Women’s Economic Empowerment: Moving Beyond the Work-First Myth

By Rhonda Breitkreuz

Since the mid-1990s, the concept of women’s economic empowerment has spread like wildfire through international NGOs and governments. Globally, it has been declared the next frontier for social transformation. The World Health Organization, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, the European Union, and the Canadian International Research Centre have all identified it as a key priority. Even corporations, such as The Gap, have adopted it as an objective within their global supply chains.

While there is an international consensus on the importance of women’s economic empowerment, the pathway to achieving it is contested.

Within this context, our new book, Women’s Economic Empowerment and the State: A Critical Human Ecological Approach (Rhonda Breitkreuz & Marian Baird, Eds.) explores the realities of women’s lives across six countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ghana, India, and Ireland. Using a critical human-ecological lens, we highlight how ideological constructs and government policies create enabling or disabling environments for women.

This book constitutes a curated collection of essays written by in-country experts that document the fragile nexus between labour force attachment and unpaid care work, the challenges of entrepreneurship, the persistence of gendered social norms, and government policies that either help or hinder women’s employment.

The seed for this book was planted over 30 years ago. When I was 26 years old, I became the director of a shelter in Canada for women and children fleeing domestic violence. Freshly out of graduate school and looking forward to making a difference, I witnessed a specific dimension of inequality — gendered economic vulnerability — that deeply influenced my worldview. Under our current social and economic structures, many women were what I coined “one man away from welfare.”

This realization cemented my conviction that economic security is an essential protective layer for women’s wellbeing. I saw how economic vulnerability forced women into impossible choices between a violent partner or a life of economic precarity. It was clear to me then, as it is now, that this injustice is literally man-made—constructed through social norms, policies, and structures that create economic vulnerabilities for many women. I committed myself then to challenging the systems that normalize women’s economic dependence on men.

‘This is an excellent book. Grounded in the theoretical literature on women’s economic empowerment, it uses case studies from a range of different contexts across the world to examine how women fare in labour markets and the role that governments play in promoting – or obstructing – their search for productive and dignified work.’

– Naila Kabeer, London School of Economics, UK

Labour market participation and personal income generation are the most common strategies for empowerment. While these strategies make sense at face value, they overlook a significant reality: women still perform the lion’s share of the world’s unpaid household and care work. How do we ensure women’s economic autonomy without simply burdening them with a “double shift” of paid and unpaid labour?

Globally, women perform 75% of all unpaid work, totaling an estimated 11 billion hours every single day. If assigned a dollar value, this work would account for between 15% and 50% of a country’s entire GDP. These facts are fundamental to understanding economic empowerment for women. We argue that this invisible economy of care—looking after children, the elderly, and the home—is the primary barrier to women’s economic security.

In low-income countries, where labour markets are less protected, many women often have no choice but to enter the informal economy. While informal work offers flexibility for childcare, it lacks legal protection and stable earnings. In some global regions, a staggering 92% of women’s employment is informal. And in high-income countries such as Australia, Canada, and Ireland, where most employment is protected by labour laws, women still experience a gendered pay gap and often cut back on paid work to accommodate unpaid work responsibilities.

This book reminds us that work-first initiatives to move women into employment often overlook the challenging social and policy environments that frame women’s lives. Simply giving a woman a job doesn’t empower her if that job is precarious, underpaid, or adds an impossible double burden to her existing responsibilities. Through exploring the various economic, social, cultural, and normative structures within the countries queried in this book, we come up with three key recommendations to enhance women’s wellbeing: the promotion of decent work, the redistribution of unpaid care work, and the dismantling of patriarchal gender norms.

What is particularly unique about this collection is our demonstration that these strategies are essential across vastly different contexts. By including countries from both the Global North and the Global South, we show that while specific environments differ, the themes of gendered time and precarious resources transcend borders.

Ultimately, we conclude that addressing care work through the ILO’s “5Rs”—Recognize, Reduce, Redistribute, Reward, and Represent—is crucial for a more equitable world. Furthermore, solutions must come through government policies that redress the vulnerabilities women face in market economies. We hope this book helps light the path toward a world in which all persons, regardless of gender or geography, can truly flourish.

Rhonda Breitkreuz is a Professor of Family and Social Policy in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta, Canada

Marian Baird is a Professor of Gender and Employment Relations in the School of Business at the University of Sydney, Australia