WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT MATTERS EVIDENCE FROM THE HEALTH AND EDUCATION SECTORS IN DEVELOPING WORLDS.

• Author: Shin, Kyeong Min

INTRODUCTION

Women have been an icon of weakness and vulnerability in almost every culture. Sylvia Tamale argued that patriarchy drives women out of "the gendered male public space." (1) A clear border is said to have been designed between the public and private spaces, restricting women from entering the privileged public spheres. The privileges that public spheres bring are chances to obtain adequate education, access resources, seize more opportunities, and eventually, attain power and wealth. Women who are denied those privileges are left to perform unrecorded work in informal sectors, forced to remain in their subordinate conditions, and are thereby confined to their long-standing position as second-class citizens in the patriarchal society.

Gender and development (GAD) theorists and advocates who try to tackle the gendered interactions between the roles of women and men, instead of the different roles of women, have taken a step further and highlighted the necessity to "move away from the simple dichotomies of public/private, formal/informal, urban/rural and production/reproduction." (2) This approach has allowed for thorough questioning and examination of many aspects of women's lives beyond the traditional dichotomies. "Empowerment" in GAD paradigm is, therefore, not to overturn the power granted to men through patriarchy but to balance the power relations between women and men.

In recent years the global community has been showing a rising interest in gender equality as a means to achieve development. The United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) not only promote gender equality as a separate goal (Goal 5) but also combine it with other goals as cross-cutting targets for operations. For example, highlighting gender equality explains other forms of inequality and is naturally linked to Goal 10 (Reduced Inequality), manifesting the global community's robust and synchronized commitment to attain gender equality in social, economic, and political spheres in order to achieve overall universal development. Broadly, gender equality should be closely connected with SDGs 1 (No Poverty), 2 (Zero Hunger), 4 (Quality Education), and 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institution), as well.

Empowering women is often cited as a successful intervention in the field of international development. Esther Duflo recognized the interrelationship between economic development and women's empowerment, hence stressing that both factors must be continuously reinforced to increase the likelihood of a virtuous cycle that would lead to the improvement of women's rights in many dimensions. (3) The World Bank emphasized the importance of this empowerment as one of the key elements not only in gender equality but also in poverty reduction; women's access to assets indeed enhances their rights, grants them a voice in the family, and improves other domestic conditions, thereby contributing to poverty alleviation. (4) Women's empowerment will lead to gender equality, which will eventually lead to development, a core theme of the 2012 World Development Report titled "Gender Equality and Development."

Empirically, is women's empowerment positively associated with international development? If so, in what capacity? Does it work independently or conditionally under certain circumstances? This study examines these theoretically expected outcomes, empirically using comprehensive panel data covering seventy-eight developing countries from 2000 to 2018 (see Appendix I for the list of countries). The focus is on two sectors--health and education--where the impact of women's empowerment is relatively more obvious and direct than in other sectors. This study uses immunization, child mortality, and primary school enrollment as major indicators.

Previous studies touched upon this topic; for example, Gabriella R. Montinola and Sarah M. Prince examined the association between women's empowerment, foreign aid, and child development and found that foreign aid significantly reduces infant mortality where women are more empowered. (5) More specifically, this study found that women's political empowerment has the strongest impact on the reduction of infant mortality, while economic and social empowerment has a lesser impact. Mina Baliamoune-Lutz measured the effectiveness of official development assistance (ODA) given to women's equality organizations and institutions (WEOIs) of thirteen countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and found that the ODA disbursement to WEOIs have indeed contributed to a general increase in the proportion of seats held by women. (6)

Sara Thorpe et al. examined the relationship between women's agency and childhood immunization in lower-income settings and revealed that the higher agency among women--presumably mothers--was positively associated with the higher odds of child vaccination. (7) Pierre Pratley also assessed sixty-seven existing studies and found that women's empowerment does matter improving maternal and/or child health outcomes. (8) Asabe Ibrahim et al. also confirmed the positive relationship between women's empowerment indicated by women's decision-making autonomy and children's health status using immunization and stunting status in Nigeria and India. (9) Similarly, David T. Doku et al. showed that there is a high possibility that women's empowerment can reduce preventable neonatal, infant, and under-five mortality in fifty-nine low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), thus strengthening the importance of women's empowerment as a key development agenda. (10)

In the same direction, this study also deals with women's empowerment, with an up-to-date dataset covering more years and more variables. To state the conclusion up front, GDP per capita, health expenditure, and the ODA do not significantly reduce immunization, child mortality, and primary school enrollment. Likewise, women's empowerment in political and economic fields is not significantly affecting the above-mentioned dependent variables. However, when those two kinds of explanatory variables interact, women's empowerment is positively affecting immunization rate and primary school enrollment rates in countries with income levels lower than 1,500-2,000 USD, mainly located in East Africa. At least in those countries, women's empowerment indeed matters.

This study is structured as follows. After providing background information about the current discourse on women's empowerment, the study empirically measures its effectiveness and provides major findings. The last section concludes with implications.

GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT AND WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT

Gender is relatively a new social concept that can be distinguished from the traditional and biological notion of dichotomous sex. (11) Gender is a socially constructed idea that refers to a continual process rather than a fixed structure, to the extent that some feminist scholars even categorize the term as a verb. (12) Many feminist scholars argue that it is important to understand the immanent complexity of the word gender and its pliability. (13) Gender is viewed as a result of cultural ideology as well as a process that is strongly implicated with political power and privilege.

Gender equality came onto the scene of international development in the 1970s. The first gender initiative emerged in the form of the Women in Development (WID) paradigm, which designated women, who were confined in their traditional roles as wives and mothers, as the full beneficiaries. This approach successfully promoted women's participation and reformulated women's identity in the development discourse, but it failed to reveal the relational power difference between women and men that reinforces customary stereotypes aimed toward women. (14) In the mid-1970s, WID started to be replaced by the Women and Development (WAD) approach. WAD managed to observe the relationship between women and men in the development mechanism, suggesting that women's improved status will be followed by institutional and structural reforms. Even though women's engagement in development projects became an integral part of effectiveness in WAD, it also failed to adequately acknowledge individuals' race, class, or ethnicity while unsuccessfully addressing the nature of power dynamics and the gendered structure of the development field. (15)

Admitting partial successes of the previous attempts to improve women's social status and eliminate various barriers that hamper women from accessing resources, the gender and development (GAD) approach arose "as a strategic response to the limitations of the WID & WAD approaches." (16) Unlike the other two approaches, GAD emphasizes the power differentials between women and men. Thus, GAD policies acknowledge socially constructed inequality among classes and understand how it is embedded in social institutions rather than directly engaging women in the development agenda hoping it would cure everything. GAD also interprets gender as the power relations that involve social...