The economic empowerment of women is a crucial component of gender equality.

On an individual level, financial independence provides greater freedom of choice in one own’s life. On a national level, increasing women’s employment rates significantly boosts a country’s gross domestic product (GDP). For example, according to the United Nations, if all member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) achieved Sweden’s level of female employment (81%, noted the World Bank as recently as 2021), it would increase their GDPs by $6 trillion annually.

But women’s international development doesn’t happen overnight. Cultural norms can be barriers to women seeking employment and wherever women work, they face the “the motherhood penalty”—systemic disadvantages women face in the workplace once they become mothers.

Additionally, there isn’t global consensus on one best way for women to advance economically—but researchers and policymakers alike can agree that every little bit counts.

University of Oregon faculty are themselves approaching women’s international development from different angles: through experimental financial programs, improving working conditions and labor rights, and in poverty reduction by improving access to healthcare.

Financial independence through digital savings groups

Alfredo Burlando, associate professor of economics in the College of Arts and Sciences and an African Studies Program affiliate, has worked for years in East and Southern Africa. Much of his work has focused on how communities can manage financial risk through financial services. In most places in sub-Saharan Africa, the financial services infrastructure like one would find in the US doesn’t exist, and women typically rely on informal mechanisms such as savings groups. These are informal clubs in which community members come together to pool monetary resources and make small loans to each other as needed. While they are extremely popular, particularly among women, savings groups provide only a partial solution to these communities, and there is a lot of room for improvement in their functioning. For example, savings groups have yet to take advantage of recent innovations in financial digitization.

Burlando recently started working on a project that integrates financial technology in savings groups. The study takes place in 260 rural communities in Egypt, where women are historically far less financially independent than their urban counterparts and where savings groups have yet to be established. His research is in partnership with researchers at the University of Minnesota, the Egypt Impact Lab, and the Egyptian National Council of Women. to launch digital savings groups with the eventual goal of reaching 300,000 women. The project embeds a woman in a community with access to a special app on her phone that enables her to act as a financial coach and banker of sorts for other women. She helps them maintain digital bank accounts where they can save money and gain access to credit.

“These are groups for women, by women, in their communities,” Burlando said. “The app provides a means to facilitate financial transactions that should be occurring in these communities that don’t have other banking institutions. Research shows that savings groups can help mitigate food insecurity and providing funding for educating their children.”

Burlando said that while the focus of other research projects has been on enabling people to become entrepreneurs through microloans to start businesses, that isn’t necessarily the goal of the digital savings groups.

“We hope to see movement toward financial independence,” he said. “When the money is locked in the savings group and in digital accounts, the money can’t be easily taken by a husband at any time. Unfortunately, in many cash-based contexts, the husbands show up when women have money and demand a portion or all of it. This impact evaluation study will look at whether access to this app improved the economic conditions of these women, whether it improves their independence, which can make a big difference in their lives.” 

Plodding slowly toward upward mobility

The odds are good there’s an item of clothing (or many items of clothing) in your closet with a tag that reads, “Made in Bangladesh.” If you do, it’s practically guaranteed that the garment was made on an assembly line by women. Bangladesh’s main export is clothing, and four million of the country’s women are employed by the garment industry.

Lamia Karim, professor and head of the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts of Sciences, said that her native country’s shift toward a mostly textile-based economy began in earnest in the 1980s. Based on long-term research, Karim wrote Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh, which won the Society of Cultural Anthropology’s Gregory Bateson Book Award Honorable Mention in 2023. Karim has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with hundreds of women across three generations. Her work has determined that for these Bangladeshis, working in the garment industry, rather than as small-scale entrepreneurs selling eggs or handicrafts, has been more upwardly mobilizing.

“Working in an industry that is durable, where women can work as wage laborers for a period of time, gives them a certain amount of autonomy and financial security,” Karim said. “Most importantly, it gives them the ability to dream that while their lives might not be better, their children’s will be. Research on female garment workers shows that as factory employees, they are more secure compared to women in the informal sector without any wage guarantees.”

However, wages in the garment industry are low and working conditions are often poor. The tragic Raza Plaza factory collapse in 2013, which killed more than 1,100 people, resulted in some improvement in working conditions, but progress has been slow. Lack of childcare (other than leaving their children behind in their birth villages) and healthcare are other areas where gains must be made. Affordable housing remains scarce in Bangladesh’s large, crowded urban areas.

Karim said that while Bangladesh has strong labor laws, they’re rarely implemented or enforced.

“Trade unions are necessary to safeguard workers' rights, such as safe work conditions, wages, overtime pay, regular work hours, hiring documents, vacation, and so on,” Karim said. “Trade unions must be empowered to help these factory women. At present, only 2-3% out of the four million female workers is unionized.”

Karim’s research also shows that financial literacy training is essential to help the garment workers know how to plan their futures. Better educational opportunities, like in any country, clearly enables women to better advocate for themselves and secure higher-paying work, though this outcome is also dependent on Bangladesh diversifying its economy, so it is not so dependent on the textile sector.

“I’ve always been interested in how we can improve the lives of women, economically and socially,” Karim said. “Women hold up half the sky; how can we ignore their labor power, their dreams and aspirations? Society is better off when both men and women have meaningful work. A well-contented worker is a productive worker. Ethnographic research is very important to help policymakers and economists formulate better policies that target the needs of the people they are trying to help empower.”

Class, caste, and gender in Hyderabad’s urban slums

In a similar vein, anthropology doctoral student Malvya Chintakindi studies what factors shape the aspirations of Dalit women and their ideas of what makes for “a good life.” The Dalit social class faces significant structural inequities, not least of which is that the vast majority engage in informal labor— cooking, cleaning, manual labor, and home-based work—which lacks stabilities like health insurance, pensions, and regular wages. These precarities render Dalit women particularly vulnerable as the compounding forces of class, caste, and gender interact in Hyderabad’s urban slums—forces that themselves are not well studied in terms of informal labor.

“Through interactions with their employers, engagements with labor- and gender-specialized government policies, and the interventions of regional non-governmental organizations (NGOs), my research asks what the role is of regional NGOs and state actors in creating notions of development for Dalit women informal workers in urban slums,” Chintakindi said. “How does the fragility of the informal economy impact these women’s lived experiences of stress and trauma?”

Chintakindi is using multiple research anthropological methods, including participant observation, interviews, social mapping, group discussions, and photo voice.

“My preliminary research revealed a sharp disconnect between state services and the needs and realities of Dalit women,” she said. “Unfortunately, antiquated beliefs persist: That Dalit women are ‘used to’ social insecurities, that the caste system ‘need not be addressed’ because of its complex history, that Dalit women ‘deserve’ the anger and mistreatment of the employers as a ‘labor class’, and that they chose to lifestyles filled with vulnerabilities and that ‘cannot be helped’.”

Chintakindi notes that many Dalit women feel neglected and misunderstood due to limited social protection policies for domestic labor, no justice for caste and gender-based discrimination, and long travel times to acquire food rations.

“Consumerism, popular culture, and the glamor of the city shape Dalit women’s aspirations for the ‘good life’,” Chintakindi said. “My findings show that what these women really want is very simple: lives free of domestic violence and to receive a governmental ration to lift them out of poverty.” 

Health and wealth

The saying, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything,” rings true when it comes to the role good health plays in a person’s ability to work. Women often face challenges that preclude their ability to return to the workforce after giving birth. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 2 million women worldwide suffer from obstetric fistula, a treatable condition. Beyond physical maladies, WHO estimates that 12 billion working days are lost globally to anxiety and depression, a productivity loss of $1 trillion annually—and this problem is exacerbated by stigma people who seek treatment for mental health disorders often face.

But where is the line between improving healthcare to improve a person’s overall well-being versus health as an economic variable?

“We in global health teach that health is a key part of human flourishing. When we think about ‘economic uplift initiatives’ and ‘poverty reduction initiatives,’ addressing health is part of that agenda for good reason,” said Jo Weaver, director of the UO’s Global Health Program.

She notes the “Disability Adjusted Life Years” metric that sprang into being in the 1990s, which, among other things, enables economic entities like the World Bank to quantify the productivity loss of that comes with being unable to work due to illness, disability, or early death.

“Poverty reduction for women, and by extension their children, is a major topic of discussion in the global heath community,” Weaver said. “But there is more to people’s health and well-being than economic productivity. I don’t like reducing human health and flourishing to economic imperatives, but that’s often the language that gets attention in global policy spaces.”

As a medical anthropologist, Weaver studies how people manage illness outside of traditional medical frameworks. Right now, she’s looking at how women in India cope with distress in a culture that deeply stigmatizes clinical mental illnesses and their treatment.

“The women I work with in India are experiencing levels of distress and symptoms we might classify as clinical depression, but they have little interest in seeking out a psychologist or a psychiatrist,” Weaver said, adding that India’s mental health care system is typically reserved for people suffering acute symptoms like active psychosis.

“We have good, evidence-based treatments for mental health challenges, and lots of people in global health who are working to improve global access to those treatments. But engaging that system in India means something very culturally different and damaging than in the US or other parts of the world,” she said. “So instead, women I work with would prefer to talk to family members, go to a temple, seek economic uplift, meditate, do yoga, or walk. And in fact, many of the things they do to cope with stress are recognized as valid methods.”

Weaver’s research documents the effectiveness of “homegrown” methods women are using to deal with distress to elevate their validity within the field of global health, which for decades has favored Western medicine. She hopes the global health community, and by extension policymakers, will be more open to providing women with culturally specific treatment options that don’t require accessing them clinically.

“Supporting women’s access to resources that are culturally acceptable and attractive to them is a crucial part of more effective global development, whether in the field of health or in other realms,” Weaver said.

— By Kelley Christensen, Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation