Abstract
A significant body of multi-disciplinary research supports the proposition that women may experience empowerment from microfinance programs. This is based on the assumption that an increase in women's financial contribution to the household helps to transform gender norms and relations which increases their decision-making power. However, the relationship between the strength and persistence of patriarchal gender norms within the household and women's financial empowerment needs further exploration. This paper presents the findings of a mixed-method study comprising 331 surveys and 33 in-depth interviews with women receiving microfinance and their husbands in a southern sub-district of Bangladesh; it draws upon gender socialisation and gender performance theory to understand how patriarchal gender norms influence women's financial empowerment in households receiving microfinance. Findings demonstrate that participation in microfinance programs has not shifted gender norms, nor financially empowered women. Women's loans were largely controlled by men as prescribed by underlying, unchanged patriarchal gender norms. The inter-generational reproduction of patriarchal gender relations continued to reproduce a strict gendered division of labour that reinforced restrictions on women's behaviour, mobility, and decision-making domains, and men's dominance in household and economic decision-making.
Highlights
Women disproportionately suffer from economic discrimination and exploitation [1,2,3,4]
The exact definition of patriarchy is contested, we find it a useful concept because power relations between genders are constructed at household level throughconstruction andproduction of gender roles [35,37,38] and genderperformativity [37,39,40], on the aspect of gender socialisation practices in the families
Patriarchal gender norms in Bangladesh dictate that income-generation is men’s responsibility, the women in our study surrendered control of their money, including microfinance loans, to male relatives. This finding concurs with findings in the literature about the cultural practice of money management being attributed to men that result in microfinance borrower women relinquishing control of loans to their male family members [61,77,78,79]
Summary
Women disproportionately suffer from economic discrimination (e.g., restriction from financial dealings) and exploitation (e.g., unpaid domestic labour) [1,2,3,4]. Development scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplinary backgrounds identify the lack of women’s access to financial resources as one of the major impediment to their empowerment [5,6]. Over the last few decades, developing countries’ have sought to address this issue by implementing financial inclusion programs for women. The most ubiquitous of these have been microfinance programs. Microfinance refers to a series of financial services
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