Women's Social Rights: Untapped Economic Potential

This paper analyzes whether women’s social rights play a role in fostering higher levels of economic development. Prior development initiatives and economic policies failed to account for the productive capacities of women by discriminating against their basic rights to things such as an equitable education, equal inheritance, and marital rights. Applying the CIRI (Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights) dataset for women’s social rights, I found that improvements in these areas of human rights leads to significant increases in real GDP per capita, which highlights the need for development analysts and economists to focus their attention on countries’ most viable productive resource, women. Comments This paper was written for Professor Caroline Hartzell's course, POL 303: Women and the Political Economy of Development, Spring 2015. This student research paper is available at The Cupola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College: http://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ student_scholarship/353 Women’s Social Rights: Untapped Economic Potential Political Science 303: Gender and Development Monae Evans 4/14/2015 This paper analyzes whether women’s social rights play a role in fostering higher levels of economic development. Prior development initiatives and economic policies failed to account for the productive capacities of women by discriminating against their basic rights to things such as an equitable education, equal inheritance, and marital rights. Applying the CIRI (CingranelliRichards Human Rights) dataset for women’s social rights, I found that improvements in these areas of human rights leads to significant increases in real GDP per capita, which highlights the need for development analysts and economists to focus their attention on countries’ most viable productive resource, women.