Essays on Women's Empowerment in Developing Countries

by Jana Lenze
Cumulative thesis
Date of Examination:2018-11-15
Date of issue:2019-05-10
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Stephan Klasen
Referee:Prof. Dr. Stephan Klasen
Referee:Prof. Dr. Marcela Ibáñez
Referee:Prof. Dr. Amy C. Alexander
Persistent Address: http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-7380

 

 

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Abstract

English

Women’s empowerment has been identified as a prerequisite for poverty reduction. In addition to driving overall economic growth, women’s empowerment has been found to have beneficial effects on fertility rates, child health and education outcomes, as well as community development. This thesis aims to explore various factors that foster women’s empowerment, as well as linkages between different dimensions of women’s empowerment. Each of these chapters addresses specific research questions in order to contribute to a better understanding of the processes underlying social and economic dimensions of women’s empowerment at the micro and macro level. In particular, the first chapter starts by providing a broader perspective on the causes of women’s empowerment at the macro level, by investigating the factors correlated with the closing of gender gaps in education across regions during the last 30 years. More specifically, we ask what economic, political or institutional changes are the drivers of progress in gender parity in education. This explorative study paves the way for a more detailed analysis at the micro level. As the first chapter identifies conflict as one of the determinants impeding empowerment at the macro level, we explore in the second paper how women’s economic empowerment reacts to refugee shocks triggered by conflict at the micro level. We do this by asking whether refugee shocks impact the host population in terms of women’s labor force participation and social cohesion in Uganda. The third chapter investigates whether economic empowerment itself can have instrumental effects on social dimensions of empowerment, namely domestic violence. Given that economic empowerment can be a powerful means to improve women’s welfare by reducing domestic violence in the context of developed countries, we investigate if this link can be carried over to the developing country’s context, where empirical findings show mixed results.
Keywords: Women's empowerment; Female Labor Force Participation; Uganda; Domestic Violence; refugees and host population; education
 
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