Not so long ago, I was a young mom in Bangladesh with a good-paying job that I loved. But I could not secure adequate child care for my two kids. As a result, I was forced to put my career aside. I didn’t work for six years, and instead I stayed home with my children. Even with income and resources at my disposal, my life choices were constrained because of limited child care options.
That was my experience, but women face limitations on their life choices across countries and within households all around the world.
Today I am back at work, here at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where I am part of a team that focuses on creating economic opportunities for 80 million women from low-income communities by 2030. The women that the foundation and our partners work with across Asia and Africa experience many barriers to accessing informal or formal jobs that pay well, are reliable, and are safe and dignified. Making income-generating opportunities possible for these women has long been at the center of our work.
But over time, those of us who do this work have realized that empowerment programs focused on getting cash into the hands of women are only the first step. Leaders and advocates, including our foundation, need to start focusing on women’s economic power.
Women’s economic power means that women have access to all the resources they need to assert full control over their lives—not just income, but also shelter, contraceptives, credit, and, of course, child care.
In my career, I’ve learned a lot of lessons about what it takes to successfully build women’s economic power (and I am still learning). Here are just a few:
Lesson 1. Efforts to advance women’s economic power must address all aspects of a woman’s life.
As a graduate student, I studied the work of Naila Kabeer, a leading academic in feminist economics. Her research underscores the importance of looking at women’s economic power from multiple angles, and that approach has guided my work. Below are a few ways to develop solutions that are intersectional and address all aspects of a woman’s life.
- Solutions must be designed to eliminate the gaps between men and women in their access to and control over a range of resources. For example, it means addressing issues like access to digital technology. Access to and the ability to use a variety of technology, from Wi-Fi to smart phones to digital bank accounts can greatly affect who has power and who doesn’t.
- Programs and policies must also focus on removing the many barriers to women’s economic power. Most women face multiple and often overlapping barriers that prevent them from claiming their power. Overcoming these requires instituting comprehensive child care systems, meeting women’s health needs, addressing the lack of jobs available to women, and repealing discriminatory laws.
- Finally, achieving meaningful advancements in women’s economic power means investing in solutions that build power, such as women’s collectives and programs that create pathways to women’s leadership.
Lesson 2. The work of building women’s economic power must be adapted to different cultures and social norms.
I used to work in the chars of Bangladesh, which are the most impoverished and isolated areas in the country. I ran training programs designed to help women set up income streams, understand their rights, learn financial skills, and more. The programs were designed to help women achieve economic empowerment, but I found that one of the most effective ways to help women build economic power was to include men.
When men took part in the training programs, they began to encourage their wives to participate more in household decisions, from financial choices to decisions about education and child-rearing.
As the women started to gain power within their own households, their confidence to pursue economic opportunities outside the home also grew. That confidence, combined with the support they received from the training programs, led some of them to establish successful microbusinesses—which they still run today.
This experience underscored for me that even though women around the world face barriers because of their gender, the challenges they experience are not identical. Women come from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and religions, and different social norms govern their lives and choices. It’s important to keep these dynamics in mind as we work with communities to harness women’s economic power. Sometimes that can mean including men.
Lesson 3. Everyone has a role to play in building women’s economic power.
Solutions that build women’s economic power not only need to be tailored to each context, they require effort and commitment from a variety of stakeholders: communities, nonprofits, religious institutions, the private sector, financial and economic decision-makers, and government ministries. It takes all of these institutions and people to help remove barriers and allow women to claim economic power. That’s how we begin to see things move in the right direction.
Because when women start to gain power, the ripple effects go well beyond the individual. We see these women invest in and improve the lives of their family members, communities, and countries, and they often help improve the very institutions and economic systems that previously excluded them. Not only does everyone have a role to play in building women’s economic power, but everyone benefits.
From lessons learned to power gained
Along with the programmatic work our foundation funds to help build women’s economic power, we’ve set forth a list of policy priorities that leaders must adapt if the world is to see women’s power fully unleashed.
Melinda French Gates outlines these priorities in a recent article—you can read them all here.
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