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Women entrepreneurs are considered here as a backbone of economic growth and development. This research is conducted to explain the role of microfinance banks in women's financial, socioeconomic, and political empowerment. The sample was gathered from the customers of microfinance banks operating in the specific areas of Sukkur, Pano Aqil, and Khairpur districts of Sindh province. Women perception about the microfinance bank was found to be positive as they give positive feedback about the banks. According to the findings, limited knowledge about business and financial matters make it highly challenging for women entrepreneurs to start and run business smoothly. However, most of the women are living separate with their husbands, and due to more children, women enjoy freedom of mobility.

This chapter critically analyzes the outcomes of a legal reform enacted in Bali to address unintended consequences of a World Bank policy that undermined women’s economic, legal, and human rights.

This qualitative exploratory inquiry employs ethnographic data including participant observations and 18 interviews conducted in Denpasar, Bali.

The analysis suggests that policy measures intended to empower women which fail to address the influence of gender in the formation and functioning of social institutions reinforce conceptualizations of gender that constrain women’s autonomy and reify patriarchal sociocultural institutions.

Conceptualizations of gender in post-conflict research have lagged behind the richness of theories pertaining to gender as a social structure. Incorporating analyses of gender ideologies into the research phase of policy development will bridge this gap between theory and application.

Calls for women’s empowerment in the wake of the collapse of central governance structures, such as in the Arab Spring, must be accompanied by attention of feminist researchers and activists ensuring that policy measures intended to address barriers to women’s equality move beyond conceptions of empowerment that privilege economic capital. Dominant frameworks employed by microcredit programs and legal reformers emphasizing economic independence without attending to structural causes of women’s marginalization run the ironic risk of more deeply entrenching harmful social institutions.

This project allows women’s voices to reciprocally transform social theories and practices, contributing to understandings of the influence of gender in legal reform efforts and gender as a social structure.

Anna Julia Cooper and Septima Poinsette Clark were two prominent late 19th- and early 20th-century educators. Cooper and Clark taught African American students in federally sanctioned, segregated schools in the South. Drawing on womanist thought as a theoretical lens, this chapter argues that Cooper and Clark’s intellectual thoughts on race, racism, education, and pedagogy informed their teaching practices. Influenced by their socio-cultural, historical, familial, and education, they implemented antioppressionist pedagogical practices as a way to empower their students and address the educational inequalities their students were subjected to in a highly racialized, violent, and repressive social order. Historical African American women educators’ social critiques on race and racism are rarely examined, particularly as they pertain to how their critiques influence their teaching practices. Cooper and Clark’s critiques about race and racism are pertinent to the story of education and racial empowerment during the Jim Crow era.

Despite some decline, most Sub Saharan African countries still exhibit very high levels of fertility, resulting in the lengthening of the phase of strong population growth. Using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data collected over a pooled sample of more than 430,000 married women living in 33 countries, the author examines the relationship between empowerment and desired fertility. The author constructs six different proxies of empowerment: two “objective” proxies (education and labor force participation), three “subjective” proxies (say in household decisions, non-acceptance of domestic violence, and no son preference), and a “relative” proxy (small spousal age difference). The author first shows that these six dimensions are related with one another and highly variable from one country to another across the region. the author then explores the relationship of these dimensions with desired fertility at the individual level. On the pooled sample, the author find that there is a strong and negative relationship between all six dimensions of empowerment and desired fertility: in other words, women who have a low degree of empowerment tend to want a higher number of children. This result still holds when taking into account country fixed-effects to account for country-level characteristics. However, when examining more closely the relationship at the country level, the author finds that there is some variation on the strength of the relationship and that its sign is reversed for some indicators in some countries. Lastly, the author finds that local context matters which suggests that empowerment policies should address both the individual and collective dimensions of empowerment.

The focus of the study was to explore the understanding of family among homeless adults in Southeast Texas. We incorporated both qualitative and quantitative methods by interviewing two key groups (short-term homeless, long-term homeless) over a 16-week period. Thirty homeless participants were interviewed using 18 questions designed to explore their understanding of family and the social supports that lead to resiliency. Participant ages ranged from 19 to 56 with an average of 44 years. Twenty-six participants were male and four were female. Half of all homeless participants claimed to lack familial support from either biological family or close friends. Among short-term homeless individuals, five of seventeen identified their biological family as fulfilling the role of a traditional family, while among long-term homeless adults, five of thirteen identified their friends as fulfilling the role of a familial unit. A recurring theme emerged in which participants defined family as those individuals who were consistently accessible for support, whether biological relations or non-related friends and companions. As we seek to improve our programs of assistance and advocacy, these findings become important as a step toward honoring our clients and recognizing the validity of their perceived realities as we reconstruct the models by which we facilitate interaction and intervention.

The traditional Confucian management system is considered distinctly different from Western-based management. This study draws data from indigenous Taiwanese firms listed on its public stock market and examines the associations among various human resource (HR) systems and organizational performance. First, factor analysis is used to explore a wide range of HR practices. Then, cluster analysis is used to classify indigenous Taiwanese firms with regard to their HR practices. Indigenous Taiwanese firms were found to use various HR systems, ranging from traditional Confucian HR to high-involvement HR practices. Companies that used high-involvement HR systems were found to perform better than those using a traditional Confucian HR system.

This paper assesses the impact of a pioneering and unique initiative by Hindustan Lever Ltd, the Indian subsidiary of Unilever Ltd through its Project Shakti program. The study used qualitative interviews of women microentrepreneurs participating in this program about personal and occupational issues. Our analysis suggested several themes such as entrepreneurial development, economic empowerment, and social empowerment.