Women Empowerment and NGOs

Abstract

The role of women in economic activities was brought to the forefront by the world conference on agrarian reforms and rural development in 1979. The conference pledged to promote equal participation of women along with men in social, economic and political processes of development and equal access to the benefits. The major factors determining the socio economic status of women are education and occupation, the importance of which is different for those in the developed and the developing countries. After World War II, in almost every industrialised country not only has the female labour force gone up but it has also undergone far reaching structural changes. The age and composition of the female labour force have changed and there has been a shift from agricultural and industrial occupation to the service sector white-collared jobs. The various theoretical explanations for the working women phenomena show that central to the role of women is the effect of the market. In the developing countries starting with colonialism and now continued by development process, women and environment have been turned into resources for appropriation in a process of capital accumulation on an unknown scale. Mostly, economically active women work either in agriculture, where the female participation is 78 per cent in Africa and 80 per cent in Asia, or in the urban informal sector varying between 25 per cent to 40 per cent in Latin America. Women are routinely discriminated against in terms of pay scales, job advancement, and job security; and are more likely to be unemployed compared to men.