Does schooling and work empower women in Fiji? Or have gender inequalities persisted and why?

Abstract

The paper explores the limitations of the theoretical presumptions underlying the relationship between empowerment, education and employment that have been emphasized in both the existing literature and the current rhetoric to ‘empower’ women in developing countries. The research uses findings from in-depth interviews and focused group discussion data to empirically examine the relationship between schooling, paid work and empowerment of women in Fiji. The paper argues that the relationship between education, work and empowerment is conditioned by gender norms surrounding women's and men's choices on key economic decisions. The findings demonstrate that cultural norms about gender roles are considered to persist, generating gender inequality despite women's and girl's education and employment. Empirical evidence makes a strong case for the need to move away from broad-based conceptualizations of women's empowerment to an analysis of the social construction of gender as both a conceptual and an empirical category of inquiry.

Keywords:

• gender norms
• gender inequality
• women's empowerment
• Fiji

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the funding support from the World Bank for this qualitative study on gender and economic choices informing the World Development Report on Gender (2012). Fiji and other countries were part of the rapid qualitative study with more than 4000 men and women in 98 communities from 19 developing countries, exploring how gender affects their everyday lives and their aspirations, education, job chances, decision-making and other aspects of well-being. This paper presents and discusses some of the findings from the qualitative study conducted in Fiji.

Notes

1 To protect the anonymity of individuals being studied, family names and place names have been changed. Confidentiality and anonymity of the participants were preserved through the use of pseudonyms and the use of letters to represent each community. Terms/adjectives used to portray gender and economic choices of women throughout this article are the words used by the women/girls to describe themselves during the conversations (though translated into English, I made sure that the meaning of the conversation and words did not lose their originality and authenticity). For this reason, these words are in quotation marks or presented as extracts.

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8 Sajeda Amin, ‘Female Education and fertility in Bangladesh: The Influence of Marriage and the Family’, in Girls' Schooling, Women's Autonomy, and Fertility Change in South Asia, ed. Roger Jeffery and Alaka Basu (New Delhi: Delhi Press, 1996), 138–55.

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11 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

12 World Bank, World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012), Chapter 2.

13 Barker, ‘Beyond Women and Economics’, 2201.

14 Sen, Development as Freedom.

15 World Bank, Engendering Development: Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources and Voice (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001).

16 World Bank, World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012).

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Barker, ‘Beyond Women and Economics’, 2201.

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21 Karen Mason, ‘The Status of Women: Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Demographic Studies’, The Sociological Forum 1, no. 2 (1986): 284–300; Constantina Safilios-Rothschild, ‘Female Power, Autonomy and Demographic Change in the Third World’, in Women's Roles and Population Trends, ed. Richard Anker, Mayra Buvinic, and Nadia Youssef (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 117–32.

22 Karen Bradley and Diana Khor, ‘Toward an Integration of Theory and Research on the Status of Women’, Gender and Society 7 (1993): 347–37; Mason, ‘The Status of Women’, 284–300.

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24 Bradley and Khor, ‘Toward an Integration of Theory and Research on the Status of Women’, 347–57; Mason, ‘The Status of Women’, 284–300.

25 Mason, ‘The Status of Women’, 284–300.

26 John Caldwell, Theory of Fertility Decline (London: Academic Press, 1982).

27 Ester Boserup, Women's Role in Economic Development (New York: St Martin's Press, 1970).

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29 Niluger Isvan, ‘Productive and Reproductive Decisions in Turkey: The Role of Domestic Bargaining’, The Journal of Marriage and the Family 53 (1991): 1057–70; Sunita Kishor, ‘Autonomy and Egyptian Women: Findings from the 1988 Egypt Demographic and Health Survey’, Occasional Paper 2 (Calverton: Macro International, 1995).

30 Ursula Sharma, ‘Women's Participation in Agriculture in India’, Current Anthropology 23 (1982): 194–95.

31 Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985).

32 Janeen Baxter and Emily Kane, ‘Dependence and Independence: A Cross National Analysis of Gender Inequality and Gender Analysis’, Gender and Society 9 (1995): 193–215.

33 J. Davidson and M. Kanyuka, ‘Girls’ Participation in Basic Education in Southern Malawi', Comparative Education Review 36 (1992): 446–66; K. Hyde, Women's Education in Developing Countries: Barriers, Benefits and Policies (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1993), Chapter 1.

34 Barker, ‘Beyond Women and Economics’, 2189–206.

35 Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

36 Rosemary Crompton, Restructuring Gender Relations and Employment: The Decline of the Male Breadwinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

37 Ibid.

38 Eudine Barriteau, ‘Engendering Development or Gender Mainstreaming? A Critical Assessment from the Commonwealth Caribbean’, in Feminist Economists and the World Bank: History, Theory and Policy, ed. Edith Kuiper and Drucilla Barker (London: Routledge, 2005).

39 Spike Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (London: Routledge, 2003).

40 Ibid.

41 Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy, 28. As Barker (‘Beyond Women and Economics’) notes, while there may be nuanced disagreements over Peterson's articulation of the centrality of gender, the movement from the purely empirical to the conceptual remains a shared commitment.

42 Barker, ‘Beyond Women and Economics’, 2189–206.

43 Michael Bittman, ‘Parenthood without Penalty: Time Use and Public Policy in Australia and Finland’, Feminist Economics 5, no. 3 (1999): 27–42; Suzanne Bianchi, ‘Maternal Employment and Time with Children: Dramatic Change or Surprising Continuity?’, Demography 37, no. 4 (2000): 401–14.

44 Caroline Vogler and Jan Pahl, ‘Social and Economic Change and the Organisation of Money within Marriage’,

Work, Employment and Society 7, no. 4 (1993): 77–90.

45 Paula England and George Farkas, Households, Employment, and Gender: A Social, Economic and Demographic View (New York: Aldine deGruyter, 1986).

46 Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (London: Piatkus Ltd, 1989).

47 Peter-Hans Blossfeld and Sonja Drobnic, A Cross-National Comparative Approach to Couples' Careers: From Male Breadwinner to Dual Earner Families (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

48 Sarah Berk, The Gender Factory: The Apportionment of Work in American Households (New York: Plenum Press, 1985).

49 Candace West and Don Zimmerman, ‘Doing Gender’, Gender and Society 1, no. 2 (1987): 125–51.

50 Hochschild, ‘The Second Shift: Working Parents’.

51 Julie Brines, ‘Economic Dependency, Gender and the Division of Labor at Home’, American Journal of Sociology 100, no. 3 (1994): 652–88.

52 Bittman, ‘Parenthood without Penalty’, 27–42

53 Bernard Walters, ‘Engendering Macroeconomics: A Reconsideration of Growth Theory’, World Development 23, no. 11 (1995): 1869–80.

54 Nancy Folbre, Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and Structures of Constraint (New York: Routledge, 1994).

55 Ibid.

56 Fiji Bureau of Statistics, 2007 Census of Population and Housing (Suva, Fiji: Fiji Bureau of Statistics, 2007).

57 Priya Chattier, ‘Gender, Survival and Self-respect: Dimensions of Agency for Women within a Poor Rural Indo-Fijian Community’ (PhD diss., The Australian National University, 2008).

58 Fiji Ministry of National Planning, Millennium Development Goals: 2nd Report 1990–2009 for Fiji Islands (Suva: Ministry of National Planning, 2010).

59 Fiji Bureau of Statistics, 2007 Census of Population and Housing.

60 Fiji Ministry of National Planning, Millennium Development Goals.

61 Wadan Narsey, Gender Issues in Employment, Unemployment and Incomes in Fiji (Suva, Fiji: Vanuavou, 2007).

62 Fiji Ministry of National Planning, Millennium Development Goals.

63 Chandra Dharma and Lewai Vasemaca, Women and Men of Fiji Islands: Gender Statistics and Trends (Suva, Fiji: Fiji Bureau of Statistics, 2005).

64 Jacqueline Leckie, ‘Gender and Work in Fiji: Constraints to Re-negotiation’, in Bitter Sweet: Indigenous Women in the Pacific, ed. Alison Jones, Phyllis Herda, and Tamasailau Suaalii (Otago: University of Otago Press, 2000), 73–92; Christy Harrington, ‘Marriage to Capital: The Fallback Positions of Fiji's Women Garment Workers’, Development in Practice 14, no. 4 (2004): 495–507.

65 Richard Anker, Gender and Jobs: Sex Segregation of Occupations in the World (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 1998), 163.

66 Paula England, Comparable Worth: Theories and Evidence (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992).

67 Chandra Dharma and Lewai Vasemaca, Women and Men of Fiji Islands: Gender Statistics and Trends (Suva, Fiji: Fiji Bureau of Statistics, 2005).

68 Wadan Narsey, Gender Issues in Employment, Unemployment and Incomes in Fiji (Suva, Fiji: Vanuavou, 2007).

69 World Bank, World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012), 80.

70 Ibid.