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NUPI skole

Research Project

Legal Regimes and Women's Economic Agency

The project's objective is to improve our understanding of how legal regimes and legal changes affect the economic agency of different subgroupes of women across the world

Themes

  • Development policy
  • Europe
  • Africa
  • Asia
  • North America
  • South and Central America
  • The Nordic countries

Events

A growing number of studies show that women's economic agency, understood as the ability to make independent economic choices due to access to resources via asset ownership, control of land, or employment, is key to contesting unequal gender relations, refashioning social norms, and creating sustainable development. Yet in much of the developing world the economic agency of women is still constrained by legal provisions that deny them the ability to work, to own land, to inherit, to sign contracts, and to act as autonomous agents in the public sphere. Such provisions restrict the important social mechanism of economic agency that can enable women to contest oppressive gender relations from the ground up. This project is a comparative study of how family laws, labor codes, and public policies differentially shape women's economic agency across the world.  

Project Manager

Francesca R. Jensenius
Former employee

Participants

My Rafstedt
Former employee

Articles

News
News

Nils Klim Prize awarded to NUPI researcher

"An outstanding political scientist and ideally suited as a role model for younger researchers." This is how the jury characterizes this year’s Nils Klim Prize laureate, Francesca R. Jensenius.

  • Development policy
  • Asia
  • South and Central America
  • Governance
News
News

The paradox of gender equality

‘Development doesn’t necessarily promote equal opportunities’, says Francesca Refsum Jensenius.

  • Development policy
  • North America
  • Governance

New publications

Publications
Publications
Scientific article

Gender-Discriminatory Laws and Women’s Economic Agency

Recent years have seen widespread advances in women’s legal rights in many countries. In other places, restrictions on women’s autonomy remain entrenched. This study explores cross-country patterns in the association between gender-discriminatory legislation and various indicators of women’s economic agency. We find that restrictions on legal capacity predict women’s asset ownership and labor force participation, while discrimination in wage work and parental leave are associated with the size and direction of wage gaps. These findings highlight the importance of conceptualizing and measuring legal rights and their potential effects as multidimensional.

  • Governance
  • Governance
Publications
Publications
Chapter

India: A Contradictory Record

This chapter provides a review of the role of women in Indian politics, with a focus on female legislators. It begins with an account of the entry of women into politics in the early 20th century. Second, it looks at the gradual increase in the number of women MPs and the barriers they have faced. The third section presents the debate that resulted in quotas (‘reservations’) for women in local-level politics, but not in the more influential parliament and state assemblies. The final section is about some characteristics of women MPs. This review demonstrates some of the key barriers that keep women out of elected office in India, but also highlights the diversity of the women who have come to power despite these obstacles.

  • Asia
  • Asia
Publications
Publications
Scientific article

Comparative Analysis for Theory Development: Reflections on a Study of Women’s Empowerment

Methodological texts about comparative work have focused overwhelmingly on controlled comparisons aimed at causal inference. To show the range of possible goals and approaches, this piece reflects on our own choices while studying the state and women’s empowerment in Norway, Japan, and the United States. We show how our research design evolved with our theoretical thinking, and explain that we did not select comparative “cases,” but rather diverse contexts with interesting variation in our main concept of interest. Finally, we discuss how we constructed multi-cultural research teams to take advantage of insider and outsider perspectives during fieldwork.

  • Comparative methods
  • Comparative methods

Themes

  • Development policy
  • Europe
  • Africa
  • Asia
  • North America
  • South and Central America
  • The Nordic countries

Project Manager

Francesca R. Jensenius
Former employee

Events

Participants

My Rafstedt
Former employee