Contents Acknowledgments 4 Executive Summary 5


Gender Norms and Women’s Labor Force Participation



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4.3 Gender Norms and Women’s Labor Force Participation


  1. Social institutions also determine whether women’s increased independent incomes translate into greater bargaining power within households. In India, the ability of women to use their earnings to influence household decisions depends on their social background; those with weaker links to their natal communities were more able to reap the benefits of their own earned income than those still enmeshed in local societal constraints (Luke and Munshi 2011; World Bank 2011e). Still, it remains important to recognize that women’s economic participation is not a silver bullet in achieving gender equality. Recent household surveys in Afghanistan and Pakistan suggest that in households with rising household incomes (that is, rising above the lowest income levels), women’s participation in income-earning activities actually decreases.46 This is due to social norms around purdah and female seclusion, where the honor of the family resides in women being withdrawn from the labor market and the public sphere. Similar trends were observed earlier in Punjab in India in the 1960s among successful agricultural households during the Green Revolution. Having said this, social norms are not static, and have been observed also to change in response to economic incentives, as in Bangladesh, where female migration to cities for garment work is increasingly accepted socially, and in northern Pakistan, where the potential for female employment in the growing nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector induced increased education participation among girls.

  2. Another important factor in changing gender dynamics within labor markets in South Asia has been migration (though its impacts on gender dynamics remain under-researched). Gender norms permeate migration decisions and impacts, as well as the networks and support systems that play a key role at all stages of migration (United Nations General Assembly 2004). Migration can help reset gender relations within households and countries by offering women the opportunity to enter the global labor market. Female overseas migrants are especially vulnerable and can be exposed to economic, psychological, physical, and sexual abuse, as in the case of female domestic workers migrating to the Middle East (Siddiqui 2008). Migration, whether within a country (rural­–urban) or within or outside the region, by both men and women, has gendered impacts, and policy and socioeconomic implications. Women represent a substantial part of the migrant population within countries, primarily employed in domestic work, manufacturing, and construction. Even among women migrants, major differences exist. For instance, female overseas migrants from Sri Lanka are mostly literate, as are skilled nurses from India, while the bulk of the women migrants from the rest of the region are mostly unskilled and illiterate, and thus at higher risk of being exploited.47 Migration movements also have implications for the well-being of these women’s children.

  3. Returning female migrants can also have difficulty being reabsorbed into society and the economy, as in Sri Lanka, where returnees from the Gulf find themselves suspect as “lone women” in conservative Muslim communities. Aside from voluntary migration, conflict- and natural hazard-induced migration have gender impacts and affect gender relations but remain poorly understood and under-researched. Some reports suggest women in new environments can access new opportunities for asset development, given that social rules are less fixed in unfamiliar settings (particularly for de jure or de facto female-headed households), while others suggest that norms of seclusion can make women even more vulnerable during transition periods in displacement locations, such as post-disaster contexts.


5. Agency


  1. Women face multiple constraints to exercising their agency in South Asia, including social norms and legal factors. These interact with other social, cultural, and religious dimensions to result in women’s restricted socioeconomic participation, social exclusion, and restricted rights, notably in the areas of land and inheritance rights, and family law and child custody practices. A further dimension is the high social tolerance for domestic violence. Women’s formal political participation in South Asia is on the rise, including in the form of holding local and national elected office, helped by quotas for women in some countries such as Pakistan, though that aspect could improve much further. Experiments with legal mandates for women’s formal participation, as in India, have also proven to have mixed outcomes. Active measures in Afghanistan appear to have improved women’s electoral outcomes, as discussed below.

5.1 From Social Exclusion to Gender-Based Violence


  1. Barriers to women’s enhanced participation in the public sphere are multilayered, and intertwined with caste, ethnicity, religion, and other criteria for social exclusion. Social norms define and constrain the space for women to exercise their agency by imposing penalties on both those who deviate from and those who do not enforce the norms (including more senior women, such as mothers-in-law). For example, while infrastructure, services, and incomes contribute to women’s mobility, mobility is also driven by social norms on what is acceptable for women – including norms on their role as caregiver, codes of modesty and honor, and beliefs about women’s safety on the street (World Bank 2010e). Women, for example, may need their husbands’ permission to travel from their household to seek medical care. Education levels interact with these norms, but can be confounded by class norms about female propriety. Education dampens normative constraints on female mobility more than income (figure 20).

Figure 20. Effect of Education and Income on Women’s Need for Male Permission to Travel for Medical Care



Source: World Bank 2011e, using data for 40 countries.

Note: Blue line shows probability of women of average wealth (and control characteristics) requiring permission to travel for medical care; red line presents the same conditional probability for women with average education (and control characteristics).

  1. Gender-based violence, particularly domestic violence, represents an extreme loss of agency, and remains a major challenge for South Asia. Among women aged 15–49 in India, 34 percent have experienced physical violence, and 9 percent have experienced sexual violence. In all, 35 percent of women have experienced physical or sexual violence, including 40 percent of ever-married women (IIPS and Macro International 2007). In Bangladesh, 49 percent of ever-married women report having ever experienced physical violence by their husband. Violence against women (physical or sexual) is more common among women who are employed for cash (62 percent) than among those who are not employed (49 percent), perhaps suggesting a male backlash effect to women’s perceived empowerment. Experience of domestic violence decreases with education (62 percent among women with no education compared to 36 percent among women with secondary completed or higher) and also with wealth. Women whose husbands have no education are much more likely than those with highly educated husbands to report violence (62 percent versus 38 percent) (NIPORT, Mitra and Associates, and Macro International 2009).48

  2. Global evidence suggests that gender-based violence is a problem that cuts across income tiers and national boundaries, meaning that it does not disappear fully with economic growth, even as social norms change. Increasing women’s education and asset ownership can have a protective influence by altering the perception of men (and female enablers such as mothers-in-law) to the “fallback” position of women, who with assets (and especially income) have greater “exit options,” thus making violence seem less of a viable option for abusers (Kabeer 1994; Agarwal 1997; Sen 1990). Even though attitudes toward domestic violence have been slowly changing over the past decade, many forms of physical, verbal, and sexual abuse are still condoned by many men and women alike (table 2).

Table 2. Attitudes to Domestic Violence: Adolescents Aged 15–19 Who Think a Husband Is Justified in Hitting or Beating His Wife under Certain Circumstances (2002–09)




Male (%)

Female (%)

South Asia

56

51

Bangladesh

n.a.49

41

India

57

53

Nepal

27

24

Sri Lanka

n.a.

54

Source: UNICEF 2011.

  1. Domestic violence affects women’s ability to freely choose and to take advantage of endowments and opportunities. It is associated with long-term negative health outcomes, including among the children of abused women, and the intergenerational reproduction of the acceptance of violence (figure 21). Women’s accounts of the main reasons for not reporting violence include a feeling of shame or guilt; perception of violence as being normal or justified; fear of consequences; and lack of support from family members and friends. These are mostly driven by social norms on the acceptability of violence, by the view that victims themselves are somehow responsible for the violence, and by the fear of the penalties that would be imposed if one deviated from the norm (World Bank 2011e). In the case of India, improving women’s voice and representation has been shown to have a positive impact on reducing gender-based violence (Iyer et al. 2011).50 Improving women’s mobility can contribute to reducing women’s isolation, increasing and diversifying their social capital, enhancing their participation and inclusion in socioeconomic processes, and reducing their exposure to domestic violence.51 Participation of women in community-driven development processes and local governance not only improves agency outcomes for individual women, but also contributes to changes in social norms at the community level regarding what is appropriate “space” for women.52

  2. Gender-based violence is not only that which takes place within the home between intimate partners (termed “domestic violence), but includes also other forms of violence against women (and less commonly, men), either as instruments of war, torture or extreme social control of groups (as when women are raped in conflict situations or as part of caste or class “privilege”); hate or other crimes (for example, against sexual minorities); or as an attempt to control an individual’s sexuality and/or autonomous choices (as in the case of so-called “honor killings”).

  3. “Honor” crimes are considered the “disciplining” of women (usually though murder or incitement to suicide) by family members, especially male family members, for transgressions or assumed transgressions of societal gender norms that control women’s sexuality and reputation as part of family “honor” (UNDAW 2009). Many of these crimes in South Asia are hidden under the veil of “suicide” or “kitchen accidents” in which women are grievously burned or killed. UNDAW recommends that honor crime legislation define the crime as broadly as possible to include the full spectrum on constraint of life choices, mobility, sexual behavior, discrimination, and violence against women in the name of “honor”. The more common term “honor killing” refers only to those crimes resulting in the death of the accused woman (and frequently her alleged partner or husband). In 2004, Pakistan’s Criminal Law Amendment Act established a specific offense for crimes “committed in the name or on the pretext of honor” (UNDAW 2009).

Figure 21. Life Cycle of Violence against Women and Its Consequences




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