Worldwide there is growing recognition of the importance of women’s empowerment, in its own right and for a range of development outcomes. Yet, the evidence on what works to empower women is mixed and impacts differ in different settings and across different programs. While much of the existing research has focused on relaxing external economic constraints, such as lack of credit and education, recent empirical evidence in economics indicates the existence of internal constraints as a potential barrier to empowerment, which can take the form of internalized psychological barriers such as lack of aspirations, low perceived agency (or belief in oneself) or low hope, and more. To understand how these internal constraints can be alleviated to promote women’s empowerment and spur development, the Faculty of Economics and Business is involved in two international projects. One in collaboration with a microfinance institution in Vietnam, and another aimed at improving food and nutrition security by enhancing women's empowerment in Bangladesh and Ethiopia. Claire Stein, a PhD candidate at FEB, is part of the Vietnam project’s research team. To acquire input for the further project, she met with local organizations in the country and performed qualitative research with women in Vietnam to understand empowerment in the local context.

Gender (in)equality

“Advancing women’s empowerment and working towards gender equality requires innovative solutions; addressing constraining factors beyond economic ones will be necessary, especially in environments where traditional gender norms remain. Of course, this must be done while promoting an understanding and respect for the local culture and engaging in culturally sensitive intervention design and research”, Stein states.

Gender equality has improved in Vietnam over the years; women are now participating in the labor market, are owners of small enterprises and are represented in the government. There are also several laws and policies to protect women against abuse. Nonetheless, traditional rigid gender perceptions towards men's and women's values and roles still prevail. Although Vietnam has made progress in terms of gender equality, the latest national report highlighted that important gaps remain (some of which are mentioned below) many of which are most probably linked to the persistent traditional norms.

A dual burden

The role assigned to women as family caregivers is a sustained and strong value in the minds and behaviors of Vietnamese people. By traditional belief, Vietnamese women are housekeepers and men manage remunerated activities. This reflects the belief that the place of a woman is below the place of a man in the household and that boys are more valued than girls, which often results in girls having to drop out of school, or women internalizing that they should be less educated (or make less money) than their husbands to maintain family harmony. All this is reflected in a preference for sons in Vietnam, which in turn leads to a widening sex ratio at birth (the sex-ratio at birth was 111.5 boys per 100 girls in 2019). Also, stereotypes on gender-appropriate fields of study or occupation and bias against women in leadership prevail.

The results of Claire Stein’s research show that women in Vietnam essentially face a dual burden. On the one hand women must work hard and contribute to the family well-being: they must take care of the children and the household; they often do unpaid work on the family crop or in other family businesses, or work in long-hour low-paid jobs. On the other hand, women are responsible for maintaining and respecting the family balance. Stein: “This means that women can participate in income-generating activities, but under the condition that they manage to take care of the household at the same time. However, the income generated by women is expected to be less than that of men. Such conditions make it difficult for women to rise in their communities and in society at large.”

Contextual research

During the qualitative research phase of her project, Stein discovered that when women were asked which women they admired most in their community, they often gave examples of women who could manage their household responsibilities well, who were hard-working and contributing to the household income and society, and who were engaged in community activities. “From the interviews, it seemed that women felt more empowered when they participated in income-generating activities, as it improved their bargaining power and ability to contribute to household’s financial decisions. However, women still needed the approval of their husbands to attend community activities or to access certain leadership positions.”

This highlights that contextual factors such as household dynamics, cultural factors, belief systems and so forth influence the various levels and domains of women empowerment in different ways. Vietnam is a country where collectivistic behavior is much more common than individualistic behavior that is mostly observed in Western societies. “When working on collaborative projects, such as the Vietnam project that is aimed at designing and testing an intervention for women empowerment, contextual factors should thus be researched and understood in order to design a culturally-relevant and feasible intervention, and to derive pertinent research questions’’, Stein explains.  

Different meanings in different cultures

In her research, the PhD candidate discovered that the understanding of women empowerment fluctuates in different contexts, and that cultural values shape ideals and the way that concepts are perceived. The literal translation of women empowerment in Vietnamese means “to give rights/power to women”, which can be understood differently than the English term. “When asked in such a way, women stated they had equal rights as men. But when asked about challenges, women stated multiple, including their multiple responsibilities and difficulties to engage in certain activities. Furthermore, certain cultural values were emphasized in some of the concepts discussed in the interviews. For instance, when women were asked about their aspirations, they often mentioned aspirations related to family well-being, and a sense of ‘self’ was less existent than in Western contexts, which reflected a culture valuing collectivism. This goes to show that understanding differences in culture, beliefs systems, and how they might impact concepts such as ‘empowerment’ is very important when engaging in cross-cultural projects, and is necessary to define indicators that are relevant to the local context, rather than ones that are Western-centric and that might not be understood in the same way in other cultures.”

References to further reading:

• Hinson, R., Lensink, R., & Mueller, A. (2019). Transforming Agribusiness in Developing Countries: SDGs and the Role of FinTech. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2019.07.002
• Asia Pacific UN Women (2021). Country Gender Equality Profile - Viet Nam. Retrieved from https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/Field%20Office%20ESEAsia/Docs/Publications/2021/10/vn-CGEP_Full.pdf
• Government of Viet Nam (2020). National Report 2020. Progress of Five-year-implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (Summary Report). Retrieved from https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/migration/vn/Summary-national-SDG-report_ENG.pdf
• Genicot, G., & Ray, D. (2017). Aspirations and Inequality. Econometrica, 85(2), 489-519. https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA13865
• Duflo, E. (2013). Hope, Aspirations and the Design of the Fight Against Poverty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Center for Ethics in Society.
• Garcia, A., Lensink, R., & Voors, M. (2020). Does Microcredit Increase Aspirational Hope? Evidence from a Group Lending Scheme in Sierra Leone. World Development, 128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104861

Questions? Please contact Claire Stein.