Interrogating progress indicators of the third Millennium Development Goal from the viewpoint of ultrapoor Bangladeshi female heads of household

Abstract

Abstract Three indicators are instituted to monitor progress towards the third Millennium Development Goal (MDG3) directed at the promotion of gender equality and women's empowerment: girls’ participation in education, women's participation in nonagricultural wage employment, and women's participation in national political decision-making. We examined these indicators through the narratives of 43 ultrapoor Bangladeshi women heads of households. Although the United Nations reports that Bangladesh is making strides towards achieving MDG3, we question the salience of indicators that shelter social institutions such as marriage from scrutiny and perpetuate an instrumentalist orientation to gender equality, where women need to participate in the world-as-it-is.

Résumé Trois indicateurs sont utilisés pour évaluer les progrès accomplis dans la réalisation du troisième objectif du millénaire pour le développement (OMD-3) qui vise à promouvoir l’égalité entre les sexes et l'autonomisation des femmes : il s'agit de la participation des filles à l’éducation, de la présence des femmes salariées dans secteur non agricole et de la participation des femmes à la prise de décision politique nationale. Nous avons examiné ces indicateurs à travers le récit de 43 femmes bangladaises chefs de famille extrêmement pauvres. Même si les Nations Unies rapportent que le Bangladesh fait de grands pas vers l'atteinte des OMD, nous remettons en question l’à-propos de ces indicateurs qui préservent d'un examen critique les institutions sociales comme le mariage et qui perpétuent l'instrumentalisation de l’égalité de sexes en invitant les femmes à participer à un monde inchangé.

Keywords:

• gender
• empowerment
• Bangladesh
• poverty
• Millennium Development Goals

Acknowledgements

Lynn McIntyre holds a Chair in Gender and Health from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. Funding for this project was provided through the Chair's research allowance.

Biographical notes

Lynn McIntyre is a Professor and Canadian Institutes for Health Research Chair in Gender and Health in the Department of Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary. She holds both a medical degree and master's degree in community health and epidemiology from the University of Toronto. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada in Public Health and Preventive Medicine. McIntyre has studied food insecurity for 20 years using a variety of methods and with diverse disadvantaged populations both in Canada and globally.

Patricia Thille is a physical therapist and PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Calgary. Over the course of her graduate studies, she has been awarded support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Killam Trusts and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is a qualitative methodologist, with research interests in gender and health, health services, weight bias, and science and technology studies. She is co-editor of Women Who Care: Women's Stories of Health Care and Caring (2010).

Jennifer Hatfield is Associate Dean of Global Health andInternational Partnerships in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences and the Director of the Health and Society Program in the O'Brien Centre BHSc. Her research and teaching focus is on maternal child health and health promotion in low- and middle-income countries. She is a board member in the Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research and has supervised dozens of graduate and undergraduate research projects.

Notes

1. The MDGs are more fully described at http://www.undp.org/mdg (accessed 5 March 2012).

2. Some had a male in the household; for this reason, our sample does not necessarily reflect different constructions of female heads of household that have been the subject of other scholarship (for example, Lewis 1993 or Chant 1997). Our version aligns with the economic orientation reflected in development indicators.

3. The other two open-ended questions were “Tell me how you manage to feed your family” and “What do you think could be done to help women like you?”

4. The Garo are an indigenous, matrilineal Christian minority group.

5. Further methodological details and the central findings of the study can be found in McIntyre et al. (2011).

6. This is important because much has been made of the success of microcredit, although the literature demonstrates that it is not a choice of the ultrapoor (Datta 2004; McIntyre et al. 2011) and that it in many ways serves to reduce social service expenditures on the ultrapoor in accordance with neoliberal economic policies (Rankin 2002; Wood 2003; Karim 2011).

7. For a full discussion on the unique gendered concerns of the informal market and vulnerable employment that were identified from the narratives of these ultrapoor female heads of household, see Watterson, McIntyre and Rondeau (forthcoming).

8. Exceptions and reservations can be found at http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=IV-8&chapter=4&lang=en (accessed 5 March 2012).

9. In 2000, women in waged nonagricultural employment made on average 42 per cent of the income of men (Government of Bangladesh, United Nations Country Team in Bangladesh 2005).