This policy brief reports on a discussion of the role of female leadership in development held during a full day conference at the Stockholm School of Economics on June 16, 2014. The event was organized jointly by the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) and the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and was the fourth installment of Development Day – a yearly development policy conference. It is well known that women fall behind men on many markers of welfare and life opportunities, both in developed and developing countries. For most indicators, though, such as education and labor force participation, both the absolute and relative position of women tend to improve with economic development. However, in some areas the beneficiary effect of raising incomes is less clear. Access to leadership positions and decision-making roles are examples of such areas. To discuss this question, the conference brought together a distinguished and experienced group of policy oriented scholars and practitioners from government agencies, international organizations, civil society and the business community.
Gender equality and the empowerment of women is one of the eight goals of the United Nations Millennium Declaration. One commonly used measure of progress in this area is the proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments. As of 2013, this proportion was 21.2 percent, and only 34 countries – of which 18 were developing countries – had met the United Nations 1990 target of 30 percent or more in national legislative seats.
The participation of women in all levels of decision-making is by the UN considered a basic human right and a key condition for women’s empowerment, and there is now increasing support for making gender equality a stand-alone goal for the post-2015 development framework. However, in her opening remarks the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation, Hillevi Engström, pointed out that gender equality is not only a basic right, it is also smart economics. In fact, citing a recent IMF report, she brought up that if women and men have the same opportunities on the labor market, GDP is estimated to increase by as much as 10 percent in Sweden, 9 percent in Japan, and 34 percent in Egypt (Women, Work and the Economy: Macroeconomic Gains from Gender Equity, IMF, 2013).
The key constraints to women empowerment are of course context specific, but there are also some common global themes. A broad overview of both the commonalities and the variation was given by Jeni Klugman, Director of Gender and Development at the World Bank Group, as she presented the main messages of a recently released report on ‘Voice and Agency: Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity’ (2014). Using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from 54 countries over the period 2001-2012 the report argues that women often experience one or several deprivations and constraints in their ability to make decisions about their own life. For example, 42 percent of women lack control over household resources, 51 percent are married before the age of 18, and 43 percent condones wife beating. The situation differs significantly across countries, though, with one of the worst cases being Niger, where 99 (45) percent of women suffer at least one (all three) of the above mentioned deprivations.
Source:https://freepolicybriefs.org/2014/06/30/gender-and-development-the-role-of-female-leadership/
