Women's Empowerment and Global Health: A Twenty-First-Century Agenda

Women’s Empowerment and Global Health

Women’s Empowerment and Global Health

A Twenty-First-Century Agenda

EDITED BY

Shari L. Dworkin, Monica Gandhi, and Paige Passano

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dworkin, Shari L., editor. | Gandhi, Monica, editor. | Passano, Paige, editor.

Title: Women’s empowerment and global health : a twenty-first-century agenda / edited by Shari L. Dworkin, Monica Gandhi, and Paige Passano.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016030545 (print) | LCCN 2016032540 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520272873 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520272880 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520962729 (Epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Women’s rights—Case studies. | Women—Health and hygiene—Case studies. | Women—Political activity—Cross-cultural studies. | Medical policy—Case studies. | Women—Social conditions—Case studies.

Classification: LCC HQ1236 .W598 2017 (print) | LCC HQ1236 (ebook) | DDC 305.42—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030545

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Empowering Women for Health

Gita Sen

SECTION ONE. SOCIOCULTURAL, EDUCATIONAL, AND HEALTH SERVICE INTERVENTIONS AS TOOLS OF EMPOWERMENT

Introduction

Dallas Swendeman and Paula Tavrow

1. Taking Services to the Doorstep: Providing Rural Indian Women Greater Control over Their Fertility

Pallavi Gupta, Kirti Iyengar, and Sharad Iyengar

2. Obstetric Fistula in Kenya: A Holistic Model of Outreach, Treatment, and Reintegration

Lindsey Pollaczek, Paula Tavrow, and Habiba Mohamed

3. Pathways to Choice: Delaying Age of Marriage through Girls’ Education in Northern Nigeria

Daniel Perlman, Fatima Adamu, Mairo Mandara, Olorukooba Abiola, David Cao, and Malcolm Potts

4. Early Empowerment: The Evolution and Practice of Girls’ Boot Camps in Kenya and Haiti

Karen Austrian, Judith Bruce, and M. Catherine Maternowska

5. Empowerment and HIV Risk Reduction among Sex Workers in Bangladesh

Victor Robinson, Theresa Y. Hwang, and Elisa Martínez

6. Gender Roles in U.S. Women with HIV: Intersection with Psychological and Physical Health Outcomes

Leslie R. Brody, Sannisha K. Dale, Gwendolyn A. Kelso, Ruth C. Cruise, Kathleen M. Weber, Lynissa R. Stokes, and Mardge H. Cohen

7. Examining the Impact of a Masculinities-Based HIV Prevention and Antiviolence Program in Limpopo and Eastern Cape, South Africa

Shari L. Dworkin, Abigail M. Hatcher, Christopher Colvin, and Dean Peacock

SECTION TWO. STRUCTURAL (LEGAL/POLICY, ECONOMIC) INTERVENTIONS AS TOOLS OF EMPOWERMENT

Introduction

Shelly Grabe, Sheri Weiser, Shari L. Dworkin, Joanna Weinberg, and Lara Stemple

8. Empowering Adolescent Girls and Women for Improved Sexual Health in Zimbabwe: Lessons Learned from a Combined Livelihoods and Life Skills Intervention (SHAZ!)

Megan S. Dunbar and Imelda Mudekunye-Mahaka

9. Is Microfinance Coupled with Gender Training Empowering for Women? Lessons from the IMAGE Process Evaluation in Rural South Africa

Abigail M. Hatcher, Jacques de Wet, Christopher Bonell, Godfrey Phetla, Vicki Strange, Paul Pronyk, Julia Kim, Linda Morison, Charlotte Watts, John Porter, and James R. Hargreaves

10. Older U.S. Women’s Economic Security, Health, and Empowerment: The Fight against Opponents of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

Carroll L. Estes

11. Women’s Health and Empowerment after the Decriminalization of Abortion in Mexico City

Gustavo Ortiz Millán

12. Impact of a Grassroots Property Rights Program on Women’s Empowerment in Rural Kenya

Kate Grünke-Horton and Shari L. Dworkin

13. Land Tenure and Women’s Empowerment and Health: A Programmatic Evaluation of Structural Change in Nicaragua

Shelly Grabe, Anjali Dutt, and Carlos Arenas

Conclusions: A Twenty-First-Century Agenda for Women’s Empowerment and Health

Shari L. Dworkin and Lara Stemple

List of Contributors

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1.1. Map of India

1.2. Map of Rajasthan

1.3. Conceptual framework of the intervention by ARTH

1.4. Educational materials used by health workers

1.5. Wall painting by ARTH

1.6. Number of ARTH pregnancy tests done

1.7. Who conducted ARTH pregnancy tests?

1.8. How many women wanted to have a child at time of pregnancy test?

1.9. How many women wanted to continue their pregnancy?

1.10. What did women do in case of unwanted pregnancy?

1.11. How many women underwent safe abortion?

3.1. Number of girls enrolled in secondary schools in CGE project communities

3.2. Kaplan-Meier estimates of the proportion of women unmarried by age

4.1. Adolescent Data Guide, 6- to 17-year-old females not in school, Kenya

8.1. SHAZ! program logic model

8.2. HIV community risk map developed during a life skills session

8.3. Economic decline in Zimbabwe, 2007–2008

13.1. Organizational participation and land ownership hypothesized to predict gender role ideology

13.2. Relationship between structural power, interpersonal power, and violence

TABLES

1.1. Profile of women who used the pregnancy test service in the villages

5.1. Demographics of sex workers in the Stage 2 survey

6.1. Demographic information for HIV-positive and HIV-negative women

6.2. Definitions of coping strategies coded from narratives

6.3. Partial correlations between coping strategies and gender roles

6.4. Partial correlations between coping strategies, physical violence, and sexual relationship power

6.5. Partial correlations between coping strategies and psychological outcomes

6.6. Partial correlations of age with coping strategies, resilience, gender roles, depression, quality of life, and physical violence for HIV-positive and HIV-negative women and total sample

6.7. WORLD intervention likely to impact particular coping strategies

8.1. Retention by study visit and group

8.2. Intervention completion by study arm

8.3. Effect of the intervention comparing full sample to sample receiving microgrant

8.4. Effect of participation in the intervention arm on biological outcomes

9.1. IMAGE process evaluation data collection methods

13.1. Mean differences among Xochilt-Acalt study variables

Introduction

Empowering Women for Health

GITA SEN

In the lexicon of gender equality, there are probably no two words as common as women’s empowerment. Ever since its early usage (Sen and Grown 1987, p 89) in the mid-1980s, few terms have so captured the imagination of activists, scholars, advocates, scientists, intervention experts, and policy makers alike as the term empowerment. Early authors on empowerment (Batliwala 1994; Kabeer 1994, 1999; Oxaal and Baden 1997; Sen and Batliwala 2000; Stromquist 2002) and more recent ones (Cornwall and Edwards 2014) have pointed to the risks inherent in the rapid spread of this term. As Presser and Sen (2000) have argued, while the rhetoric about women’s empowerment is pervasive, the concept has remained ill-defined (p 3).

Is the term acceptable because it is vague enough to allow people to interpret it as they please, filling it with content that can be radical, objective, or simply business-as-usual? Is its wide usage due to its appearance of promoting strong action without any intrinsic policy accountability for actually doing so? Despite ongoing worries about the term and its use, empowerment continues to be a powerful concept to understand and use to advocate for social and political transformation. For example, after an extensive global debate over development priorities, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development selected Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls as the fifth of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld). Although discrepancies remain over the definition of the term empowerment, programs aiming to enhance women’s empowerment continue to spring up across the globe—and researchers are increasingly deploying the term and designing studies to better measure it. Given this growing interest, the editors of the current volume requested contributing authors to define what they mean by empowerment, describe interventions that have been designed to change the factors that lead to empowerment, and think carefully about how empowerment affects health outcomes. In some chapters, authors also discuss the reverse: how health impacts empowerment. But how does one measure empowerment? And why does it matter for health?

MEASURING EMPOWERMENT

The central meaning of empowerment in early writing is the process by which the powerless gain greater control over the circumstances of their lives (Sen and Batliwala 2000, p 18). Power is central both to the word itself and to the concept. Feminist activist-scholars, searching for an appropriate word to express what was being discussed within the rapidly growing discourse and practice of gender equality and development, gravitated towards the term primarily because it contained the word power. They recognized the pervasiveness of the power relations that govern women’s lives in families (through unfair division of resources, labor, access to health and education, constraints on mobility and decision making, and control over women’s sexuality), communities (through discrimination on the basis of gender as well as on factors such as caste, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age, indigeneity, and cultural norms, beliefs, and practices), markets (inequitable access to markets for labor, land, credit, technology, and other resources), and the state (discriminatory laws, institutions, policies and practices; poorly funded or poor quality government programs) (ibid., p 21).

Importantly, empowerment implies more than just formal equality between women and men as a matter of law. Empowerment is a way for previously powerless women to gain control over material resources—physical, human, financial, and intellectual—and over ideology (beliefs, values, and attitudes) (Batliwala 1994). It therefore includes both extrinsic control and growing internal confidence and capabilities—a transformation of women’s beliefs and consciousness. For many feminists, empowerment is largely something women must do for themselves (Rowlands 1997). It is not simply something to be done for them from outside by governments, corporate actors, development agencies, or even non-governmental organizations, whose role is to create enabling environments and, if needed, to act as catalysts of change (Sholkamy 2010). It is women’s own actions and awareness that hold the key to their empowerment. This kind of thinking is certainly reflective of several works in this book. For example, Victor Robinson, Theresa Hwang, and Elisa Martínez (chapter 5) meticulously detail how sex worker collectivization in India shaped empowerment and health-related processes recursively, producing outcomes well beyond what individual-level action could ever achieve. Kate Grünke-Horton and Shari Dworkin (chapter 12) detail how women at the grassroots level in Nyanza, Kenya, worked to secure women’s access to land using community mobilization, mediation to resolve land disputes, and collaboration with government officials and traditional leaders. These efforts not only improved women’s voice and agency but shifted their status in the community—and reduced their risk of HIV and gender-based violence.

These examples also highlight the importance of groups and group processes. Groups have been stressed as providing strength and support for individual women who feel subordinated and oppressed by power relations (Bisnath and Elson 1999). Indeed, it was personal involvement in group processes that catalyzed much of the original work by feminist scholars (Sen and Grown 1987; Batliwala 1994). But group processes are not enough. As Kabeer (2001) emphasizes, women must be able to exercise agency (the ability to use their new resources to create new opportunities), leading to achievements (new social outcomes). In the context of this volume, achievements include health and social and economic outcomes. Most authors in this volume indeed draw upon and deploy Kabeer’s definition of empowerment, which is significant because it highlights the limitations not only of individual-level analysis (knowledge, information, skills) but also reveals the ways in which newly gained resources amplify women’s voices and spark social change. In short, resources coupled with collective action and voice lead to a catalytic and internally transformative process within women, creating in them the ability not only to speak truth to power but to be able to change the practice of the power relations that constrain their lives (Klugman 2000). Megan Dunbar’s research (chapter 8) reveals that adolescents in Zimbabwe who are at high risk of acquiring HIV can be supported in their process of empowerment through a combination of group-based vocational training, life skills education, and economic and livelihood opportunities to reduce their HIV risks. Abigail Hatcher and her colleagues (chapter 9) highlight the importance of merging resources (microfinance) with gender equity training and community-level action. The chapter reveals the specific mechanisms that shaped empowerment-related processes—and these include both control over resources and collective action (among others).

Such a transformation can be rejected by families, communities, and male partners, but this need not be a zero-sum game (such as the assumption that when women gain, men lose), as others have argued (Dworkin et al. 2012, Dworkin 2015; Sen and Batliwala 2000, p 20). While it is generally accepted that gender inequities constrain women’s opportunities and yield poor health outcome among women, the impact of this gendered power imbalance on men is less understood. The literature on masculinities bears evidence that unequal gender power relations, while giving men greater control over and access to a variety of resources, can also be damaging to men’s own health and well-being, resulting in narrowed emotional and cognitive experiences, violence, substance abuse, and premature death (Baker et al. 2014; Courtenay 2000; Dworkin et al. 2012; Hatcher et al. 2014). The central importance of masculinities based gender-transformative health programs, such as the one described in chapter 7, shows us that we can simultaneously work towards a social environment that sets the stage for women’s health and empowerment alongside men’s social transformation—because this shift in inequitable social norms improves not just women’s health but also men’s health.

The discussion above also highlights how much of the foundational writing on empowerment conceptualizes it as both process and outcome. But if women’s empowerment, while not a zero-sum game, is a complex and perhaps open-ended process, where does that leave researchers who need to rigorously trace cause and effect or to clearly specify variables? Can outcomes be attributed to particular causes if complex, layered processes are at play? A number of authors (Kabeer 1999; Dixon-Mueller and Germain 2000; Jejeebhoy 2000; Kishor 2000; Kritz, Makinwa-Adebusoye, and Gurak 2000) have grappled with this question, and some of the authors in this volume continue to press this debate forward. To engage the complexity of these processes, the editors asked each of the authors in this volume to discuss the promises and limitations of their research and its implementation. In addition, each chapter contains boxes that summarize the successes or challenges that arose during program implementation or an explanation of how the program diverge from previous assumptions about health and empowerment in favor of a more contemporary approach. The work in this volume shows that, with a skillful mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, it is indeed possible to measure inputs, processes, and outcomes in innovative ways that lead to new insights. One of these critical insights is how empowerment is linked to health.

GENDER, POWER, AND HEALTH

Recent decades have seen an explosion of academic and policy writing on women and health in both high, middle, and low-income countries (Doyal 1995; Sen, George, and Östlin 2002). These multiple strands of literature are often built on a core hypothesis that gender inequality has adverse effects on the health of women and girls, of infants and small children, and even of men. These two concepts—women’s empowerment and gender equality—are deeply intertwined with a third concept: universal human rights.

Gendered power relations are a central basis of gender inequality. Sen, Östlin, and George (2007) posit that gendered power is embedded in structural determinants, impacting health through four pathways: (1) discriminatory values, norms, practices, and behaviors; (2) differential exposures and vulnerabilities to disease, disability, and injuries; (3) biases in health systems; and (4) biases in health research. These various biases and forms of discrimination are themselves interlinked, a product of structural determinants of health, including multiple and intersecting power relationships, demographic factors, economic realities, and legal frameworks and institutions, which result in different health outcomes by gender.

The impact of gendered power on health is complex and multifaceted. Power imbalances are exacerbated by discriminatory belief systems and values, such as the belief that a girl should be married off at the onset of puberty (often coupled with the belief that she therefore doesn’t need education) or that women who do not obey their husband deserve violence. Changing regressive gender norms is empowering for both young men and young women and can lead to improved health for both. In this volume, the case study by Shelly Grabe, Anjali Dutt, and Carlos Arenas (chapter 13) on Xochilt Acalt demonstrates how discriminatory beliefs and practices keep women from owning land. The authors show how breaking restrictive gender ideologies can embolden women to assume greater power and economic autonomy in the household while simultaneously safeguarding their health. Leslie Brody, Sannisha Dale, Gwendolyn Kelso, Ruth Cruise, Kathleen Weber, Lynissa Stokes, and Mardge Cohen (chapter 6) demonstrate how HIV-positive women who question traditional gender norms and connect with a supportive community of peers fare better in terms of adherence to antiretroviral medications and broader health outcomes.

Exposures and vulnerabilities also differ by gender. For example, women are more exposed to kitchen smoke and thus more vulnerable to acquiring respiratory disease than men in many parts of the world. These vulnerabilities are further exacerbated by gendered biases in health care. In chapters 1 and 11, Pallavi Gupta, Kirti Iyengar, Sharad Iyengar, and Gustavo Ortiz Millán vividly illustrate the harsh repercussions of poor access to abortion services on poor and rural women—and the children who depend on them. Both chapters call upon governments to take action to protect women’s health, showing that as higher quality, safe abortion services become available, women no longer need to risk their lives to control their fertility.

Biases in research funding and research methodologies can also play a significant role in health outcomes of marginalized groups. Indeed, in practice, health systems rarely recognize the multiple challenges to accessing health care that girls and women often face (e.g., lack of income, restrictions on mobility, or the disproportionate burden of caring for others). In the second chapter of this volume, Lindsey Pollaczek, Paula Tavrow, and Habiba Mohamed reveal how weaknesses in the health-care infrastructure, paired with stigma linked to obstetric fistula within rural communities, required empathetic community insiders to find and assist the women whose basic reproductive rights had been denied. In chapter 10, Carroll Estes reveals how political and economic processes, alongside broader societal norms, shape assumptions about whether politicians even view women as deserving of health care, Medicare, and social security—and discusses the challenges associated with multisectoral collaborative social movements for social change.

Govender and Penn-Kekana (2010) argue that gender has a profound impact on interactions between patients and health-care providers. However, empowerment of both patients and providers (who are themselves marginalized) can alter and improve the health consequences related to these interactions. Khan’s (2014) study of Pakistan’s lady health worker (LHW) program also shows that empowerment may be bidirectional and long-term. Her case studies show that within the private sphere and her own family, the LHW is redressing gender balances without directly confronting this most patriarchal of institutions. . . . [H]er work has earned her increased agency[:] . . . decision-making over her own reproductive health, the schooling and marriage decisions of her children, and the management of her own and family finances (p 120). Pallavi Gupta, Kirti Iyengar, and Sharad Iyengar in chapter 1 of this volume provide further evidence of bidirectional empowerment. By training health workers from castes and communities similar to those of the rural women they intended to reach, trust and acceptability was enhanced while the new knowledge empowered both health workers and rural women who needed information and services.

The authors in this volume show how this kind of bidirectionality matters outside the health system as well. In chapter 3, Daniel Perlman, Fatima Adamu, Mairo Mandara, Olorukooba Abiola, David Cao, and Malcolm Potts reveal the potential for multigenerational health impacts in communities where the gender imbalance in rural secondary education is slowly shifting towards improving girls’ access to and retention in secondary school. Through extensive engagement with adolescent girls and their communities, patriarchal norms are being influenced subtly, but profoundly. As girls exert greater influence over critical life decisions, they will become different types of role models for their children. As a result, their children’s health and educational trajectories are likely to be impacted. In chapter 4, Karen Austrian, Judith Bruce, and M. Catherine Maternowska discuss a unique intervention that targets organizations that aspire to serve vulnerable populations of adolescent girls. The intervention helps organizations rethink the content of their programs, strengthening the organizations’ ability to support girls in building assets that will protect them as they transition through adolescence and into adulthood. By training program designers and implementers to be more strategic and accountable when designing interventions and outreach strategies, program planners can reverse common mistakes that tend to deepen the marginalization of the poorest girls, thereby improving their chances to participate fully in society and realize their human rights.

EMPOWERMENT AND THE HUMAN RIGHT TO HEALTH

The international human rights framework addresses gender equality and health, as well as the interconnectedness between them. From the early 1990s on, first through the vehicle of major United Nations conferences (the International Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993; the International Conference on Population and Development [ICPD] in Cairo in 1994; and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995), a human rights-based approach to women’s health came into its own (Chavkin and Chesler 2005; Sen 2014). Although the right to health was enshrined in the Constitution of the World Health Organization; the Universal Declaration on Human Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR); and the Alma-Ata declaration, it was not until the flurry of international activity in the 1990s, spurred largely by women’s rights organizations from around the globe, that international instruments recognized the links between women’s health and gender equality. For example, these instruments began to recognize sexual and reproductive health and rights and the right to be free from gender-based violence as key components to full realization of women’s human rights. The approach of the 1990s represented a more inclusive approach, emphasizing the right to health services as well as the right to access key material and social determinants such as clean water and adequate housing, sanitation, and nutrition.

This human rights–based approach to health used sexuality and reproduction as central themes in shaping gender inequality, while also addressing violations of women’s human rights by directing attention to the issue of bodily integrity. It emphasized laws, policies, and programs that would both advance gender equality and advance sexual and reproductive health and rights. The Programme of Action of the ICPD included a central chapter titled Gender Equality, Equity and Empowerment of Women (United Nations Population Fund 2004, chapter 4). More recently, advocacy for sexual rights has included claims beyond those for reproductive rights and gender equality. Examples include the right to sexual autonomy outside of one’s reproductive capacity (i.e., nonprocreative sex) and equality rights based on sexual orientation and gender identity (the Yogyakarta Principles in 2007, the UNHCHR Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity [SOGI] declaration in 2011, and additional developments that emerged from the 2014 Human Rights Council Resolution). The 2000 ICESCR’s General Comment on the Right to Health also articulated a broader conceptualization of rights, asserting states’ obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to health for all people. The UN Political Declarations on HIV/AIDS from 2001, 2006, and 2011 asserted that gender inequality can place women and girls at risk for HIV. While too long to list, there have been numerous other general comments and international recommendations related to women’s health and empowerment, including ones that are focused on female genital mutilation, child marriage, and violence, several of which emerged out of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Have the approaches that link gender equality, women’s empowerment, and human rights been assessed rigorously enough to conclude that empowerment interventions affect the realization of the right to health? Some of the literature cited earlier (Kishor 2000; Jejeebhoy 2000; Kritz, Makinwa-Adebusoye, and Gurak 2000; as well as other chapters in Presser and Sen 2000) has begun such an assessment, and more recent work is beginning to grapple more thoroughly with measuring rights and examining the causal links between rights-based interventions and health outcomes (Gruskin and Ferguson 2013; Polet et al. 2015; Unnithan 2015). And although there were multiple assessments of the achievements of the ICPD agenda occasioned by its twentieth-year review processes in 2014, they tended to be broad, partially due to the broad nature of the ICPD agenda itself.

In this context, the UN Population Fund’s global review (UNPF 2014) demonstrates that, while much has been achieved, major challenges remain. These include considerable inequalities both within and between countries in relation to sexual and reproductive health outcomes and significant shortfalls in the fulfillment of women’s human right to health overall. But these results also come with caveats about the inadequacy of data and the paucity of strong empirical research, even as theory has advanced and political commitments continue to be made. Importantly, this volume helps fill the gaps in the empirical research base by providing detailed descriptions and lessons learned from both science-based interventions and advocacy programs that strive towards the achievement of fundamental human rights.

Part of the challenge of linking health, human rights, and gender equality is the sometimes stark difference in perspectives, approaches, methodologies, and language used by those in the health sciences and the social sciences and those working in the realms of law, policy, and human rights advocacy. This is why the University of California Global Health Institute’s (UCGHI) Center of Expertise (COE) on Women’s Health and Empowerment (WHE) was established. The editors of this book are situated in different disciplines (medicine, public health, medical sociology) and seek to address the major gap in cross-disciplinary communication and action related to women’s empowerment and health. The COE works to achieve this through integrated research, educational initiatives, and knowledge dissemination—pushing scholars and practitioners across the ten University of California campuses and beyond to engage in discussions, expand their perspectives, and work collaboratively to produce knowledge and educational programs that benefit from a multidisciplinary perspective. This book represents one concrete step towards translating the goals of the Center of Expertise in Women’s Health and Empowerment into a reality. It is written for a general audience, with particular relevance for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students across disciplines and for practitioners implementing health and empowerment programs. In addition, instead of being focused only on academic research studies or only on work carried out by community-based organizations, many of the chapters in this book represent an intersection between theory and practice: a collaboration between academic researchers or policy experts and community-based organizations or non-governmental organizations.

A basic reason for the slowness in developing a multidisciplinary perspective may lie in the politics of research on women and health. To date, research politics have downplayed research on gender in favor of research on biologic sex (Kreiger 2003; Springer 2012). Far too little funding has been earmarked for the combination of biomedical and social science research that can uncover their complex connections (Sharman and Johnson 2012; Springer, Stellman, and Jordan-Young 2012). These internal biases in research do not incentivize innovative cross-disciplinary research or recognize the value of social science research in relation to biomedical research. To explore newer hypotheses about the links between health, human rights, and gender in this context is not easy.

Thus, the editors and authors of this volume offer a timely and valuable contribution to bridging three existing divides: between empowerment and health, between theory and practice, and between science and advocacy. Empowering Women for Global Health: A Twenty-First-Century Agenda provides a much needed, in-depth examination of specific women’s health and empowerment interventions and programs implemented across the world. The case studies provide readers with a window into these programs—enabling them to see, in different contexts, what works, what doesn’t, and how. Several of the chapters are complemented by short videos that take readers right into the setting, bringing them closer to the work, eliciting the feel of the context, and highlighting some of the promises and challenges of carrying out actual programs on the ground.

The first section of the book explores sociocultural, educational, and health systems’ interventions as tools for empowerment, with each chapter describing an attempt to alter the factors that lead to disempowerment and poor health. The cases in section 1 reveal the importance of reaching out directly to community insiders who have the most at stake and perhaps the greatest incentive to lift binding constraints to transform their communities. The second section of the book presses beyond individual, group, educational, and organizational processes to explore broader economic, policy, and structural interventions as tools for empowerment. The authors in this section delve into factors that structurally shape health, such as access to and control over resources and rights-based and policy-level approaches. This section delves into analyses of microfinance, property rights, and land tenure to demonstrate the powerful influence that factors outside of health have on health and empowerment. This section illustrates the importance of law and policy to secure human rights and emphasizes the need for strong advocates working across multiple sectors to ensure that these laws and policy changes translate into a reality for people on the ground. This volume shows that the time is ripe to provide some answers and raise new questions about how women’s empowerment improves health—and to light the path leading us there.

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