The SEEP Network's WEE Peer Learning Group (PLG) focused on shifting social norms in the economy and scaling change

What We Aimed to Achieve

The WEE Peer Learning Group focused on how social norms affect women and the economy, including gender norms (i.e. asset ownership or violence against women) and economic norms (i.e. what is considered work, versus leisure, and the perceived skill and value placed on different economic activities). Norms that lead to gendered occupational segregation maintain the gender pay gap, and skew prices for products and services considered “female” versus those that are “male.” Unfortunately, these norms shape and distort markets and economic policy by influencing cost-benefit analyses and investment decisions. 

Development efforts may promote women within existing market systems, but fail to achieve transformational change because they do not challenge the social norms in the economy that systematically discriminate against women in the selected markets. As a result, market-based programs must design interventions for WEE that address social norms in the economy.

The WEE Peer Learning Group focused on the following learning questions:

• What are social norms in the economy?
• How do we diagnose social norms in specific contexts?
• What strategies are effective at creating change at scale?
• How do we measure changes in social norms?

Featured Resource

As a culmination of the insights from the PLG experience, this learning brief provides an introductory overview to social norms and their relationship to women’s economic empowerment. It also highlights practical tools, approaches and frameworks that practitioners and researchers can use to diagnose, measure and change social norms. 

Organizational Participants