Giving Compass' Take:

• Rachael Goodman and Sarah Kaplan explain how policymakers can acknowledge the challenges that women face and the work that women do to boost women’s economic inclusion.

• What cultural factors are at play in your area? How are women already addressing the challenges that they face? 

• Learn more about policy shifts to reduce inequalities in care work.

To achieve women’s economic inclusion, policymakers will need to either provide services to support women’s care work, or recognize and support the use of family systems to do so. Here are our recommendations:

  1. Pay attention to the barriers to women’s economic inclusion: Research has shown that women’s economic empowerment through microfinance, for example, may not be as effective as hoped, because recipients do not always have time to devote to their projects given their care responsibilities.
  2. Examine how cultural practices can enable and not just constrain women’s economic inclusion: Joint families and polygynous marriages, like Western nuclear families, have the potential to be both beneficial and harmful. Rather than trying to eliminate practices that can be bad for women and rejecting significant aspects of other cultures, we argue for a more careful and nuanced understanding of existing values and social systems.
  3. Find and celebrate the parts of social systems that are already empowering: Working with family systems that benefit women can create a stronger base for lasting improvement in women’s lives.
  4. Value care work as much as paid work. Current calculations of GDP do not include time spent on care work and therefore undervalue the contributions women are already making to the economy through unpaid work at home.

Read the full article on women’s economic inclusion by Rachael Goodman and Sarah Kaplan at Stanford Social Innovation Review.