The existence and persistence of harmful gender norms shape all aspects of women’s economic lives. As development initiatives try to expand women’s economic opportunity, the norms underlying market and operational systems can work against their efforts, and women themselves. At times, male intimate partners, seeing their wives and girlfriends enter the workforce for the first time, sense a threat to their own power and masculinity or fear ridicule from their communities and react with violence.

Women with paid jobs are 6.7% more likely than other women to experience sexual violence and 7.4% more likely to experience emotional violence from an intimate partner in their lifetimes than those without paid jobs, according to new ICRW research from Nepal. Women working outside the home encounter violence that they otherwise might not, and are 7.2% more likely to experience physical violence and 8.3% more likely to experience emotional violence from someone other than an intimate partner.

Economic empowerment initiatives can fail to recognize and account for norms that dictate – even implicitly – women’s positions within value chains, often confining them to specific sectors, non-managerial roles, and informality. Finally, these initiatives increase the demands on women already struggling with time poverty. Especially where workplaces lack childcare facilities (like 95% of apparel factories in Bangalore), the most vulnerable women are forced to choose between tending to their families and earning the salaries that provide for them.

The unintended consequences of economic empowerment programs are sobering: gender-based violence, time poverty, workforce reduction, limited entrepreneurship. But new efforts to shift focus from providing economic inputs to transforming underlying gender norms offer promising solutions for women and their families. By targeting norms, these approaches are able to increase women’s economic well-being while preventing or mitigating harm.

ICRW’s session goes in-depth into unintended consequences of women’s economic empowerment programs, with experts presenting promising practices that are transforming gender norms across market systems and value chains.

If you cannot attend in person, join us via livestream by registering here: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/3231617899384809219.

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