The Politics of the Empowerment of Women: Mapping Enabling Environments within Narratives of Femininity and Power

Jinn Winn Chong, American University Washington College of Law

Abstract

ABSTRACT

July 2010 marks another milestone in international women’s agenda when the United Nations General Assembly voted unanimously to create UN WOMEN, a United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women to “accelerate the progress of meeting the needs of women and girls worldwide.” Hailed as “a historic move,” UN Women, operational since January 2011, is envisioned to address the challenges the United Nations has faced in its efforts to promote gender equality globally since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the landmark agreement of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Amongst various issues of importance, the empowerment of women has been earmarked as an important priority for UN Women in response to the recognition that gender inequalities remain deeply entrenched in every society. Notwithstanding the increased centrality of various efforts, particularly of gender mainstreaming in all international commitments and interventions, the effectiveness of these strategies to reduce gender inequality and advancing the empowerment of women has not been sufficiently established. These strategies have failed to transform existing power structures that perpetuate inequalities. Institutions and organizations continue to pay lip-service to aspirations of gender mainstreaming without fully understanding its basic texts, concepts, and methodologies, or without changing the existing economic policy framework. Observable negative impacts in fact extend to instances of greater wage gap between men and women, deterioration of working conditions, weakened social safety nets, and an overall decline in the welfare of women and girls in many parts of the world.

To that end, this paper aims to elucidate the complexities and challenges of advancing the global agenda on the empowerment of women, provide reflections and analyses of key discourses to sophisticate and enrich discussions of issues pertaining to the empowerment of women, and to engage in brainstorming for collaborative approaches towards addressing these issues. The paper proposes an ethnographic approach to understand the real challenges women all over the world face, to see concepts of femininity, power, oppression, empowerment, agency, participation, and social relationships through the lens of their lives and experiences, and recommends approaches to work with them to reconfigure these concepts in ways that would help bridge some of these challenges.