Firstly, lets familiarise with some key terms and concepts to help us explore this topic further.
Gender based violence
| Reflection Activity
Can you think of any examples from your experience of these types of violence against women? Note these down |
Our study is focused on what happens when women are at work. The workplace can take many different forms and we will explore some of these during this course. Gender-based violence related to work could be in the workplace itself or linked to the process of getting to work or being in employment. What forms can this take?
Discrimination at work may be compounded by physical or psychological violence which may be gender-based. The clearest illustration of this is sexual harassment; but harassment accompanied by violence or the threat of violence need not be sexual in intent. There is a close connection between violence at work and precarious work, gender, youth, and certain high-risk occupational sectors.
Women’s economic engagement and economic empowerment
Economic engagement refers to women’s economic activities. The focus here is on women’s material condition, and access to services like education and healthcare.
Confusion between economic engagement (income generation activities) and economic empowerment is a common yet critical error. It is useful in this context to note the difference between a person’s condition and position (Johnson 2005). The former denotes material state (health, level of poverty etc.), while the latter refers to one’s social, political and economic place in society. A great deal of past attention to women’s development has been paid to their weaker condition, and thus to their unequal access to resources and greater requirement of services. Many programmes that claim to be working towards women’s empowerment are actually focusing only on their condition: their access to services like education and healthcare, for example.
Women’s economic empowerment should therefore be understood as an aspect of empowerment more broadly; it should certainly not be confused with mere economic engagement or even with skills training. Ultimately, economic engagement is only empowering if the underlying power relations that subjugate women are also addressed. Women can only bargain, in other words, if they are empowered enough to do so.
In the Women, Work and Violence in South Asia study, the focus is on the link between women’s economic engagement, i.e their economic income earning activities and their experience of violence.
Harassment and pressure
Harassment and pressure (also known as bullying or mobbing) at the workplace can occur as various offensive behaviours. It is characterised by persistently negative attacks of a physical or psychological nature, which are typically unpredictable, irrational and unfair, on an individual or group of employees. Sexual harassment is a particular form of harassment.
Informal economy (informal sector)
Our study focused on formal employment which many of us are familiar with, and with working in the informal sector which in many ways is more challenging and difficult to define.
Although countries work with different definitions of the informal economy, the term may be understood to refer to “all economic activities by workers and economic activities that are – in law or in practice – not covered, or insufficiently covered, by formal arrangements”. The term has largely replaced “informal sector”, perhaps in general acknowledgement of the ever-growing economic weight of informal activities in the international and national economies.
The concept of the informal economy covers two very different situations:
- informality due to the lack of a formal reference point, where there is no applicable labour standard, and thus no obligations to be filled or rights to be respected or demanded;
- informality due to non-conformity with a legal reference point, where applicable labour standards exist but are completely or partially flouted and neither obligations nor rights are recognised.
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