Women Empowerment and Economic Development

T persistence of gender inequality is most starkly brought home in the phenomenon of “missing women.” The term was coined by Amartya Sen in a now classic article in the New York Review of Books (Sen 1990) to capture the fact that the proportion of women is lower than what would be expected if girls and women throughout the developing world were born and died at the same rate, relative to boys and men, as they do in sub-Saharan Africa. Today, it is estimated that 6 million women are missing every year (World Bank 2011) Of these, 23 percent are never born, 10 percent are missing in early childhood, 21 percent in the reproductive years, and 38 percent above the age of 60. Stark as the excess mortality is, it still does not capture the fact that throughout their lives, even before birth, women in developing countries are treated differently than their brothers, lagging behind men in many domains. For each missing woman, there are many more women who fail to get an education, a job, or a political responsibility that they would have obtained if they had been men. Table 1 summarizes some indicators of the relative position of women and men circa 1990 and circa 2009 in poor countries. Both the relative deprivation of women, and the extent to which there have been improvements over the last twenty years, are apparent in a number of spheres. In access to education: in low and moderate income countries, the enrollment rate for girls in secondary school was 34 percent in 2010, while that for boys was 41 percent. Twenty Women Empowerment and Economic Development