usual sex roles in decision- making and leadership had been reversed in Huairou, while the Beijing Conference represented the status quo. The experience of marginality that some men undoubtedly felt in Huairou was one that women have learned to accept as "normal": the consequence of living and working in an environment that was created by, and continues to be dominated by, people with different needs, interests and priorities from your own. The experience of "men as men" (rather than as individuals) in Huairou would tell us a great deal about why, despite the provisions of the Platform for Action, women are still so far from achieving equality in decisionmaking and leadership. Current Levels of Women's Participation in Decision-Making and Leadership: Tables 1 and 2 show just how far women are from achieving equal participation in decision- making and leadership. From most perspectives, the picture is rather

gloomy: women's share of decision-making and leadership is small and, in most parts of the world, shows no clear trend toward improvement. Only in the Nordic countries are women approaching equality in the political sphere, and even in those countries the picture in the private sector and such key institutions as universities is often much less satisfactory. For example, almost no women are managing directors in the 100 largest private enterprises in the Nordic countries. [Last week's British election gives cause for greater optimism: reports indicate that 125 women were elected in the Labor Party's 419 seat landslide win.] By 1995, only 24 women had ever been elected as heads of State of Government in modern times. In this case the trend appears more encouraging: half had been elected to office since 1990. Between 1987 and 1995, the number of countries where women held no ministerial posts fell from 93 to 59. However, less than 6 per cent of cabinet ministers were women in 1994 and women held more than 15 per cent of ministerial positions in only 16 countries. Changes in women's participation in government show no clear trend. For example, most countries where women hold top ministerial positions do not have comparable representation at the sub-ministerial, suggesting that women senior ministers are not pioneering a new trend. Women's membership in parliaments has declined in eastern and western Asia and fell sharply in eastern Europe after 1987, although women seem to have increased their share of seats in recent elections. However, measures such as the 33.3 per cent reservation for women introduced by the Government of India at the local level and now being considered for other levels of decision- making can be expected to create a pool of experienced potential women leaders. These women may begin to move into political decision making in increasing numbers of future. Table 2 suggests that women are excluded from decision-making by more than just lack of education. Women's position in the labour force as a significant source of highly skilled and qualified labour as professional and technical workers is not matched by an equivalent contribution as administrative and managerial workers. In the world as a whole, women provide almost 40 per cent of professional and technical workers but less than 15 per cent of administrators and managers. Even in the industrial countries, the proportions are quite unbalanced: almost half of the professional and technical workers but just over one quarter of the administrators and managers. As the experience of the United Nations suggests (Table 1), the imbalance becomes more pronounced in the higher levels of decision-making. The UN experience also shows how fragile improvement may be: in 1949 there were more women in the UN, although heavily concentrated at the lowest levels, than a quarter of a century later in 1975. Why should women share decision-making & leadership? The Beijing Platform for Action includes a strong statement calling for governments to ensure women's equal access to and full participation in power structures and decision-making. It also called for government to increase women's capacity to participate in decision-making and leadership. Why is it necessary or desirable for women to share in decision-making and leadership? Two kinds of argument may be advanced, a human rights argument and a more pragmatic, efficiency-based argument, although there is considerable overlap between the two.

In democratic countries, rights-based arguments are difficult to deny (although the Beijing Platform merely noted that women's participation in decision making is needed in order to "strengthen democracy and promote its regular functioning"). It is a basic principle of democracy that adult citizens from all walks of life should have equal access to participation in decision- making and leadership. Ideally, representatives of groups with specific interests and perspectives should participate directly in decision-making processes and leadership to ensure that both the agenda of issues to be considered and the decisions subsequently made incorporate their views. It is untenable that any specific interest group, say a particular ethnic or religious group, could be systematically excluded from direct participation in decision-making on the grounds that others can "speak" for them. Since women and men play different roles in society and therefore have different needs, interests and priorities, it follows that women also cannot be adequately represented in decisionmaking by men. The pragmatic, efficiency-based argument for women's participation in decision making and leadership also starts from recognition that women and men have different needs, interests and priorities arising from their specific roles and situations. Even when men are aware of and seek to represent this difference, they lack information in the same way that mainstream decision makers are unable to capture the perspectives and needs of minority cultures or the poor. This failure to incorporate women's concerns in decision making represents a major loss for society as a whole. Women's needs, interests and concerns are not just those of women themselves, but reflect their primary roles as mothers, wives and caregivers. Therefore, incorporating a woman's perspective in decision making should result in better decisions that more adequately reflect the needs and interests of children and families (including the male members). Finally, the Beijing Platform recognizes that women's equal participation in decision making and political life is vital for the advancement of women. Women remain in a position of inequality compared with men partly because their situation, needs and concerns are not even considered in current decision making: they do not even reach the mainstream agenda. Much of the discussion at the NGO Forum focussed on women's need to become involved in "setting the agenda". The advancement of women demands that women participate actively in setting the agenda and determining issues on which decisions are to be made. An Australian woman politician recently pointed out that it was only when women entered the Australian parliament in significant numbers that issues such as child care, violence against women and the valuation of unpaid labour were even considered by policy makers. As a result of these issues entering the agenda, Australia now promotes familyfriendly employment policies, including work-based child care. It also recently undertook a nationally representative survey of violence against women, collects time allocation data and is now using that data to try to incorporate the value of unpaid work in national policy making. Why are women marginalized in leadership? Women are marginalized in decision making and leadership by a variety of processes that begin in infancy. In most societies, women lack experience of decision making and leadership in the public arena because girls, in contrast to boys, are socialized to play passive roles and given little opportunity to make decisions or develop leadership skills outside the family context. In most traditional societies girls are kept

largely within the confines of the household and family where they are protected and taught to accept the decisions that others parents, teachers, brothers make on their behalf. As a result of this lack of experience in a public context, girls tend to the lack self-confidence and skills needed to function effectively in positions of formal leadership. An added handicap for many is their lack of capacity due to discrimination in access to education and training: in most countries, women have higher levels of illiteracy and fewer years of schooling than men. Even women when women succeed in gaining education and enter the decisionmaking mainstream, they are often marginalized by an institutional setting that reflects men's needs and situation and ignores women's different needs and experience. Modern work patterns and practices are designed for men who have a supportive wife to take care of their essential domestic needs and family responsibilities at home hence the saying that every career woman needs a good wife! Because it is designed to fit the needs and expectations of men, the modern work environment is not family friendly. The hours and inflexibility of the working day, overtime, the location of work and commuting times make it difficult for working women to meet the dual expectations of their family and work roles, giving rise to role conflict. Most men do not face such role conflict because society regards their family and personal roles as discretionary, meaning that they are subsidiary to and have to be fitted in with the primary work role. Thus, although men play important roles as husbands and fathers, these generally do not interfere with their primary work role as family breadwinner. For example, if a man's wife or child falls ill or is otherwise in need of his assistance, he is not expected (nor, in most cases, permitted) to leave his work in order to attend to them. Nor will he be considered a "bad" father or husband as a consequence. By contrast, women's primary roles as wife and mother require their attention 24 hours a day and thus, for working women, must be carried out simultaneously with the work role. Even where a working woman has domestic assistance, she is still held responsible for managing her family. If her child or husband is ill, she is expected (and grudgingly permitted) to interrupt her work in order to ensure that their needs are met. If she fails to do so, society tends to judge her as a "bad" wife or mother. In addition to role conflict, women often find themselves isolated and marginalized in unfriendly, if not hostile, male-dominated institutional cultures. A colleague recently described the situation of women in her office in the following terms: women must continually prove themselves to be capable, but the men are assumed to be competent even when they are demonstrably not. Women must provide strong arguments to support their views; men are simply believed on the basis of their professional qualifications and personal relationships. In the work place, women are often judged by two quite different and conflicting standards, as women and as workers, placing them in a classic no-win situation. For example, good employees at the management level are usually expected to be decisive, articulate, assertive and clear about their goals and objectives. However, in most cultures women as women are expected to be submissive, passive and demure. Thus a woman who displays the characteristics of a good manager may find that her supervisors are not appreciative because they are actually and probably unconsciously judging her as a woman, as well as a worker. Some women also find that there is no "space" for them to perform effectively as decision makers because

men dominate debate, male networks determine promotions and sexist stereotypes (for example, assumptions such as "women cannot work in the field", "will not take transfers away from their families", made without actually consulting the women concerned) bar them from gaining the experience required for senior decisionmaking positions. What can be done? This analysis of the reasons for women's exclusion from decision making and leadership suggests a number of strategies to work toward equal access for women to decision making and leadership. The Beijing Platform for Action also identifies several specific issues that need to be addressed, including socialization and negative stereotyping, which have kept decision making the domain of men. The Platform calls on actors to: create a gender balance in government and administration; integrate women into political parties; recognize that shared work and parental responsibilities promote women's increased participation in public life; promote gender balance within the UN system; work toward equality between women and men in the private sector; establish equal access for women to training; increase women's capacity to participate in decision-making and leadership; and increase women's participation in the electoral process and political activities. At the personal level, perhaps the first thing that needs to done is to change the way we rear our children. We must provide our daughters with opportunities to develop their decision making skills and leadership capacities, and we must train our sons to respect their sisters as equals. In particular, we must ensure that daughters have equal access to the same quantity, quality and type of education as sons. Since this is a long-term objective, we must also take immediate steps to place more women in decision-making and leadership positions and, at the same time, provide them with the necessary catch-up training and experience in order to be effective. However, as the experience of capable women decision makers has demonstrated, these measures alone will not be sufficient. We also need to address the institutional context of decision making and leadership to create more women- and familyfriendly institutions and organizational cultures. Some industrial countries have already begun slowly to move in this direction, reducing working hours, introducing flexi time and career structures for part-time workers (most of whom are women) and providing government-subsidized or work-based child care, maternity and parental leave and emergency leave for caregivers. In addition, institutions need to reexamine their organizational culture and work practices. An interesting example of this may be found in a study of organizational culture in the Bangladesh NGO BRAC in the most recent issue of the Oxfam Journal Gender and Development (Volume 5 No. 1 February 1997). We also need to ensure that there are women in senior positions able to act as role models and mentors for young women and to establish women's networks that can support women in the same way that conventional maledominated networks support the career development and promotions of men. An essential step toward the more equal participation of women in decision making and leadership is awareness-raising for men. Institutional cultures that are unfriendly to women are not usually the result of deliberate policies but the consequences of their development over time to meet the needs and situations of men, who have for so long dominated the public domain and who have different needs, priorities and concerns from women. Men need to become aware of the ways in which their

assumptions, attitudes and behaviour are gendered to reflect their own situation, exclude a woman's perspective and thus obstruct women's equal participation. Women and men together must then negotiate a new institutional setting that provides space for both groups. What is being done? As noted, a number of countries have introduced measures designed to promote women's equal access to decision making and leadership. Some of these, particularly in the industrial countries, are ongoing activities that are part of a long-standing drive toward equality. Others are more recent and seem to be specifically related to commitments made at the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women or to the equally important awareness-raising processes that preceded it. An exciting example of these is the introduction of a 33.3 per cent quota for women in the local panchayat raj elections in India. This has resulted in a sharp increase in the number of women decision makers at the local level and provided an important training ground for women to move on to higher levels of decision making and leadership. The Government of India is now considering introducing a similar quota at higher levels of government. Over the last two decades, most interventions have been directed toward strengthening women's leadership through women's organizations and national machineries. While this is clearly essential, perhaps the time has come to pay more attention to complementing these measures with programmes to strengthen the capacities of individual women. In the private and public sectors, mentoring and other leadership programmes for women are being introduced in a number of countries. Although most of these activities have been in the industrial countries, some developing countries, particularly the Philippines, are now exploring the potential for such programmes. One area of decision making in which developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region have been particularly active is politics and the electoral process. As part of the preparatory activities for the Beijing Conference, most regions of the world held national and regional meetings seeking a more active role for women in political decision making at all levels. These culminated in Regional Conferences and the First Global Congress on Women in Politics held at the NGO Forum in Huairou. Women around the world are now preparing for the Second Global Congress on Women in Politics to be held in New Delhi in February 1998. The Secretariat for this conference is the Center for Asia-Pacific Women in Politics (CAPWIP), a regional network of national and sub-regional bodies. CAPWIP is currently setting up a regional training programme to support women who are already in or who are considering entering politics at any level. A number of countries also held training programmes to prepare women for participation in specific elections. For example, in Thailand a number of training programmes were set up to assist women participate in local elections in 1996. In the Pacific, a sub-regional training course was held in conjunction with the regional WIPPAC Congress in November 1996 and others are planned to prepare women for forthcoming elections in several Pacific countries in the next two years. Can a man be Prime Minister? In conclusion, I would like to share with you an enlightening story told by Mrs Gro Hart Bruntland at the Beijing Conference. It illustrates both the power of the

stereotypes that currently obstruct women's participation in decision making and the ways in which they can, and must be, broken. Mrs Hart Bruntland recalled how, when she first became Prime Minister, many Norwegians were shocked at the idea that a woman could hold the key decision-making and leadership post and predicted disaster and a short tenure in office for her. Many years later, after successfully holding her post for more than a decade, she was told of a conversation overhead in a primary school playground. A small boy had boasted to his friends that he was going to be Prime Minister when he grew up. His playmates girls laughed and told him: "Don't be silly! A man can't be Prime Minister it has to be a woman." Table 1: Women's Participation in National and International Leadership, 1995 Heads of State or Government Government and Cabinet By 1995, only 24 women had been elected as heads of State or Government, half since 1990 1994 women were 5.7 per cent of cabinet ministers (3.3 per cent in 1987) 1994 women held no ministerial position in 59 countries (93 countries in 1987) 1994 women held more than 15 per cent of ministerial positions in only 16 countries (8 countries in 1987) Sweden 1994 - 52 per cent of ministers were women 1994 women held more than 15 per cent of positions in 23 countries (only 14 countries in 1987) Wide variation 1987-1994 proportion of women declined in eastern and western Asia Strongest in northern Europe (Nordic countries) Women's representation at highest levels of government weakest in Asia In southern Asia, women hold 5-6 per cent of senior positions, but in other regions of Asia women hold not more than 2 per cent Women most represented in social, law and justice ministries 1991 formation of International Association of Women Judges First woman Assistant Secretary General 1972 1993/94 12 women at this level 1985 General Assembly first set goals for women staff 30 per cent women in the Secretariat achieved 1990 By end of 1993, only 13 per cent of women in senior management No women ever elected to the International Court of Justice (89 male judges elected since 1945) No woman ever appointed executive head of a UN autonomous or specialized agency 1993, women comprise only 1 per cent of CEOs and 2 per cent of senior managers in the largest US corporations. Outside the US, there was no woman at the top level, 1 per cent in the second level and only 2 per cent at the third.

Sub-ministerial level Parliamentary representation

Overall

United Nations

Private sector

Source : United Nations, 1995. The World's Women 1995. Trends and Statistics. United Nations: New York Table 2: Women's Participation in Decision-Making 1990 and 1995 Country HDI Rank Women in Government Administrators Professional 1995 & Managers & Technical 1990 1990 Ministerial SubTotal [Per cent [Per cent ministerial female] female] 6.7 8.8 8.3 9 42 13.3 7.4 3.8 3.4 0 8.7 7.7 0 26.7 20 4.5 1.2 7.1 10.7 4.7 0.5 23.7 43 16.8 32 4.4 1.5 5.1 9.8 5.8 0.4 22 4 34 10 12 4 25 48 52 45 16 45 45 33

Japan Australia New Zealand Thailand

3 11 14 52

Korea, Rep 29 of Singapore 34 Fiji Malaysia 47 53

Iran, 66 Islamic Rep of Philippines 95 Lao PDR Vietnam Myanmar Pakistan India Nepal 138 121 133 134 135 151

8.3 0 6.5 0 3.7 4.2 4.5 0 0 3.6 11.1 6.7 0 1.2 12.5 0 7.7 12.6

26.3 4.1 2.4 0 1 6.3 3 0 3.1 1.4 21.1 7.4 8.7 0.6 7.9 6.6 8.5 11.3

23.9 34 2.7 3.9 0 1.6 6.1 3.4 0 1.6 1.8 7.1 4.7 0.6 8.7 5.1 7.6 .. .. .. 3 2 5 .. 12 7 12 .. .. 17 .. 10

63 .. .. .. 20 21 23 .. 30 41 48 47 .. .. 25 .. 36 48

Bangladesh 143 Papua New 126 Guinea Indonesia 102 China Samoa (Western) Mongolia Korea, DP Rep of Sri Lanka Cambodia Industrial 108 88 113 83 89 156 ..

16.2 13

Developing ..

10.8 27

Countries Source : UNDP, 1996. UNDP Human Development Report 1996.

Nature and impact of women's participation in economic activities in rural Bangladesh: insights from household surveys
Author info | Abstract | Publisher info | Download info | Related research | Statistics Author Info Hossain, Mahabub (International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)) Bose, Manik Lal ( mbose_mlb@yahoo.com) (International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)) Ahmad, Alia ( Alia.Ahmad@nek.lu.se) (Department of Economics, Lund University) Abstract Based on household-level data collected in 1987 and 2000 this paper first depicts the patterns and trends in womens work and secondly, analyses the factors that work behind gender division of labour in rural Bangladesh. An empowerment index is developed from the data on household decision-making in different spheres, and its relationship with womens work is then explored. The persistent gender division of labour in rural Bangladesh has been found to be associated with both economic factors - wage rates, access to production factors like land, micro credit, infrastructure) and socio-cultural factors - norms and customs regarding womens mobility and gender role in production and reproduction. Economic activities within the household have been found to have weak impact on empowerment. Two policy implications emerge from the study: 1. Promotion of female education to enable women to take part in market activities in the non-agricultural sector where gender disparity in earnings is less. 2. Investment in infrastructure that can facilitate womens mobility outside the household as well as can reduce the burden of domestic work.

Research Development & Planning Family Economy and Poverty Labor Market

Economy and Poverty

1.Center for Women's Studies University of Tehran, 2004, "Gender Dimensions of Patterns and Characteristics of Poverty in the IRI

Social Issues

2.Center for Women's Studies University of Tehran, 2003 "Women in Financial Markets: Banking system

Gender Dimensions of Patterns and Characteristics of Poverty in the IRI1

Center for Women's Studies University of Tehran

Abstract The phenomenon of poverty among woman in comparison of general poverty will not boast a separate trend. However, discussing poverty from gender perspective and its characteristics is of great importance. The issue that women are more destitute compared to men is raised in poverty analysis. Women are more exposed to poverty; the intensity of poverty among women is higher and has more rapid growth compared to men in the passage of time. Moreover the unequal distribution of income and assets within the household is of great importance creating problems and further diminishes womens abilities for getting disentangled from the poverty trap. The available statistics in Iran are concerned with family units and not individuals. Therefore in the majority of conducted studies, poverty among female headed households is analyzed as womens poverty. The statistics are based on expenditure which is determined for family, so there is no information about the allocation of such expenditure among family members, men or woman. Poverty line has been determined on the basis of the amount of calorie intake per capita in a day equal to 2179 calories and the amount of expenditure needed for determining the calories and further generalization to an average family size. Absolute poverty: The gender sensitive poverty analysis shows that the percentage of poverty in the female headed households has always been higher than male headed. In 1991, 1996 and 2001; 45.4%, 52% and 17.5 % of all female headed households successively ended up living in absolute poverty. While the same figures for men were 25.4%, 16.1 %, and 14.8 %. The poverty index in urban societies implies that poverty has decreased from 36.6% (1991) to 15.2% (2001). The descending trend holds true in rural areas too. The poverty line for rural and urban areas is not the same, as different costs apply for similar products and services. The ratio of rural population of the country has decreased from 42 % in

1991 to 36 % in 2001. Poverty in rural areas has reached to 20% and 15 % in 1996 and 2001 respectively from 18.2 % in 1991. Invariably, the living standard in rural areas was less than in urban areas. The average rural household expense was in between 55% to 65% of the average urban household expense. Relative Poverty: Distinguishing household income or expense on the basis of tenth or twentieth percentiles is a common tool to distinguish impoverished households. When studying households in the first and second tenth percentiles with respect to the household heads literacy, a major portion - more than 70% - of households in the first tenth percentile, and more than 54% of households in the second tenth percentile, were headed by illiterate persons. Women elevated tendency for higher education (60 to 40 %) and its positive impact on working outside home, and participation in decision making at home, resulted to a general culture among women, while unfortunately this is not identical for men. Households that were headed by illiterate persons invariably were at a higher risk for falling into poverty than those households headed by literate persons; illiterate women in urban areas are in a very high risk of falling into poverty. However, over time, the trend indicates that relative poverty has decreased for this group. Contrary to initial expectations, as household size increases, the probability of falling into poverty decreases. In addition, the percentage of poverty among the 56-years and older and 25-years and younger age groups was consistently higher than the other age groups. This phenomenon was seen in both urban and rural areas. The levels of poverty among women in these two age groups, particularly in the first half of the decade, were much higher than among men. On the other hand smaller family size provides more free time for women consequently will increase labour supply, demand for higher education, and social participation in general. Studying variables for age and education reveals higher consent with women working outside home to two fold 2.6 % in higher education level. Growing poverty in the job market can be the result of decreasing demand and low investment in economic sectors leading to insufficient demand for new work force. It can also be attributed to the lack of proper trainings and skills relevant to the requirements of the market. The percentage of poverty among households with employed heads was much lower than

among households headed by unemployed. Poverty levels among unemployed and employed urban and rural persons showed that the benefits resulting from the economic growth of the first half of this decade, to a great extent, went to the urban areas, and rural areas received a much smaller share. In 2001, the probability of non-working income entering the cycle of poverty was greater than previous. However, the levels of poverty among women household heads who were students or homemakers were much greater than other women. The numbers of employed persons in the upper tenth percentiles were sometimes as high as six to eight persons. This point indicates that with a greater number of employed household members, the risk of being poor decreases. The greatest number of agricultural workers categorized among the poor, In addition to the industry and mines sector. Workers in these sectors had the lowest share in the higher class. In the service sectors, financial intermediaries or middlemen had the highest status. In the subsidies policies we come to this conclusion that lowest percentile benefit only 3.8%, while tenth percentile benefit the most amounting to 20.5 %. Therefore top percentile benefits 5.4 times of the lowest percentile. Studies show low participation of women in economical decision making, but higher role in children's education. Rural women's participation in the use of income generated by carpet waving is very little; where for 82 %, men decide on their own; 8% are decided by both men and women and only 10% is for women to decide alone. Rural women expenditure primarily is spent on basic needs (88%), followed by loan payment, children education, and lasting goods respectively. More than 82.5 % of rural women participate in income generation at home or work place. Only 51% of rural women generate income meaning 49% of women are not able to earn income whether or not they participate in economic activities. They are considered as housewife in categorization by Statistics Centre. The study on decision makers in household concluded that patriarchal eras in Iran have passed, while growth of democracy in household is expanding. Development in education and practice of democracy resulted to lessen monopoly for men where only 14% of high educated approve the household to be the father's domain. Head of household income indicator conveys the same message considering extended participation for both spouses. Comparing the study carried out in 1974 in which 72% voted for

man's power in the process of decision making, the present findings which points to only 35% indicate higher participation and accordance among men and women. Government policies: in general, to address poverty alleviation in the framework of First, Second and Third Development Plan did well, being involved directly or indirectly. While the plans did not deliver gender perspective, still in The Third Dev. Plan some sensitivity was pursued. Indicators under study relevant to health and medical and education endorse the success to alleviate poverty and discrimination while in job creation and housing the improvement is lower. In fact conduction of education programs shows higher impact in reducing discrimination. Social security plan in general lack defined strategy pursued similarly until the Second Plan. The absence of gender sensitivity was due to, lack of Systemic approach, ignorance to social vulnerability, stresses on traditional method in contrary to scientific ones, parallel establishments for implementing social security programs, mismanagement and disregard for the roles of NGOs and people participation in aid works. Although, in the Third Dev. Plan "Proper organizational structure design for Social Security" was anticipated, and despite the fact that this is the final year of The Plan, the social security law is not yet ratified and contains ambiguous articles. Conclusively ineffectiveness of the social security system and its supportive programs are less due to scarcity of financial resources and mostly are the outcome of improper budget allocation, mismanagement and lack of systemic approach. In this respect the issue of ignorance to NGOs in relief and aid works, is significant which needs further attention. Total population access to health services increased from 72% in 1990 to more than 95% in 2000. Access to potable water in rural area was also increased from 74% in 1990 to 86% in 2000. The number of health centers in villages increased covering 19.363.345. Above findings reflects the improvement of indexes for general medical and health services. The observation indicates the decrease of the gap between men and women, trapped by poverty; and more accurate verification of the stability of this trend after 2001 must be searched through statistics in line with up to dated family expenditures and incomes. Key Words

ral

updated: 16 October, 2007

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challenges, creating change International Women's Day has been celebrated for more than 90 years. In 1977, the United Nations began sponsoring March 8 as an occasion to promote and protect the equal rights of women. The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) was established in 1946 to prepare recommendations and reports on promoting women's rights in political, economic, civil, social and educational fields. For the last 60 years the UN has helped create a multitude of programmes and strategies to advance the status of women worldwide.

''Women's equal participation in decisionmaking is not only a demand for simple justice or democracy, but can also be seen as a necessary condition for women's interest to be taken into account. Without the active participation of women and the incorporation of women's perspective at all levels of decisionmaking, the goals of equality, development, and peace cannot be achieved.'' Related links

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Today, International Women's Day is an occasion to recognize how far women Beijing have come in their struggle Platfor for equality - and how much m for work remains to be done. This Action, year's theme is Women in 1995 decision-making: meeting challenges, creating change. While progress is being made towards the equality of women and

men in decision-making at all levels, the pace remains slow. Women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of decision-making and their achievements all too often remain invisible and unacknowledged, their voices unheard. More needs to be done to accelerate the inclusion of women in formal decision-making bodies, and to increase their impact in decision-making. Women around the world are meeting the challenges of leadership, and contributing to change in their communities, countries and in the international arena in very real ways. But even in developed countries, despite educational advances for women in many parts of the world, women's participation in high-level political and economic decision-making remains low. Women and rural poverty Rural poverty is deeply rooted in the imbalance between what women do and what they have. In many poor countries, women do most of the farm work - planting, weeding and harvesting crops, as well as tending livestock. They also spend long hours fetching water, collecting firewood, preparing meals and caring for children and sick relatives, making their typical day much longer than a man's. Yet, poor rural women have less access than men to the assets they need to improve their lives. Women are often not able to own or inherit land and they are less likely to get an education. They have more limited access to credit, markets and technology and have fewer legal rights than men. Strengthening women's decision-making Building women's capabilities and addressing gender inequalities are crucial factors in enabling them to transform their lives and the lives of their families and communities. Poor women need to be able to influence the public and private decisions

that affect their lives, if change is to be sustainable. Women must be empowered to lead the fight against poverty and hunger. In its projects and programmes IFAD combines gender mainstreaming with specific measures for women's empowerment. This means taking into account gender roles and relationships and ensuring that men and women participate equally in, and benefit from, development initiatives. Because IFAD specifically targets women, their involvement in project activities is required. Women's economic empowerment changes cultural perceptions of gender roles and relations. For poor rural women, ownership of land often means gaining status and respect. Increased status and confidence lead to increased participation by women in community decision-making. In societies where women are valued, girls are sent to school; this is directly linked to social recognition of women's contribution to the household economy and household food security, and is made possible by, among other things, improved access to land. IFAD has learned that when women play a significant role in economic and social activities, their role in household decision-making and participation in financial management decisions increases. Increasing the representation of women in national governments is only possible through increased women's representation at all levels, starting in the village. Women and drylands 2006 is the International Year of Deserts and Desertification - an opportunity to highlight the difficulties faced by women and men in areas affected by desertification. In many of the world's drylands, including much of Africa, it is traditionally women who devote most time and effort to the land. They process, manage and market food for their families and societies, and work directly with natural resources. Women's traditional roles related to natural resource management and food security are particularly crucial in areas subject to drought and desertification. But, despite their efforts and

knowledge, women living in dry lands tend to rank among the poorest of the poor, with little power to bring about real change. With ownership and decision-making over land and livestock resting predominantly with men, women are often excluded from participation in land conservation and development projects, from agricultural extension work, and from the overall policy-making process. Women as agents of change IFAD-supported projects enable women to have a voice by facilitating their rights of association and expression and building awareness of their rights. Women's groups are successfully re-establishing soil and land productivity by blending indigenous and new technologies in IFAD supported projects. For example, women in Ethiopia have been provided with seeds, hand tools and technical support to develop vegetable gardens. In China, indigenous women were trained in organic farming, which helped reduce the need for costly fertilizer and helped restore soil productivity. Women's workloads were reduced and their self esteem and social position improved due to their entrepreneurial success. In its projects and programmes, IFAD combines gender mainstreaming with specific measures for women's empowerment. This means taking into account gender roles and relationships, and ensuring that men and women participate equally in, and benefit from, development initiatives. IFAD considers three dimensions in its work to achieve gender equality and women's empowerment:

economic empowerment participation in decision-making improved well-being

IFAD considers women in general and womenheaded households in particular to be the most disadvantaged groups among the rural poor, but it also recognizes that women can be agents of social change. In many countries women's groups also work as partner organizations, helping to combat

the advance of desertification, reclaim lost croplands and restore trees and shrubs. IFAD attempts to help poor rural women become the driving force of their own development by strengthening their organizations, increasing their knowledge and enhancing their bargaining power in the marketplace. When the participation of women is assured in the conceptualization and planning measures of a project, it considerably enhances the chances of project's success.

Towards a Gender Analysis Framework to assist the application, adoption and use of Environmentally Sound Technologies
Foreword
The criticality of gender issues is being increasingly recognized , particularly in developing countries, and emphasis on gender sensitivity and inclusiveness is being called for, and its stronge integration into developmental policies, programmes and projects. This short report is an output of GDRC's Gender and Development Programme, and was written with two objectives in mind. Firstly, it attempts to summarize the current understanding of gender analysis frameworks, and the process of developing and using such frameworks. It focusses on environmentally sound technologies (ESTs) [1] and contextualizes the development of a Gender Analysis Framework to assist the application, adoption and use of ESTs. The other key objective of the report is to develop and use gender criteria in the design, A Gender Analysis Framework is a development, implementation and evaluation of step-by-step tool to raise questions, developmental programmes and projects. analyze information, and develop

Understanding Gender in Development

strategies to increase women's and men's participation in and benefits from projects and programmes.

The criticality of incorporating gender perspectives in environmental management and community development programmes lie in the fact that decision-making processes always start at home and at the individual level. Power structures notwith-standing, most of the decisions at the household level are taken by women, and directly affect the household to which she belongs. Also, benefits accrued from

education and awareness building programmes targeted at women, are ploughed back to the family and household. But dilemmas with respect to gender issues do exist - Do we look for gender specificity or look at human dimensions? Do we work on gender stereotypes, or work on new/emerging roles? Is there a difference/distinction in the way women collect, process and use information and in the way they take decisions? Should gender studies be separate or should be mainstreamed? Should it be 'gender' and environment or 'women' and environment? Should 'Gender' focus on women, on men, or on both? The three corners of a gender policy relate to (1) creating the right conditions for the delivery of a variety of resources to support empowerment of women, especially where they have a say on the type and mode of delivery of resources of their choice; (2) the provision of cost-effective and complementary services - for example, training and gender sensitivity workshops, covering all issues of economic, social, cultural and other aspects, that leads to empowerment, and (3) mainstreaming of gender issues within larger developmental policies, which may call for a in-depth review of norms and regulations from a gender perspective, identifying empowerment indicators for a programme or policy, etc. 1. Gender Analysis A thorough gender analysis is a critical starting point for any programme or project that aims to be more gender sensitive. Questions such as the difference in impacts of the policy/programme on women and men; the advantages and disadvantages; roles and responsibilities; who does what, who has what, who needs what; strategies and approaches in closing the gap between what men and women need; etc. need to be asked and analyzed in building a comprehensive picture of the existing situation. This will identify the lacks (that which is not there), gaps (that which is not enough) and mismatches (that which is not right). 2. Information and knowledge Key to developing a comprehensive gender framework is the effective management of information and knowledge. Attention needs to be paid to the collation, packaging and dissemination of information - the right information, at the right time, at the right level, to the right person, so that the intended and right decision can be taken. All three stages of the information management continuum - collation, packaging and dissemination is therefore critical. Issues that need to be kept in mind for collation include - who has the information, what is the quality and quantity of the information available, what format is the information in; for packaging include - how will the information be used, what format should it be in, what decisions and actions are expected from the information provided, who is the user of the information; for dissemination include - what is the best media to use for reaching the intended target group, how can the dissemination facilitate long term capacity building, etc. 3. Participation and Decision-making

As mentioned in the introduction above, the household is the smallest decision-making unit in a society, where decisions are taken daily - that not only affects the household itself, but cumulatively have a long-term and global impact. As the slogan "Think Global, Act Local" extols, it will be the effective action taken at the local / micro level that will have maximum impact. Effective involvement of all levels of decision-making, particularly at the household level will ensure that decisions taken at the macro level will have its intended micro impacts. The participation of women in all decisionmaking processes - whether micro or macro - will ensure that broader goals are achieved, and will benefit all sections of the society 4. Legislation, rules and regulations A comprehensive set of legislation, rules and regulations at the national and local levels - that address short, medium and long term issues are important, but so is its implementation. Both women and men need to be made aware of the protection and provisions made under different legislation, rules and regulations. These cover remedial, preventive, and management strictures that aim to create a gender-balanced society. Effective legislative frameworks in fact lie at the core of good governance. 5. Organizational balance Maintaining a gender balance within any organization - in the public or private sector - is critical to ensure that concerns and needs of both women and men are taken into account in decision-making and implementation. Day-to-day operations of an organization, whether a local government, a business, a company or a school or university, need to benefit all its members. This is done though conscious and stated policies, regulations, and/or management practices. 6. Capacity building and Training Despite well intended policies, legislation or practices, achieving a gender balance in meeting needs and concerns of both women and men does not just happen. There is a clear need for better capacity building and training to be undertaken to increase the viability and effectiveness of gender policies and programmes remedy the situation, as well as proactively prevent discrimination and bias from happening. Gender sensitivity has to be built in both women and men, particularly in those who are in positions of decisionmaking. 7. Resource Provision Dismantling decades and even centuries of gender discrimination is not an easy task and requires the elimination of deep-rooted bias with both positive and negative reinforces. Access to markets, information, finance, skills and other resources need to be provided to women in order to be able to play in a level playing field. These can come in the form of specially targeted programmes and provisions, or better and open access to existing ones. This is particularly true in the case of access to financial resources, and access to

markets and information for the products they produce or services they provide.

Contextualizing Gender Analysis

Gender analysis examines the differences in women's and men's lives, including those which lead to social and economic inequity for women, and applies this understanding to policy development and service delivery is concerned with the underlying causes of these inequities aims to achieve positive change for women. The term 'gender' refers to the social construction of female and male identity. It can be defined as 'more than biological differences between men and women'. It includes the ways in which those differences, whether real or perceived, have been valued, used and relied upon to classify women and men and to assign roles and expectations to them. [2] The significance of this is that the lives and experiences of women and men, including their experience of the legal system, occur within complex sets of differing social and cultural expectations'. A gender analysis should recognize that: women's and men's lives and therefore experiences, needs, issues and priorities are different women's lives are not all the same; the interests that women have in common may be determined as much by their social position or their ethnic identity as by the fact they are women women's life experiences, needs, issues and priorities are different for different ethnic groups the life experiences, needs, issues, and priorities vary for different groups of women (dependent on age, ethnicity, disability, income levels, employment status, marital status, sexual orientation and whether they have dependants) different strategies may be necessary to achieve equitable outcomes for women and men and different groups of women analyses aim to achieve equity, rather than equality.

Gender equality is based on the premise that women and men should be treated in the same way. This fails to recognize that equal treatment will not produce equitable results, because women and men have different life experiences. Gender equity takes into consideration the differences in women's and men's lives and recognizes that different approaches may be needed to produce outcomes that are equitable. Gender analysis provides a basis for robust analysis of the differences between women's and men's lives, and this removes the possibility of analysis being based on incorrect assumptions and stereotypes.

Why Gender Analysis?

Several different Gender Analysis Frameworks exist today. They are step-by-step tools for carrying out gender analysis, which help to raise questions, analyze

information, and develop strategies to increase women's and men's participation in and benefits from forestry programmes. In general, Gender Analysis Frameworks are concerned with a number of critical questions [3] such as (1) the development context or patters in an area, answering the questions What is getting better? What is getting worse? (2) Women's and men's activities and roles in the forestry sectors, answering the questions Who does what? (3) women's and men's access to and control over resources, answering the questions. Who has what? Who needs what?, (4) programme actions needed, answering the questions What should be done to close the gaps between what women, and men need? What does development deliver? The outputs and recommendations from a Gender Analysis can be used in a number of ways: development of management plans to ensure that the contributions of both women and men are adequately recognized in determining access to and control over resources development, or review, of policy to ensure sustainability through equitable participation of all stakeholders profiling of stakeholders to develop an understanding of who the stakeholders are, beyond just gender, to other socially determined characteristics. restructuring of activities and organizations to ensure equitable participation at all levels and in a diversity of functions by both women and men. development of criteria for training selection or recruitment to ensure that women and men have equal opportunities to progress in their career and that there are both women and men working in diversity of capacities in the sector to work with the women and men of the other stakeholder groups

A Typical Gender Analysis Framework

A typical gender analysis framework has four parts and is carried out in two main steps [4]. First, information is collected for the Activity Profile and the Access and Control Profile. Then this information is used in the analysis of factors and trends influencing activities and access and control, and in the project cycle analysis. 1. Activity Profile: Who does what? What men and women (adults, children, elders) do, and where and when these activities take place. The planner needs to know the tasks of men and women in the population subgroups in the project area to be able to direct project activities toward those performing particular tasks. Therefore, data must be gathered on women's and men's involvement in each stage of the agricultural cycle, on their shared as well as unshared tasks, and on the degree of fixity of the gender division of labor. The objective is to ensure that women are actively included in the project and are not disadvantaged by it. The Activity Profile usually considers all categories of activities: productive, reproductive,1 community-related service. It identifies how much time is spent on each activity, how often this work is done (e.g., daily or seasonally), which periods are characterized by a high demand for labor, and what extra demands the program inputs will make on women, men, and children.

The Activity Profile also identifies where the activities take place, at home or elsewhere (the village, marketplace, fields, or urban centers), and how far these places are from the household. This information gives insights into female and male mobility, and allows an assessment of the impact of the program on mobility, method of travel, travel time for each activity, and potential ways of saving time.

Issues considered under Activity Profile include: Production of goods and services Reproductive and human resource maintenance activities Community work Community organization and activities

2. Access and control profile Who has what? Who has access to and control of resources, and decision making? The Access and Control Profile considers productive resources such as: land, equipment, labor, capital and credit, and education, and training. It differentiates between access to a resource and control over decisions regarding its allocation and use. It enables planners to consider whether the proposed project could undermine access to productive resources, or if it could change the balance of power between men and women regarding control over resources.

The profile examines the extent to which women are impeded from participating equitably in projects. For example, if women have limited access to income or land, they may be unable to join groups, which provide production inputs and commercial opportunities, or to become independent commercial producers. In some subgroups, men may also suffer the same disadvantage. Program management mechanisms (e.g., the creation of water users) groups or cooperatives) may determine who has access to and control over productive resources and may change existing gender relations. 3. Analysis of factors and trends What is the socio-economic context? How activity, access, and control patterns are shaped by structural factors (demographic, economic, legal, and institutional) and by cultural, religious, and attitudinal ones. This analysis considers the structural and socio-cultural factors that influence the gender patterns of activity and access and control in the project area: demographic factors, including household composition and household headship; general economic conditions, such as poverty levels, inflation rates, income distribution, internal terms of trade, and infrastructure; cultural and religious factors; education levels and gender participation rates; and political, institutional, and legal factors.

The analysis should consider the following: Which policies and programs aimed at ensuring women's participation could affect the project? Which community norms and beliefs could influence women's participation in the project's activities? Are there laws or regulations that could affect women's participation in the project or their access to its benefits? 4. Program cycle analysis What gender considerations are needed for the project? Gender-sensitive project planning, design, implementation, monitoring, and post-evaluation This analysis will indicate if and where the objectives and methods proposed for the project should be modified to improve the chances that the project will succeed and to minimize the likelihood that women will be disadvantaged as a result of it. Some questions that may need to be considered in this analysis deal with production processes, training, information, participation, access, institution building, project framework etc. Particularly within the Project framework, the following issues need to be considered: Do the planning assumptions (at each level of the planning framework or logical framework, for example) adequately reflect the constraints on women's participation in the program?

Do project performance indicators identify the need for data to be collected, disaggregated by gender? Will changes in the gender division of labor be monitored? Will data on women's access to and control over resources be collected during the project? Can the project meet both practical gender needs (supporting and improving the efficiency of women's and men's productive roles) and strategic gender needs (improving gender equity through women's participation in the project)? Do the goals, purposes, or objectives of the program explicitly refer to women or reflect women's needs and priorities? Do the project inputs identify opportunities for female participation in program management, in the delivery and community management of goods and services, in any planned institutional changes, in training opportunities, and in the monitoring of resources and benefits? Will the project resources be relevant and accessible to poor women in terms of personnel, location, and timing? Does the project include measurable indices for the attainment of its GAD objec-tives, to facilitate monitoring and post-evaluation?

Gender Analysis Matrix One of the key aspects of a Gender Analysis

Framework is a matrix that studies affected stakeholder within a set of categories. It is an analytical tool that uses participatory methodology to facilitate the definition and analysis of gender issues by the communities that are affected by them. Using the Gender Analysis Matrix will provide a unique articulation of issues as well as develop gender analysis capacity from the grassroots level up. The Gender Analysis Matrix is based on the following principles: All requisite knowledge for gender analysis exists among the people whose lives are the subject of the analysis Gender analysis does not require the technical expertise of those outside the community being analysed, except as facilitators Gender analysis cannot be transformative unless the analysis is done by the people being analyzed.

Labour: This refers to changes in tasks, level of skill required (skilled versus unskilled, formal education, training) and labour capacity (how many people

and how much they can do; do people need to be hired or can members of the household do it?) Time: This refers to changes in the amount of time (3 hours, 4 days, and so on) it takes to carry out the task associated with the project or activity. Resources: This refers to the changes in access to capital (income, land, credit) as a consequence of the project, and the extent of control over changes in resources (more or less) for each level of analysis. Culture: Cultural factors refer to changes in social aspects of the participants' lives (changes in gender roles or status) as a result of the project.

Implications for Developmental Programmes and Projects

The criticality of incorporating gender considerations in any developmental or management action is well acknowledged. Taking this into consideration, the focus and coverage of an initiative is the placing of gender within the context of overall development and management. Within these areas, the coverage of the cross-cutting programme should be gender, environment and technology transfer in developing countries . There can be two complementary and supplementary objectives: To mainstream the principles of gender equity and responsiveness in developmental programs and projects To promote gender sensitivity and responsiveness in technology transfer, and in the application, adoption and use of environmentally sound technologies.

The program can be operationalized by outlining the strategies and mechanics of implementation, expected outputs, targets and results and timetable, based on these objectives. Success of a gender initiatives will also rest on links with existing organizations/institutions (international and national) that have gender programmes in order to develop and implement a monitoring system for gender-responsiveness in technology transfer. Endnotes: 1. Agenda 21, Chapter 34: Transfer of Environmentally Sound Technology, Cooperation and Capacity-Building [Return to text] 2. Policy statement from the Ministry of Women's Affairs, New Zealand.[Return to text] 3. FAO, "Gender issues in the Zambia Forestry Action Programme" (1997)[Return to
text]

4. Adopted from ADB 2002, "Gender Checklist - Agriculture"[Return to text]

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Gender inequality in educational outcomes: a household perspective

1. Introduction: the significance of households in the analysis of educational outcomes

While the importance of education to the development effort has long been recognised, it has taken on an increasing prominence in the development agenda over recent decades. This has been accompanied by a concern with equity in educational outcomes: the achievement of universal access and the elimination of economic and social disparities. This change is spelt out in the policy goals and statements adopted at the international level, most recently in the Millennium Development Goals. However, such declarations represent the views of governments and the international development community. They do not necessarily bear any relationship to the views of those who have traditionally, and in most poor countries, still continue to make the key decision which will translate these declarations into their intended outcomes, ie. families, and particularly, parents.

Indeed, the evidence suggests that there continues to be considerable divergence between the private calculus of parents about the future of their children and the public calculus of the state and international agencies about the future of the next generation of citizens. Despite the fact that most Third World governments today have made a strong commitment to the achievement of universal primary education, and despite a gradual expansion in access to education, large numbers of children continue to remain outside the educational system. Moreover, the evidence suggests that many of them are girls. As UNICEFs 1999 Report on the State of the Worlds Children put it: over 130 million children of school age in the developing

world are growing up without access to basic education, while millions of others languish in sub-standard learning situations where little learning takes place. Girls crowd these ranks disproportionately, representing nearly two of every three children in the developing world who do not receive a primary education.

The challenge is most formidable in South Asia and sub-Saharan which continue to account for much of the world's poverty. However, while Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest enrolment ratios at primary level, South Asia fares worse in absolute numbers, containing nearly 50% of the world's out-of-school children, a reflection of the size of its share of the worlds population. In addition, along with a number of Arab countries, it has the largest gender gaps in schooling (Knodel and Jones, 1996).

Official sources of data often under-report the extent of gender disparities in education. In India, for instance, conceptual and methodological limitations in data collection have given rise to a category dubbed nowhere children (Chaudhri, 1997) who are neither at school (and hence excluded from enrolment data) nor at work (and hence excluded from labour force data). According to the 1991 census, there were 92 million of such children. Closer investigation suggests that they were often engaged in casualised forms of work (eg. fuel collection, rag picking, paid and unpaid domestic work) or socially stigmatised occupations (prostitution, begging, crime etc) which tend to go unreported (Chaudhri, 1997a). In addition, there was a strong gender bias in these omissions. According to Duraisamy (1997), nearly half of girls in the school-going age are engaged in such work and hence get excluded from both work and educational statistics. Microlevel studies also suggest that it is usually girls who tend to get classified as neither at work nor in school (Bhatty, 1998 ).

Gender disparities in education take other forms as well. Gross enrolment ratios conceal disparities in attendance and completion at each level of schooling. They also conceal the extent to which the quality of schooling received by boys and girls within the same family may differ, for instance, because girls tend to be concentrated in poorly equipped and managed government schools or even more poorly performing informal education centres while families struggles to send at least one boy to a private school.

The aim of this paper is to explore these gender disparities in educational outcomes in South Asia from the perspective of the household, the site where key decisions regarding the education of children are taken. Section 2 discusses how different conceptualisations of the household might explain educational outcomes and suggests that an institutional framework which attempts to synthesise these different conceptualisations provides the most useful insights into the empirical evidence from South Asia. Section 3 sketches out patterns of gender relations in south Asia. Section 4 and 5 compares explanations for gender inequality in education in the 1960s and 1970s with those provided in the more recent literature in order to understand changes and continuities in the pattern of gender disparity during a period of rising education while Section 6 draws out some policy implications.

2. Theories of the household

Economic theories of the household have undergone important changes in recent decades. Early theories tended to treated households as corporate entities with decisions were undertaken by a benevolent head to maximise the joint welfare of the household membership, subject to its resource

constraints. Thus the decision to educate children was explained in terms of expected returns to the investment in education relative to the returns to alternative uses of household income. Budget constraints meant that there was often a trade-off between 'quantity' and 'quality' of children so that increasing education of children was generally accompanied by a reduction in numbers of children. Inequalities in decision-making outcomes were seen to reflect 'rational choice' considerations rather than inequalities in power relations (Becker and Tomes, 1976; Rosenzweig and Schultz, 1982). Thus gender differentials in educational outcomes reflected higher returns to educational investment in boys, given gender differentials in employment prospects in the labour market.

The shift to bargaining models of household decisionmaking allowed for the possibility of conflicting views about desired outcomes within the household without necessarily ruling out the possibility of unified decision-making (Alderman et al., 1995). One version of this conceptualised the household as a site of 'co-operativeconflict' (Sen, 1990). . Co-operation between different members allowed them to achieve gains for the membership which were unlikely to have accrued to any individual member acting on their own. However, conflicts could arise about how the gains to co-operation were to be distributed: in such situations, decision-making became a process of bargaining, with final outcomes reflecting differences in the degree of bargaining power exercised by different household members. Early models of household bargaining conceptualised bargaining power in terms of the economic resources that individual members could 'fall back on' should co-operation breakdown: their wages in the labour market or resources they might have inherited. More recently, however, conceptualisations of bargaining power have been expanded to include:

norms and attitudes: how the contributions of different household members are perceived and valued; the sense of self-worth that would allow a member to press for, or fail to press for, decision-making outcomes in their own interests (Sen, 1990)

extra-environmental parameters (EEPS) such as the cultural acceptablity of outside work for women; laws relating to alimony/child support settlements; women's ability to return home after marriage etc (McElroy, 1990).

Bargaining models have made an important contribution to the explanation of educational outcomes by drawing attention not only to the level of resources available to the household but also its distribution. In particular, it suggested that resources accruing to mothers would be allocated differently from resources accruing to fathers because of its effects on bargaining power within the household and hence on whose preferences would be reflected in final outcomes.

However, a major problem with neo-classical household economics in general was its failure to incorporate an appreciation of intra-household relations as well as of the 'social-embeddedness' of the household within wider social relationships. Households are neither a group of people acting 'as if' they were a single individual nor are they a collection of individuals co-operating in the interests of maximising economic gains (Kabeer, 2001). Households are, by and large, made up of families, and hence the sites of particular kinds of social relationships, which are very distinct from other relationships in any society. Institutional approaches which take account of this have been used to locate household decision-making within a sociological framework (Todaro and Fapohunda, 1987; Kabeer, 1994, 2000; Cain, 1984; Whitehead, 1981; Whitehead and Kabeer, 2000; Folbre, 1994). They are concerned with the broad patterns of behaviour which characterise a particular context or contexts rather than with variations in this behaviour at the household

level. They point to uncertainties in the wider environment, to the costs of transactions in such environments and to the emergence of institutionalised relationships, governed by recognised rules and norms, as a means of bringing about some degree of predictability to different decision-making contexts.

'Households' and other domestic arrangements are seen within such an approach as specific institutional responses to the need for long-term stable relationships within which primarily reproductive activities are organised, where reproduction refers both to daily as well as inter-generational reproduction: meeting basic survival needs of members, bearing and bringing up of children and coping with illness, disability and old age in world characterised by uncertainty (Kabeer, 1994, chapter 5). Households thus engage in 'productive' activities but primarily around a self-provisioning logic.

The stability of relationships within the household reflects principles of kinship and residence. Members of households are related to each other through blood, marriage and adoption and they tend to live with each other over extended periods of time. In addition, the stability of household relationships also reflects powerful ideologies of family and kinship which bind members to each other through sociallysanctioned 'implicit contracts' which spell out and explain their claims and obligations to each other in terms which serve to disguise that these relationships are often highly unequal. These ideologies are not 'invented' by individual households; they are embedded in wider social norms and values and hence exercise an influence that goes beyond (but serves to buttress) the authority of senior individuals within the household (Whitehead, 1981).

Households take diverse forms across the world both because their internal organisations differ considerably and because the wider institutional environment

within which they are located, the structural arrangements embodied in the local economy, community and polity, are also highly differentiated. One important principle of difference relates to gender relations and the extent to which the gender relations prevailing within a particular environment help to promote gender equity or gender discrimination in the way that households make decisions and allocate resources. Indeed, while absolute levels of education across the world closely correlate with levels of economic development, it is impossible to explain observed patterns of gender inequality in education without some reference to pattern of gender relations prevailing in different contexts (Kabeer, 2003). Most societies observe some gender division of labour within the home, with women taking primary responsibility for caring for the family, while men tend to be associated with the work outside the home, often on a paid basis. This division of labour goes some way towards explaining gender inequalities in human capabilities observed in a number of contexts.

However, societies differ considerably in the extent to which women also participate in paid work outside the home: the most marked gender inequalities are generally to found in societies in which women are confined to the home and denied the possibility of participating in work outside the home (Townsend and Momsen, 1987; Kabeer, 2003; Sen, 1990). The restriction of women to the home tends to be associated in such societies with a number of other values and practices which further restrict women's life chances. These include patri-lineal principles of inheritance and descent, where family line and property is transmitted through men; patriarchal structures of authority, where families are organised as tightly knit corporate entities under the control of the senior male who also controls most of the resources of the family; and patri-local systems of marriage which require women to be absorbed into their husbands' families after marriage, distancing them from the support of their natal families. The restrictions on women's

movements in the public domain in such societies reflects the importance attached to the biological paternity of children and the need to control women's sexuality. Denied access to resources of their own and restricted in their ability to provide for themselves, women tend to be regarded as economic dependents in such societies.

Such societies have been - and many continue to be - characterised by marked son preference and discrimination against daughters from the early years of life to the extent that such societies are characterised by excess levels of female to male mortality and higher numbers of men to women in the overall population than is considered 'standard' in the rest of the world (see discussion of regional patterns of patriarchy in Kabeer, 2003a). It is in this sense that they can be described as 'extreme' forms of patriarchy. They are to be found in northern African, the middle-east, Pakistan, much of India and Bangladesh as well as East Asia (China, S. Korea and Taiwan). Gender inequalities in education in such societies are thus just one aspect of a generalised and systematic discrimination against women and girls in such societies.

While other parts of the world are also characterised by a gender division of domestic labour, they do not exercise the same restrictions on women's ability to participate in the wider economy, although they do so at considerable disadvantage, given their prior domestic responsibilities. Thus while gender inequalities exist in these societies, they have not taken the extreme, life-threatening forms noted above.

Differences in gender relations within and outside the household thus reflect society-wide norms, values and practices rather than privately determined choices. To that extent they do not change - or else they change very slowly - in response to

changes in individual or household circumstances. At the same time, the norms, values and practices which shape gender relations are not immutable. Like other aspects of social behaviour, they have shown evidence of change over time.

Some of these changes reflect changes in society at large. Economic growth and demographic transition have been accompanied by a shift in household reproductive strategies from a focus on 'quantity' of family labour to a concern with 'quality', led to greater investments in the health and education of children and reduced gender inequalities in some societies. In others, pro-active policy measures have led to levels of social development, including levels of female education, beyond those generally associated with their levels of per capita income (Ranis et al, 2000 ). However, in yet others, neither growth nor policy has succeeded in wiping out marked gender equalities in educational achievement. Demographic transition in South Asia, for instance, has led to a decline in family size without necessarily wiping out gender inequalities in educational outcomes (Kabeer, 1996). In focusing on south Asia therefore this paper is seeking to understand barriers to education in a region which is the site of some of the most extreme manifestations of patriarchal relations in the world.

The next section sketches out the nature of social relations within the region and broad patterns of gender inequality associated with them. Subsequent sections explore some of the earlier literature seeking to gender inequalities in educational outcomes from a household perspective and then more recent literature which takes account of the changing context of household decision-making in the subcontinent. The paper concludes by drawing out some lessons for policy maker concerned with achieving greater gender equity in this field.

3. Gender inequalities in education in South Asia: patterns of disadvantage

Regional variations in gender inequality in education in South Asia partly mirror regional variations in patriarchy. There is a well-documented 'north south' divide among Indian states such that those in the north-western plains have historically displayed the pattern of extreme discrimination outlined earlier while southern states reported somewhat more egalitarian relations (see Dyson and Moore, 1983; Miller, 1981). This was associated with a divide in other aspects of household behaviour, apart from education: the northern states generally had higher levels of fertility, lower levels of contraceptive use, lower levels of female labour force participation and more marked son preference than states in the south.

This regional pattern confounds the relationship between economic development and gender equality at the 'state' level. Thus Punjab and Haryana in northern India reported the highest state per capita incomes in 1981 as well as some of the lowest sex ratios (around 870 women to 1000 men) while Kerala and Tamil Nadu, both southern states with lower per capita incomes, reported sex ratios of 1032 and 977 respectively. In addition, the relationship between gender equality and poverty is further complicated by caste. Historical evidence shows, and contemporary data confirms, that gender discrimination is particularly marked among the propertied castes in northern India. Thus analysis of 1931 census data on juvenile sex ratios (0-7 age group) by Miller () showed that masculine JSRs were generally higher among the propertied castes in the northern plains of India, and extremely high among their propertied upper castes. In the southern states, on the other hand, the propertied castes either had balanced or female-biased sex ratios while the unpropertied castes had balanced or slightly male-biased ratios. Analysis of more recent data from the 1981 and 1991 census by Agnihotri () confirms the persistence of this pattern, but notes that these has been a 'worsening' of sex ratios both among poorer castes as well as to some of the

southern states over time, suggesting the spread of forms of gender discrimination to groups and areas which had not previously practised them.

As far as the rest of the region is concerned, it has been suggested that Pakistan displays many of the characteristics of the 'northern' pattern while Sri Lanka appeared to have more in common with the southern states (Dyson and Moore, 1983). The mountainous areas of northern India and Nepal are generally more egalitarian than their plains. Bangladesh along with eastern states of India has proved less easy to classify. They have certain characteristics in common with the northern states (Dyson and Moore, 1983) but do not report such markedly adverse sex ratios.

The result of this regional variation in patterns of gender discrimination across South Asia is that, at aggregate levels of analysis, variations in poverty provide only part of the explanation for observed variations in gender inequality in education. For instance, Pakistan with higher per capita GNP than India or Bangladesh nevertheless reports higher levels of gender inequality in education than either (Table 1). Within the Indian context, the earlier 'north-south' divide in girls' education has weakened over time because of the uneven pace of development and variations in policy commitments between different states. What has emerged is a bimodal grouping of states which partly cut across the north-south divide. One group, which consists of Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujerat and Haryana, has performed well on education as well as in achieving greater gender equality in education; they report at least 75 girls to every 100 boys in school in the 5-14 group (Chaudhri, 1997b). Within this group, Punjab and Haryana belong to the 'northern' patriarchal belt. The other group consists of Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Orissa. With the exception of Andhra Pradesh, none of these are southern states.

This group, along with West Bengal, accounts for around 75% of out-of-school children in India. They have also performed poorly in relation to gender equity, with 50 or fewer girls for every 100 boys in school in the 5-14 age group.

The differing educational achievements of these two groups has been explained in terms of the pace of demographic transition , policies adopted with regard to education, their rates of economic growth and implications for labour productivity and their levels of physical and social infra-structural development. These changes can be seen to constitute the wider context in which households make decisions. They will be mediated for the household by the various social relations which determine the household's position in society and which determine the kinds of incentives, constraints and opportunities are represented by these changes and their implications for the claims and obligations of different members. Clearly, changes in educational levels and variations in gender disparity over recent decades need to be understood through such a gender lens. The next section discusses some of the constraints posed by gender relations at the household level to the achievement of gender equality in education at a time when educational levels were generally very low before we go on to consider the effects of changes in economy and policy described above.

Explaining gender inequality in education: normative constraints and livelihood imperatives

Microlevel analysis of gender inequalities in education have helped to explain how some of the structural factors outlined above are experienced from the perspective of individual households. For instance, based on their study of UP, a northern state of India which is characterised by 'exceptional gender inequality', Dreze and Gazdar (1996) spell out how the patriarchal organisation of kinship and

family sets up disincentives to investments in girls' education: 'The gender division of labour, which relegates most adult women (including those with relatively good education) to domestic work, diminishes the perceived 'returns' of investment in female education. The prevailing norm of village exogamy and patrilocal postmarital residence imply that these returns (and other benefits of female education) flow primarily to a daughters' future in-laws ather than to her parents. And marriage transactions may act as a discernible disincentive against female education, given that an educated daughter is expected to marry a more educated man, often implying higher dowry payments. The remarkably backward state of female education in Uttar Pradesh fits in a tight web of mutually-reinforcing gender inequalities and patriarchal practices' (p. 85).

Qualitative evidence based on interviews carried out with middle class fathers in urban UP by Derne (1994) spell out how these constraints were translated into attitudes towards daughters' education. These interviews were carried out in the mid-eighties by which time female education levels had risen among this group, some education was considered desirable in a wife. However, few fathers aspired to give their daughter equal chances of education as their sons. The reasons given for their reluctance varied but touched on some of the factors outlined above: the widely held belief that husbands should be more educated than wives meant that an educated girl would end up paying higher dowry to marry a man more educated than her; fear that education would increase daughters having improper relationships with men which would harm their chances of a good marriage; scepticism that education would prepare daughters for domestic work which was considered their primary responsibilities in the future; and anxiety that 'too much education' might turn out 'independent-minded' daughters who were not as deferential to their husbands and in-laws as they should be.

While these norms, beliefs and behaviours are characteristic of middle and upper castes, particularly in northern India, they are also relevant to the lives of poorer castes because they represent the model of gender propriety to which the latter aspire and which they emulate as they improve their lot, a process referred to as 'sanskritisation'. It is this process of sanskritisation which is believed to explain the gradual worsening of sex ratios among poorer castes across India (Agnihotri, ).

In addition, poorer families are likely to share with better-off families a concern with the sexual safety of girls. This may reflect fears about how girls might be perceived within the community - and hence their future marriage prospects - as much as fears that anything untoward might actually happen. It translates into a reluctance to send girls to school at all or else reluctance to send them to schools which are at some distance from the home or else require them to interact with boys or with male teachers. According to Gupta et al. (1993 cited in Dreze and Gazdar), reluctance to have girls taught by male teachers begins in northern India as early as 7 or 8 years of age; Kabeer (2003b) notes anxieties expressed by parents in Calcutta and Dhaka regarding the threats represented to their daughters' reputations by having to attend schools at some distance from their homes while studies from rural Pakistan identified the absence of primary (female) school within the village posed constraints to girls' schooling more than boys (Khan, 1993; Sathar and Lloyd, 1994; Lloyd et al. 2002). Such fears are also found in southern states of India: parents interviewed by Subrahmanian () for her study in rural Karnataka also testified to their fears about their daughters' reputations; very few girls went to high school outside the village after the onset of puberty. Quantitative analysis by Duraisamy (1992) using data from Tamil Nadu also concluded that a 'one kilometre increase in the distance to primary school reduces the

probability that a daughter attends school by two percent and similar increase in the school attendance reduces boys' school enrolment by only one percent' (p. 21).

Poor and lower caste households also share with other castes and classes a gender division of domestic labour which assigns primarily responsibility for domestic chores to women. However, economic imperatives mean that women from poorer households have always had to labour for a living and cannot observe the same restrictions on their mobility in the public domain as can be observed by other families. As a result (with the exception of a small percentage of highly educated women working in salaried public sector employment) female labour force participations in the south Asian context tends to be associated with poverty in both urban and rural areas (see discussion of literature in Kabeer, 2003a). Indeed, in the Indian context, women from scheduled caste and scheduled tribe households have long been expected to contribute directly to household income. However, they continue to face a segmented labour market so that while men from poorer households have diversified into non-agricultural forms of wage labour as well migrating into towns, women remain largely confined to agricultural wage labour where they earn far lower wages then men (Lipton, 1984 Bardhan, need to find date; Rosenzweig, 1981).

This domestic division of labour, and associated expectations about children's future, differentiate the process of growing up for girls and boys. Young girls are required to take on a variety of unpaid domestic chores and expenditure-saving activities in and around the home from an early age while boys engage in activities which more likely to generate an income. The pressure of domestic work both constrains girls' access to education and their ability to participate when they have been enrolled. An 18 year old women who had passed Class 8 was cited in a study

set in UP asking: 'What's the benefit of being educated? If you study you have to make roti and if you dont study you have to make roti' (Jeffery and Jeffery, 1996, p. 151).

The domestic division of labour also affects the incentives that parents have to educate their children. Given that boys are expected to become the primary breadwinners, and given also that parents expect to be supported by their sons in their old age while their daughters will be absorbed into their husbands' families, the returns to investments in sons' education is likely to be higher. This is captured in a wide-spread saying in the South Asian context: 'caring for the daughter is like watering the neighbour's tree; the fruits go to someone else' (Islam, 1979). Thus the mutual claims and obligations embodied in intergenerational contracts within the family provide, in the first instance, the rationale for differential investments in girls and boys. However, these normative considerations are reinforced by economic ones, namely the lower returns to female labour, relative to male, in the market place.

One result of these various considerations is that labour force participation by men and women has very differentiated implications for boys and girls. While increasing returns to, or higher rates of, male e labour force participation tends to represent an 'income' effect for the household, any changes in the terms and conditions of female labour force participation has to be disaggregated into a 'poverty' effect (female labour force participation tends to be higher in poorer households) and a 'substitution' effect (children, particularly girls, take up domestic chores to release adult women's time for paid work). A number of studies from the 1970s, a period when fertility rates were still high in much of the subcontinent and children's educational generally

low, illustrate the implications of these gender asymmetries in the meaning of school and work for different aspects of household behaviour.

A number of studies pointed to the importance of distinguishing between the effects of household income and wealth in explaining boys' educational outcomes. For instance, one study from Pakistan, using 1979 national data, noted the significance of children's, particularly boys', contribution to family income in poorer households as a factor in explaining their lower levels of participation in school by the children of the poor, particularly in rural areas (Sathar and Kazi, 1987). However, another study (Irfan, 1985) using the same data set found that the size of cropped area had an inverse relationships with male schooling because of its opportunity costs for landed families but had a positive relationship with female education which it interpreted as a 'wealth' effect. Household income, on the other hand, was associated with lower levels of education for both boys and girls. A number of studies from the Indian as well as the Bangladesh context have similarly shown that the ownership of land and productive assets increased, rather than reduced, the demand for childrens labour, particularly the labour of boys (cited in Bhatty, 1998). While these findings draw attention to the importance of household livelihoods in shaping the value, and opportunity costs of children's education, they also help to further qualify the notion that 'child labour, and educational status, are simply reflections of poverty (Bhatty, 1998 p. 734).

Other studies have explored the effects of male and female labour force participation on children within the family. One of these studies, which used 1961 district level data for India (Rosenzweig and Evenson, 1977), found that districts with larger average landholdings and higher land productivity reported higher levels of fertility, higher levels of child labour and lower levels of

children's education but where land was distributed more equally, educational enrolments were higher. Districts with higher male agricultural wages generally reported a reduction in girls' labour force participation rates but also in their enrolment rates. Apparently, fathers from agricultural labour households who earned higher wages preferred to keep their daughters at home. Districts with higher female agricultural wages reported higher levels of education, and lower levels of labour force participation by girls, but no significant effect for boys. Women's educational levels reduced labour force participation by both boys and girls and increased the percentages in school, but this effect did not kick in till women had achieved matriculation, which made them a somewhat exceptional minority. The study concluded that high levels of fertility which characterised India in the 1950s reflected 'the high return to the use of raw labor power of children compared to investments in skills obtained in schools' (0. 1077).

However, while these findings suggested that better paid and better educated women in rural India were more likely to send children, particularly daughters to school, and keep their children out of work, these findings may well have reflected correlations at the district level corresponding to the regional variations in gender relations noted above. As Sen and Dreze (1995) have demonstrated subsequently, many of the correlations between women's labour force and education, on the one hand, and investments in girl children, on the other, are explained by these regional variations.

The confounding effects of regional variations are less of a problem for analysis carried out in particular contexts within the region. One example of this is to be found in Skoufias (1994). He used household-level data collected in the midseventies from villages located in semi-arid regions in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra to explore some of the determinants of children's time allocation

between the market work (waged labour), home (own cultivation, animal husbandry and domestic chores) and school. Children's contributions to the household economy, in the form of both income and labour, were found to be highest in landless and small farm households and declined with increasing land size. The reverse relationship held for education. In addition, girls in landless households were more likely to be employed as wage labour than boys who were more likely to be employed in cultivation and animal husbandry. However, domestic tasks were more often carried out by girls than boys.. In addition, boys spent more time in school than girls for all land-owning categories.

Regression analysis provided the following findings:

a)

Compared to landowning households, landless households were least likely

to have daughters at school and most likely to have both sons and daughters at market work, and sons in home-based activities b) lower castes were less likely than other castes to have children,

particularly daughters, at school. They were more likely to have both sons and daughters in home-based activities and daughters in market based work. c) Adult male wages were positively associated with the likelihood of girls

going to school and negatively associated with boys working in the market. They were also associated with both boys and girls spending more time in school. d) Adult female wages were positively associated with the likelihood of boys

participating in market work and increasing the amount of time in home production and negatively associated with the amount of time that boys and girls spent in school. In addition, for those girls who were already working in the market, an increase in adult women's wages led to a decline in time spent in both leisure and market based work, presumably to take up more domestic work.

In addition there was one other finding which is relevant to this discussion, although it is not discussed by Skoufias. It relates the effects of timely and adequate rainfall in the planting season, critical for successful cropping in the semi-arid context of the study. As Jacoby and Skoufias (1997) have shown through analysis using the same data set, variations in village-level rainfall led to variations in child labour, and thereby the school attendance of children. However this effect was more marked in smaller farm households than ones and least marked in the village with the most assured rainfall and the most developed financial markets. The findings reported in Skoufias () suggest that this 'self-insurance' role was played by both boys and girls. There was a strong negative association between amount of rainfall reported and the likelihood of girls taking up waged work and a somewhat weaker negative association with boys taking up home-based activities. In other words, it would appear that the waged labour of girls played an important role in helping households cope with shortfalls in income.

One other study which used 1977-78 household data from urban areas of West Bengal provided some direct evidence of the way in which labour force participation of adult women was conditioned by the domestic division of labour (Bardhan, date needed). Female labour force participation rates were found to be higher among very poor and lower caste households as well as among women with middle and higher levels of education (who worked in salaried employment). In addition, it was positively correlated with the number of children, mainly girls, doing domestic chores within the household and negatively correlated with large number of (very old or very young) dependents.

To sum up, therefore, it was evident from this early literature that changes in wages or labour force participation rates would have gender differentiated

implications for children because of differences in the meaning of paid work for men and women. Male labour force participation is relatively invariant in relation to caste, class religion or region and increases in its rate or returns had an unequivocal 'income' effect, leading to increased school attendance for both boys and girls. Female labour force participation varies a great deal more and is particularly closely associated with household poverty. Increases in rates of female labour force participation or returns to it therefore had a more complicated set of effects, combining both 'poverty' and substitution effects. As a result, a rise in female labour force participation or wages often led to a decline in children's education and in many cases, a rise in their labour contributions at home or in the market place.

Transforming inequalities: changing preferences and practices

Recent decades have seen important changes across the South Asian region, including declining rates of fertility, rising levels of education, spread of agricultural technology, economic growth, infrastructural development and the adoption of various policies with implications for educational outcomes. We would therefore expect to find a different set of factors operating at household and a different set of behavioural outcomes, including behaviour relating to children's education. In this section, we explore what more recent studies using data collected in the 1990s tell us about the determinants of educational investments at the household level in a period of rising education and their implications for both change and continuity in patterns of gender disparity in education.

A recent study by Duraisami () used 1994 household survey data from villages in 16 major states of India to explore some of these issues. Dummy variables for

the different states allowed the analysis to control for the effects of regional patriarchies. As far as patterns of educational outcomes were concerned, the study found that a higher % of boys than girls were currently enrolled in school, a slightly higher percentage of boys were reported to be working but a significantly higher proportion of girls than boys were classified as 'nowhere children'. Higher income households were more likely to send both boys and girls to school, and report lower levels of child labour. Scheduled caste/tribal households and Muslim households reported lower levels of enrolment for both boys and girls, and a higher likelihood of girls working, than other castes/ religions.

As far as gender disparities in education were concerned, these reflected a number of factors. One was religion: Muslim households, and to a lesser extent, Hindu families were likely to report lower probabilities of sending girls to school relative to boys than other religions. A second was level of infrastructural development. Electricity within a village helped to reduce gender disparity because of its strong positive impact on girls' schooling. However the presence of primary and middle schools within the village increased the likelihood of boys' enrolment relative to girls.

Parents education also had a positive, significant but gender-differentiated impact; fathers' education had a stronger positive effect on the likelihood of boys' enrolment (and negative effect on their work participation) than girls. By contrast, mothers' education at every level had a more powerful effect on girls' education than boys. It also reduced the likelihood of girls' labour force participation to a much greater extent than boys'. Finally, the state dummy variables proved important for predicting gender disparities: Kerala has long been associated with higher levels of education, and greater gender equity, than

other states (Maharashtra is used as the reference state) but Himachal Pradesh, one of the mountainous states in northern India, had emerged by the 1990s as a leading performer on both counts. The greatest inequalities continue to be found in some of the northern states, including UP, Harayana and Rajasthan.

Bhat (2002) used the same data set to provide further insights into the role played by parents' education in the 'quantity' to 'quality' transition in India. He notes the significant association between women's education and fertility decline in India, but notes that the scale of the fertility decline could not be explained by female education alone. In fact, it was declining rates of fertility among illiterate women that gave momentum to later stages of demographic transition. His analysis explores the determinants of fertility decline among illiterate women and their implications for investments in children's education. Focusing on the sub-sample of illiterate women in the national data set (likely to be poorer on average), and carrying out separate estimates for first order and higher order sons and daughters, Bhat reports the following findings:

Amount of land, and amount of irrigated land, generally increases

likelihood of children's education.

family size reduces the likelihood of school attendance for both boys and

girls but to a greater extent for the first born and for girls: it is likely that the oldest child is either required to supplement the family income or, particularly for girls, look after younger siblings. It also reduced educational attainment for girls. women who reported contraceptive use also reported higher likelihood of

school attendance by all their children. This may have reflected an attitudinal difference - women who use contraception are likely to be predisposed towards

education - or it may have had a causal relationship, with control exercised over reproduction in order to afford investment in education.

the negative effect of mothers' work on daughters' education noted in

other studies is confined here only to mothers in waged work rather than other forms of paid work, and only to first born daughters. This suggests that the substitution effect does operate but that it is strongly linked to poverty: women working as wage labourers are least able to afford to hire others to take over their domestic work and must rely on their daughters.

While Muslims, and scheduled caste/scheduled tribe groups sent fewer

of their children to school than caste Hindus, it is worth noting that the difference between them were larger for boys than girls, indicative of greater gender discrimination among caste Hindus.

Beyond the household, the presence of a bus stop in the village and an index measuring its overall level of development exercised a positive effect on children's school attendance and educational attainment, with a larger and more consistent effect for girls than boys. And finally, as we would expect, households located in the 'north' (UP, Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh) reported lower overall, and much lower female, school attendance than households elsewhere.

A 1990 study exploring the implications of the adoption of the Green Revolution technology for farming households in rural West Bengal found that size of landholding had little effect on the likelihood of children's enrolment (Mukhopadhyay, 1994). However, wages and education did. For a given level of male and female wages, parents' education induced higher likelihood of

education for both boys and girls, with fathers' education having a larger effect on girls education: indeed, even in areas with poor and average levels of schooling, parents' schooling had a strong positive effect on their schooling of their children - boys as well as girls. However, while higher wages for women as well as men lead to a greater investment in boys' education, they have a negative but statistically insignificant effect on girls' schooling.

Using the same data set, Kambhampathi and Pal (2001) confirm that both boys and girls are more likely to attend school of the household head is literate; mothers' literacy, however, has a significant and positive effect for girls enrolment only and it also increased their attainment levels. Per capita income increases enrolment as well as educational attainment for both boys and girls while children from households which relied on agricultural wage earnings were less likely to go to school. While boys as well as girls from higher caste households were more likely to be enrolled than children from lower caste or Muslim households, higher caste status led to lower levels of attainment among girls, but not boys, who had been enrolled. Girls, but not boys, from femaleheaded households are less likely to go to school. Finally, girls had a greater likelihood of enrolment in villages which had good communications with the outside world (railway station, pucca road or market centres).

Dreze and Kingdon (2001)report on an analysis of household data from four states in India characterised by poor schooling performance: Bihar, Rajasthan, UP and Madhya Pradesh. Three sets of variables were used to explore

educational enrolment and attainment: household, school and village. They found household characteristics explained more of the variation in educational outcomes than the other two categories. In general, children (particularly girls)

from households which were 'consumer asset rich' were more likely to be enrolled in school; ownership of land and livestock tended to depress girls' enrolment, but not significantly so. However, households with many young children had significantly lower levels of girls' education.

The fathers' education levels significantly increased both boys, and even more strongly, girls' education while the effect of mothers' education, while positive for both, was larger (even than father's education ) and statistically significant for girls. Religion had no significant effect but scheduled and other backward castes had lower levels of enrolment than other castes, particular among girls. Finally, an indicator of favourable parental attitudes to girls education was found to significantly increase the chances of enrolment for girls, but also for boys.

The school-related variables performed better in explaining variations in girls' enrolment. In particular, whether or not the school provided a mid-day meal, whether or not the building was water-proof, the number of classrooms per 100 children and child to teacher ratio all proved significantly associated with higher girls' enrolment. These were variables which related to the quality and costs of schooling.

Village level variables also had more relevance to the explanation of girls' enrolment than boys. It was found to be higher in villages with higher levels of development (whether village had electricity; post-office; piped water; phone) as well as villages with women's associations. Given that village development index proved much stronger for girls than boys suggests that it was measuring norms and attitudes within the community rather than returns to investments in children's education. The association variable, of course, could reflect a

reverse causation viz. such associations are more likely to occur in villages with higher levels of female education. However, there does appear to be an aspect of 'associational behaviour' among women which signifies different, or else changing, attitudes. Membership of women's associations proved to be important in the Calcutta study (Kabeer, 2003) cited earlier, when controls had been introduced for both women's education as well as for neighbourhoods. A similar set of variables explained variations in educational attainment (highest grade achieved by the child) of girls

A somewhat different approach is taken by Kingdon (2002)who used a purposively designed survey of households in urban UP carried out in 1995 to explore the determinants of the gender gap in education enrolment and attainment for adults aged 23-45 years. While the rise in female enrolment and attainment relative to men in recent years was evident from a comparison of the gap for different cohorts, it remains significant. However, the gap in attainment was considerably reduced if it was calculated only for those who had enrolled.

The study found being a Muslim and lower caste had a powerful negative effect on the enrolment rates of both boys and girls. Kingdon suggests that this is not simply a reflection of differing 'preferences' but also indicative of the lower returns to the labour of members of groups that are socially discriminated against, an interpretation that is supported by qualitative analysis of parents motivations in Calcutta (Kabeer, 2003) as well as by Muzammil (1994, cited in Kingdon). In addition, the study found that parents education played an important role in increasing the likelihood of female, but not male, enrolment and that the parental effect in the case of mothers' education than fathers'. Finally, women whose mothers had 'ever worked' in the labour market were less

likely to have been enrolled in school. Although the study has no data on the time spent in domestic activities by the respondents when they were children, an analysis of the sub-set of households where there children (6-16) present showed that in households where mothers worked, the time spent by girls on domestic chores increased by 50% compared to an increase of 17% among boys.

However, relationship could also reflect the poverty effect we noted earlier, suggesting that the respondents whose mothers had worked were likely to have come from poorer backgrounds than those whose mothers had not: in as much as the female labour force participation in India was, and continues to be, associated with economic hardship, the result could reflect 'not so much the educational costs of a working mother but rather, the educational cost of poverty that falls disproportionately on daughters' (Kingdon, p. 36).

Gender differences in educational attainment were also found to be significant. As far as social status was concerned, being a Muslim affected male educational attainment more than female so that Muslim men tend to be far less educated than non-Muslim men. However being a member of lower castes affected female attainment more, suggesting that lower caste women may face greater discrimination in the labour market than men, a possibility that is supported by findings reported elsewhere in Kingdon (1998). Parental wealth was important in explaining variations in both male and female attainment, but had a stronger effect for female. Mothers' education is more important for girls than for boy while fathers' education is important for both. The sons, but not the daughters, of working mothers appeared to have attained lower levels of education than those of non-working mothers. The poverty effect captured by female labour force participation thus appeared to work differently for sons and daughters. Favourable parental attitudes towards gender equality in

education resulted in higher educational attainment for girls, but not for boys. An attempt to estimate how much of the difference in educational attainment could be explained by the variables included in the study suggested that 25% could be explained by girls' attributes. The remaining 75% was likely to reflect unobserved factors, such as son preference, or differential returns to girls' schooling relative to boys.

Studies from Pakistan where gender disparities remain higher than elsewhere in the subcontinent provide similar insights in the causes of disparities. Using the 1991 Integrated Household Survey for Pakistan, Sathar and Lloyd (1994) report that the most consistently important determinant of whether or not a child ever attends school in Pakistan were parents' education and household income. Mother's schooling in particular has a statistically significant effect in increasing the probability of school enrolment for both sexes and in urban and rural areas. Moreover, it has a stronger effect that fathers' education and larger effect on the enrolment of girls than boys, particularly in rural areas where 'the predicted proportion of girls enrolled whose mothers are educated are more than twice the proportion of those whose mothers never attended school (81 versus 38 percent)' Sathar and Lloyd, p. 120. Mother's education was also important for completion of primary school, with the largest effects occurring for girls in rural areas as was proximity to a primary school. Father's education education was less important. The quality and accessibility of female schools was another statistically significant determinant of girls' enrolment, particularly in rural areas, but is less important in urban areas.

Other studies from Pakistan echoed many of these findings. A study by Holme (2002) using 1991 household survey data found that parental education was significant determinant of children's schooling, with mothers' education exerting a

larger influence on girls' education and fathers' education on boys'. Lack of sewage disposal within the community adversely affected children's schooling with a stronger effect on boys' education. Another study (Lloyd et al, 2002) noted that most rural children went to public primary schools as private schools had, till recently, been a primarily urban phenomenon. Rising levels of enrolment in private schools reflected rising levels of consumption suggesting it is still restricted to more affluent families. The study suggested that mothers' primary or higher education significantly increased the likelihood of girls' primary enrolment rates but had little effect on boys whose rates are in any case high Lloyd et al (2002).

In addition, the study found that girls' enrolment in rural Pakistan was highly responsive to the presence of an all girls public school in the village. The presence of a private school made less difference, particularly in villages where there was already a public school. Girls enrolment were also responsive to certain aspects of educational quality: some minimum level of infrastructure, regular presence of teachers, ability to give students attention. Finally levels of community development (paved road or street; public transport; electricity; telephone; natural gas; sewerage) had a robust positive impact on the primary school enrolment of both boys and girls. Finally, studies from Pakistan point to a regional dimension within the country in the distribution of gender disparities in education, with higher levels of disparity in the North West Frontier Province than Punjab (Lloyd et al. 2002).

Analysis from Bangladesh supports the point made earlier concerning the importance of distinguishing between income and different kinds of wealth in explanations of children's education. For instance, 21% of households covered by the 1995 national sample survey on child labour in Bangladesh reported at least one working child with little variation by landholding: 28% of households with more than four acres of land reported at least one working child compared to 31% of

those with less than 1 acre while landless households were least likely to report a working child. A study by Ravallion and Wodon (1999), using the Bangladesh Household Expenditure Survey 1995-96, also found that land ownership was positively associated with the incidence of labour among male (but not female) children. A study of two districts in rural Bangladesh by Ridao-Cano also found that the likelihood of children working rather than going to school was higher (controlling for a number of factors) in households that cultivated some land. However, children were more likely to go to school in households which cultivated irrigated land.

Analysis from Bangladesh also provides support for the importance of female education as a factor in explaining children's education. Using micro-level data sets from a number of different countries, including national data from Pakistan and a rural district in Bangladesh, Montgomery et al. (1999) explore some of the determinants of fertility and children's education, including parents' education, household wealth and size and age of mother. They find that in both countries, women's schooling appears to be a driving factor behind the quantity-quality tradeoff: it is significantly associated with a decline in numbers of children ever born and a rise in children's years of schooling. In both countries, the effect is stronger for women who had completed primary education or more. In both countries, the effects of father's education on family size only becomes significant with the completion of primary education and in both countries, its effects on children's years of schooling is smaller than that of mothers' education. Although the study does not estimate educational attainment for girls and boys separately, the dummy variable for child's sex included in the analysis confirms that the gender gap in years of schooling is much lower in Bangladesh than

Pakistan. Clearly, women's education is likely to have played a role in closing this gap.

The study by Ridao Cano cited earlier also found that the education of both mother and father increased child schooling, but that the effect of mother's education was statistically higher than that of father's; it was also significantly more likely to reduce child work. Unfortunately, it does not disaggregate this effect by gender. On the other hand, analysis of rural data from the Household Expenditure Survey (1995-96) by Ravallion and Wodon which did disaggregate the effects of parents' education by gender of the child found that while increases in both parents' education reduced the likelihood of children working and increased the likelihood of them going to school, fathers' education had larger effects than mothers' for both results. Nor was it evident that mothers' education led to a stronger coefficient for girls' schooling than boys.

The study by Ridao Cano found that the number of adult males in a household increased school attendance, and decreased likelihood of work, among children (Ridao-Cano) but the gender disaggregation of this effect suggested that it affected boys more than girls (Ravallion and Wodon). On the other hand, female-headed households reduced the likelihood of girls' schooling (Ravallion and Wodon). These are likely to represent income effects as, holding assets constant, households with more adult males report higher levels of income while female-headed households are systematically poorer in Bangladesh. The study by Ridao-Cano draws attention to micro-credit programmes as a new influence in explanations for rising levels of children's education. It documents the impact of access to loans on both child labour and education and suggests that the impact is larger and more significant in the case of loans to women: 'a 10% increase in female credit increases the probability of a child going to school

by 11% (conditional on working) and 10% (conditional on not working), whereas it decreases the probability of full time work by 10%' (p. 35). The statistically significant effect of shocks in reducing the likelihood of children's schooling, confirming the point made earlier about the use of children time as a means of coping with fluctuations in income. In as much as access to loans help to tide household through crisis, this suggests one route by which access to loans might promote children's education. However, the greater effect associated with loans to women suggests that gender differentials in priorities may also be at work. While the study does not disaggregate the educational variables by gender, data from other studies in Bangladesh suggest that loans to women does contribute to closing the gender gap in education (Kabeer,1998; Pitt and Khandker, 1995 cited in World Bank, 1995).

The other major factor which helps to explain both rising rates of enrolment but also the closing of the gender gap that has accompanied it is the introduction of a number of schooling incentive programmes in Bangladesh. One is the Food-for-Education programme begun in 1993 and extended to 27% of primary schools in Bangladesh by 2000. This provides poor households whose children attend school for at least 85% of the classes with 15-20 kilograms of grain a month. An evaluation of the programme in 2000 by IFPRI found a) school enrolment in FFS schools had increased 35% after the introduction of the programme, with enrolment rates for girls much higher (at 44%) than for boys: 28%. Enrolment in schools not participating in the programme had increased by a mere 7%. Overall attendance in program-assisted schools was 71% compared to 58% in other schools. The study by Ravallion and Wodon found that the FFE stipend had a significant negative effect on children's labour force participation and a significant positive effect on their schooling. However, once other

household and individual characteristics, the gender difference in the effect of the stipend had become negligible. In addition, the study also found that the displacement of child labour is smaller than the gain in schooling: at the sample mean, an additional 100 kilogram of rice received by a household increased the probability of boys and girls going to school by about 0.17 but reduced the incidence of work for boys by 0.04 and girls by 0.02. In other words, a significant proportion of children are increasing their time into school by reducing leisure rather than work

A study by Arends-Kuenning and Amin (2000) explores the effects of a number of different schooling incentive programmes (the FFE programme; scholarships for girls in secondary schooling; and the presence of a BRAC school) in two villages in northern Bangladesh in 1992 and 1995. It found that while children had increased the amount of time they spent in school with the introduction of these programmes, the overall amount of time spent was low, even for those who attended on a regular basis. It also found that parents were now delaying the age of marriage of daughters in the 11-19 age group in response to the scholarship programme for girls. The higher incentives for secondary education for girls may also encourage parents to ensure their daughters complete primary education.

Interpreting the evidence:

We have not been able to find the kind of longitudinal study that would allow us to establish the factors behind the observed rise in children's education over the past 25 years or so and behind the continuities and changes in the gender gap which accompanied this change. However, a comparison of studies carried out in an an era when levels of children's education were extremely low with

those carried out in the current period when educational levels have rise does provide us with various elements of the explanation. They tell us, first of all, that while there is no necessary reason why the decline in fertility rates in a society should be accompanied by a rise in education levels, what has been called the 'quantity-quality' transition, the evidence from South Asia suggests that this has in fact occurred, although at a geographically and socially uneven pace. Thus explanations for the uneven pace of increase in children's education, and for variations in gender disparities in education, are partly bound up with the uneven pace of demographic transition across the subcontinent.

And secondly, these studies tell us that it is not possible to explain behaviour within the family, including various forms of discrimination against women and girls, without paying attention to the structure of gender relations within the region which also varies geographically and by socio-economic strata. These relationships organise the gender division of labour within and outside the family; spell out the claims and obligations of different members of the family to each other; provide varying degrees of social recognition to the roles that they play; and consequently help to construct the structure of constraints and incentives within which decisions about investments in children's education are made.

The recent evidence tells us that, despite the rise in education for both boys and girls, these structures remain intact, differentiating outcomes across regions ('north' and 'south'), class, religion and caste. However, given the rapid gains made by Bangladesh in closing the gender gap in education in recent decades, given also the positive association between landholding and irrigation on children's education in general, combined with some evidence of gender discrimination in educational outcomes among caste Hindus, it is likely that caste

factors may be more resilient in the face of wider socio-economic change than religion or class.

However, within the parameters embodied by these social relations, a number of factors help to explain the varying pace of educational progress in general and progress in terms of gender equity in particular. Indeed, one of the conclusions we can draw from our discussion of the literature is that there is far less variation in boys' education compared to girls' and what there is can generally be explained by households' social and economic status. By contrast, there is considerable variation in girls' education so that a greater number of variables play a role in explaining parents' decisions to send girls to school. These variables provide the basis on which policies for improving gender equity have to be built.

Some of these variables operate at the level of the household: caste status, land holdings, income levels. Women's access to various kinds of resources also emerges as an important explanatory variable, supporting the idea that where there are competing preferences within the household, access to resources helps to influence whose preferences are reflected in the final outcome. Certainly, qualitative evidence from recent studies suggests that women favour education for their daughters, often more strongly than men, for a variety of reasons related to marriage, motherhood and work but also for the very reasons that the middle class fathers interviewed by Derne expressed caution about educating their daughters, that they would become more independent, less willing to submit to what life had in store for them (Kabeer, 1998 and 2000; the PROBE Team, 1999).

It is also significant that a study by CINI-ASHA, an NGO seeking to reduce child labour in Calcutta's slums by promoting childrens access to school, found that mothers were generally easier to persuade to send children, of which 68% in the study were girls, to school than fathers and generally more willing to make the necessary sacrifices for this to happen, working long hours in paid work (CINIASHA, 2003). Fathers were more likely to express disapproval of children's education.

Women's access to resources when there are competing priorities within the household gives them a greater chance to implement their own priorities. However, not all forms of access have the same effects. Waged employment for women, for instance, is generally associated with lower levels of education of girls, most often the oldest girl who substitutes for her mother in the domestic division of labour. We have suggested that this represents the interaction between a 'poverty' effect (female waged employment is generally associated with household poverty) and a 'substitution' effect (daughters are the closest substitutes for their mothers in domestic work in households which cannot afford to hire in such a substitute). In addition, and regardless of women's work status, the number of siblings or size of the dependency ratio also depressed educational levels among girls, either because it represented a higher domestic workload or because parents with large numbers of children invested in the 'quality' of sons at the expense of daughters.

One area where women's access to resources appeared to have a positive effect on girls' education was in the area of micro-credit. Studies suggest that the provision of loans to women has a stronger effect on promoting children's education, particularly girls' education, and reducing child labour than loans to men. Microcredit is generally associated with self-employment opportunities for women

and hence less likely to imply a substitution effect. It may also reflect increased bargaining power among women. In addition, however, the effect may also reflect the fact that women generally gain access to micro-credit in the Bangladesh context (as well as the Indian) as members of 'groups' formed specifically for this purpose. There is likely to be an independent 'group effect' which reflects some combination of exposure to new norms, greater willingness to adopt new forms of behaviour and so on particularly as many NGOs also promote gender equity agendas. This may also explain the 'associational effect' on children's education reported by Dreze and Kingdon () and Kabeer (2003b).

Parental education, and more consistently, maternal education was the other resource which appeared to promote either higher levels of education for both boys and girls or higher levels of girls' education. The explanation once again may

reflect the greater influence exercised by more educated women: certainly studies from the south Asian context and elsewhere do find a positive correlation between women's education and decision-making role within the household (Kabeer, 1993 for overview of this literature). In addition, it may also reflect attitudinal differences associated with education in that, controlling for other factors, educated women are less likely to practice gender discrimination than illiterate women. Some support for this in relation to the gender differentials in child survival comes for Dreze and Sen (1995) who reported that, controlling for regional factors, districts with higher levels of female literacy also reported lower gender differentials.

These are all factors that operate mainly at the household level. There were also factors beyond the household which proved important in explaining variations in gender disparities in education. Some of these related to the schooling system. In certain contexts, it was a question of simple access, the availability of a primary or

middle level school within the village. In areas with strong norms of female seclusion, the presence of a female school or female teachers within the school increased the likelihood of girls' enrolment. In Pakistan, where schools are segregated even at the primary level, 21% of girls were found not to have a school within a kilometre of their residence compared to 9% of boys. Yet 'distance to school' made a measurable difference to the willingness of parents to send girls to school but made no difference to their decisions about boys' schooling.

Other aspects of the schooling system also mattered but more equally for boys and girls: the frequency and quality of contact with teachers, the infrastructure of the building, no. of class rooms etc. In addition, the discussion in this paper also touched on various examples of explicitly school-based interventions aimed at altering the incentive structure around education, particularly girls' education. The food-for-work programme and the secondary school scholarships for girls in Bangladesh, and the mid-day meal scheme in India, are all examples of programmes which sought to defray the costs of schooling for parents and were associated with positive impacts for girls' education.

However, there has been a decline in quality of education in Bangladesh (IFPRI, ) as a result of the increasing numbers of children entering an formal educational infrastructure which had not changed rapidly enough to keep pace. Simple tests to assess the basic competencies imparted by school found that children in formal schools did not perform as well as those in non-formal schools, most of which were run by BRAC (Chowdhury, 2003). These various findings point to some of the limitations which hinder the achievement of gender equity in education. Expanding quality along with access is clearly critical to achieve greater school attendance and translating attendance into educational achievement.

Finally, the analysis draws attention to certain community level variables which can be seen as the local level manifestations of some of the changes in the wider context in which households decisions about children's education are being taken in the current era. It was evident that education levels were higher, and gender disparities lower, in villages which had higher levels of infrastructural development and were better served by transport and communications. The lower levels of gender disparity in such areas could reflect a number of intersecting factors.

First of all, such areas are likely to be characterised by a greater availability of employment opportunities for women with education. Proximity to the market did feature explicitly in one study as a factor favouring girls' education. It is also worth noting changes in the returns to female education suggested by two studies from West Bengal. The study by Bardhan based on data from the late seventies showed lower returns to female relative to male labour in every occupation and for every level of education (Bardhan, ). The study by Mukhopadhyay (1994) over a decade later found that, while among women and men from farming households who worked in the agricultural labour force, women continued to have fewer years of education than men (1.52 compared to 3.95), returns to a year of schooling in agricultural wage labour was higher for women than men ( wage gain of 4% compared to 2). This suggests some tightening in the labour market for educated women relative to men which could have been due to a number of factors.

As Quisumbing suggests (1995),it could have reflected an increase in the demand for female labour, particularly skilled labour, generated by adoption of the Green Revolution technology; it should be noted that female agricultural wages relative to male went up throughout India during this period. It could also have reflected the

expansion of public sector employment which also took place during this period throughout India. While such employment mainly benefited women, the withdrawal of women from the agricultural labour force with increases in their level of education, suggests that may have also benefited and there were fewer of them.

A second set of reasons why more developed villages performed better in terms of gender equity in education relate to the greater 'social-connectedness' associated with greater physical connectedness. There is likely to be greater openness to new ideas which destabilise old norms and greater ease of movement in the public domain. Electricity implies dissemination of ideas through radios and television; streets that are lit in the dark; the ability to combine domestic chores with study later into the evening. Roads and bus stops imply other forms of connections to the wider economy and society and greater ease of travel, particularly for girls who were otherwise be kept at home. It is worth noting that an evaluation of public works programmes in Bangladesh found that building of all-weather roads increased the use of roads for educational purposes by girls by 58% compared to just 15% by boys. Also relevant to our argument is the finding reported in a tudy by Rahman and Rao (2002) based on data from UP and Karnataka which found greater mobility by women in the public domain in villages that had better quality approach roads, were close to a bus station or a town and had electric street lighting.

Finally, it is worth noting some of the factors that have been put forward to explain the educational revolution in Himachal Pradesh which has gone from having rates of literacy less than the national average in the early 1960s to rates that place it second only to Keral and Goa. And as we noted, these

revolution has included girls as well as boys. The PROBE report ()puts forward a number of inter-related explanations:

as one of the mountainous states of northern India, Himachal Pradesh

does not display the extreme forms of gender discrimination to be found in its north-western plains Improving prospects at work was as important a consideration for

educating daughters as improving prospects of marriage Development planning in HP has included a consistent emphasis on

developing rural infrastructure including roads and schools. Its level of per capita expenditure on education is twice the Indian average and its teacher student ratio is correspondingly higher than the rest of India. It has undertaken explicit policies to reduce disparities within the state,

investing heavily in more remote areas and using incentive schemes to iron out socio-economic disparities in education.

It would appear from this that the educational revolution in Himachal Pradesh incorporates many of the factors which have contributed to higher levels of education, and lower levels of gender disparity, in the rest of the sub-continent and which have been touched on at various points in this paper.

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Programs - Canadian Partnership Programs - Voluntary Sector - Examples of Gender Equality Results Statements Examples of Gender Equality Results Statements Corporate results 1. Decision making More equal participation of women with men as decision makers in shaping the sustainable development of their societies. Elements of this result Illustrations of the types of results that would fall into each category (i.e., illustrations of the way in which a project or other investment could contribute to particular gender equality results) Strengthened knowledge or skills (e.g., advocacy, negotiation, management) of women for participation in democratic or community-management bodies. Increased capacity or effectiveness of womens organizations to advocate for and represent

1.1 Capacity for public participation Increased capacity of women and womens organizations for advocacy and for participation in public and decision making.

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1.2 Representation among decision makers Increased representation of women in democratic processes and in decision-making positions in the partner institution, target sector, partner community.

1.3 Household and individual decision making More equal power relations between women and men at the household level; increased decisionmaking capacity of individual women.

womens views. Strengthened womens organizations or networks. Strengthened dialogue between womens organizations and government authorities. More-supportive environment for womens participation in public life and decision making in communities or institutions and among male colleagues. Increased influence of women, womens organizations in community and public decision making. Increased number/proportion of women in decisionmaking positions in (depending on the project objectives): the partner organization (not the project itself); the target sector; the partner community; and as candidates for public office. Increase in independent decision making by women on matters such as voting, mobility. Increase in shared decision making at the household level on matters such as expenditure, activities,

etc. 2. Rights 2.1 Legal system Increased use of the Women and Strengthened Convention on the girls promotion and Elimination of All Forms more able to protection of the of Discrimination against realize their full human rights of girls Women (CEDAW) in human rights. and women in law national law. and the actions of Formulation of police, legislation on key gender prosecutors, judges equality issues (e.g. land and courts. rights, violence, discrimination in employment). Elimination of legal barriers to equality (through specific legislation or as part of legal reform). Actors in legal system (police, prosecutors, judges) more knowledgeable and able to treat women equitably. Improved access by women to the legal system (legal aid, reduction of barriers to access). More equitable decision making in formal and informal judicial bodies. 2.2 Public Increased awareness awareness of rights violations, such Increased knowledge as trafficking of women and recognition by and girls, forced the general public marriage, dowry, early (women and men) marriage, female genital and decision makers mutilation. of the human rights of Increased awareness women and girls. and participation by civil society organizations (e.g., human rights organizations, development

organizations) in advocating for gender equality and womens rights. Awareness among women and men of laws and mechanisms protecting womens rights; increased participation by men in advocacy and debate on gender equality. Increased awareness and support among decision makers on womens rights and gender equality issues; more informed debate on these issues. Better media coverage of gender equality and womens rights changes in public attitudes about roles and entitlements of women and men. 2.3 Response to Improved provision or gender-specific functioning of social rights violations services (e.g. shelters) Improved services responding to rights and mechanisms violations by government responding to or civil society gender-specific organizations. constraints on rights Strengthened policy or rights violations commitments and (e.g., violence against programs to respond to women/girls, gender-specific trafficking of women constraints on rights, and girls, sexual rights violations. violence in conflict zones). 3. 3.1 Livelihoods and Increased access to Development productive assets credit and business resources Increased access and support services. and benefits control by women Increased number or

Reduced over productive competitiveness or inequalities assets (land, sustainability of womens between capital/credit, microenterprises, women technology, skills) businesses, farms. and men in and increased access More equitable access to and to decent work. access by women to control over productivity-enhancing the resources inputs and services and benefits of (extension, skills training, development. technology). Strengthened womens producer organizations. More equitable access by women to land, land ownership. Increased productivity or incomes of women, decreased disparity in incomes among populations affected by an investment; decreased vulnerability to destitution. Increased access by women to skills training, employment opportunities; increased representation of women in professional, technical fields. Reduced discriminatory practices against women workers; increased quality of employment (e.g. pay, conditions, health and safety). 3.2 Institutional Clearer institutional capacity responsibilities, Increased capacity of approaches to achieving partner institutions, national gender equality governments, and objectives. civil society Strengthened analytic organizations to skills, knowledge of design and gender equality issues,

implement policies, programs, and projects that reflect the priorities and interests of both women and men.

capacity to do gender analysis in a particular sector or public organization. Strengthened capacity and systems to collect and analyze data required for gender analysis of issues, policies and programs. Increased institutional capacity to consult with women and men on issues and priorities or on gender equality issues. Increased capacity to manage for employment equity (recruitment, training, health and safety, family leave). Increased effectiveness of partner organizations or local governments in reaching and serving women equitably. 3.3 Policy change Economic policies: Adoption of policies gender-equitable supporting gender macroeconomic policies equality by (e.g. fiscal policies, trade, institutions that budgets). manage development Poverty reduction resources and strategies: inclusion of benefits (i.e. policies measures directing responding to the resources to poor women different priorities and or measures to address interests of women/ the gender-specific men, girls/boys). constraints faced by poor women. Social policies: policies in health, education, social services, and other sectors that incorporate elements to reduce gender inequality or address women-specific

issues. Sectoral reforms: establishment of clear sectoral gender equality objectives, sector-wide implementation mechanisms. 3.4 Well-being and Increased safety, food basic needs security, access to water, Access by women to shelter, transport, basic and literacy, health, appropriate services education, etc. by that support wellwomen. being and quality of Increased access to life. social services; social service delivery that responds to the different priorities and interests of women/men, boys/girls. Increased capacity of womens organizations to deliver services. Health: increased appropriateness and use of health care; improved health status of women or reduced gender gaps in health status indicators among population served/reached. Education: increased proportion of girls/women at all levels; decreased dropout rates. Humanitarian services: access by women to appropriate services and resources. If you have comments or questions on this page prepared by Canadian Partnership Branch, send an e-mail. Last Updated: 2006-06-15 Important Notices