Women empowerment and insecurity: firm-level evidence
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Women empowerment and insecurity: firm‑level evidence Ummad Mazhar1
© National Association for Business Economics 2020
Abstract Women’s engagement in the formal economy is generally considered an important means to economic empowerment. In many developing countries, however, increasing female representation in politics, their greater engagement in paid work, and equality in educational attainment, are out of sync with the share of female workers in the formal sector’s enterprises. This paper hypothesizes the role of insecurity in hampering empowerment that would otherwise accompany such developments. Exploiting the unique trio of a fragile security situation, a positive rate of macroeconomic expansion, and increasing female political representation in Pakistan, it finds a negative link between the ratio of permanent female workers and insecurity in a sample of 1600 formal sector firms. This link also finds support in a much larger sample of 71,000 firms from 71 different countries. The empirical analysis uses fractional logit regression to take care of the peculiar nature of the dependent variable; the issue of reverse causality is handled using instrumental variables. Keywords Political violence · Terrorism · Female economic empowerment · Gender empowerment · Fractional logit · Instrumental variables JEL classification D91 · J16 · J28 · O12 · M51 · K42 It is through gainful employment that woman has traversed most of the distance that separated her from the male; and nothing else can guarantee her liberty in practice. (Simone De Beauvoir 1949).
1 Introduction Sustainable development requires gender equality both as an input and as an end. Historically, the economic participation of women played a key role in the demographic transition and sustained growth of Western countries (Diebolt and Perrin 2013). Through its positive effect on labor force participation and productivity, gender equality could boost Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1057/s11369-020-00187-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Ummad Mazhar [email protected] 1
Suleman Dawood School of Business (SDSB), Lahore University of Management Sciences, DHA, Sector U, Office 324, 3rd Floor, Lahore Cantt, Lahore 54792, Pakistan
the GDP of a developing country like Pakistan or Niger by more than 30 percent (IMF 2018). Admittedly, recent decades have observed rising educational attainment and greater political representation of women across the world, e.g., Cuberes and Teignier (2016). However, the economic empowerment of women has been an elusive quest for developing countries and more so for the Muslim majority countries. More to the point, at current rates of change, the empowerment gap is likely to persist for another 217 years.1 It is worthwhile to identify the obstacles in the way of gender empowerment. One powerful explanation attributes the differences in development outcomes across countries to differences in the econo
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