What does an economically empowered woman look like?

The International Rescue Committee’s commitment to narrowing the gender gap

This year, the Economic Recovery and Development unit at the International Rescue Committee has made key commitments to make serious progress on identifying and building evidence to effectively design and scale programs that seek to achieve one of IRC’s key economic outcomes: Women use and control resources and assets. Ultimately, we want our women’s economic empowerment programming to grow both in quantity and quality and to support policy shifts that create an enabling environment for refugee women to succeed.

For the IRC, the “women use and control resources and assets” outcome is also critical to narrowing the gender gap in contexts where we operate. To achieve this outcome, the IRC focuses on three causal pathways. The first pathway highlights the importance of women and girls having relevant knowledge and skills. The second focuses on the importance of freedom of movement, as a resource in itself but also as a prerequisite to being able to make use of resources they control. The final directly addresses the barriers and social norms related to control, including the importance of addressing violence and legal institutions or frameworks.

Supporting the achievement of this outcome and the programming in the contexts where we work is no easy task. Although refugee women make up half of the refugee population, they remain less engaged in workforce. For instance, in Jordan, where approximately 129,000 work permits were issued to Syrian refugees between January 2016 and December 2018, only 4% of those were issued to women. Similarly, data from Germany indicates that both in the short and the long term the number of displaced women participating in the labor market is lower than the number of displaced men and that displaced women often have lower paying jobs compared to displaced men or German women.

One of the biggest and most pressing obstacles that stands in the way of designing and scaling effective programming for women is defining and measuring success. We often throw around the term empowerment, but what does it mean to be empowered and how do we know when someone has reached empowerment?

Globally, there are a number of definitions of women’s economic empowerment. Most, if not all, include elements of access, control and choice in economic opportunities and gains. In a recent policy brief, we used the following definition: “As the ability for women to safely generate, use and control resources to achieve economic wellbeing.” This definition is well aligned with how the Gates Foundation defines women’s economic empowerment: access to income and assets, control of and benefit from economic gains, and power to make decisions.

But, there is limited information on what an economically empowered woman looks like in practice in the contexts where we work and how we should go about measuring economic empowerment that results from our livelihoods programs. In fact, in J-PAL’s A Practical Guide to Measuring Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in Impact Evaluations, researchers note several challenges in measuring empowerment — not least among these is the underlying concept that while empowerment may be universal, how it presents itself in various contexts may look different.

To address these questions, we asked IRC clients directly what the term “women’s economic empowerment” means to them and what it looks like in their communities. In our upcoming research on labor market participation and economic empowerment of displaced women in Niger, Kenya and Germany, we attempt to look at more locally-relevant definitions of women’s economic empowerment through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with displaced women and men. In addition to generating information on context specific barriers and the challenges women face, we hope the results from this study (available in August 2019) will give us more relevant measures and help us better understand the pathways that can lead to women’s economic empowerment.