The focus on women's financial empowerment as a means of economic growth overlooks broader social transformations, perpetuates gender gaps, and fails to address issues of gender-based violence and exploitative working conditions.

Unleashing women’s economic potential will make economic growth and recovery faster and more equitable. Economic empowerment makes other rights possible for women. (Michele Bachelet, former Executive Director of UN Women) The first “financial empowerment” trope is based on the idea that the private sector, governments, international institutions and civil society all have a role to play in improving women’s access to credit (generally provided by private lenders), which is key to their empowerment. While this is part of a much longer historical trajectory in the underdeveloped world that has been perpetuated though microcredit and other initiatives, banks and other lenders—including payday and high-cost lenders—have also come to adopt the message that their pro- ducts serve a social purpose as they help to empower individual borrowers. Despite decades of evidence from the field of GAD that disturbs the notion of a direct link between financial access and women’s empowerment,22 “financial empowerment” has become increasingly central to the international aid industry and the development arms of many states (with DFID, for instance, arguing that the empowerment of women through financial inclusion is key to alleviating poverty globally).23 At the international level, the OECD recently developed a new initiative called the International Network on Financial Education, which has a special focus on women’s financial empowerment through education.24 In June 2013, the OECD, whose project on gender equality is focused on the “Three Es: Employment, Education and Entrepreneurship”, also teamed up with the G20 and the World Bank to host a conference on financial empowerment. The pervasiveness of the “financial empowerment” trope becomes even more evident when it is considered in relation to the overlapping tropes about the need to “bank the unbanked”, which is advocated by the World Bank among others, and to promote “financial inclusion” among the world’s poor.25 Without ever defining empowerment, the report underlying the Cherie Blair Foundation’s Mobile Money programmes, for example, discusses the need to empower women by reducing the gender gap in mobile phone ownership, which is closely linked to financial inclusion via mobile banking.26 In many of these instances, the term “empowerment” has been de-linked from questions of broader social transformation, individualised and transferred onto individual women’s bodies through the production of entrepreneurial subjects. This is not merely a discursive move as evidenced, for instance, in research done by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) that has tracked where the money for women’s rights is actually going. In 2011, the group surveyed 1,119 women’s organisations in over 140 countries and actually found a decline in support from many of the donors that have historically funded them.27 They also found funding from corporations, individual philanthropists and social enterprises to be almost non-existent.28 This suggests that the broader move to corporate-led initiatives will have important implications for grassroots women’s social organis- ations, which are increasingly having to rely on membership fees, individual donations and income-generating activities. As Eyben and Napier-Moore document in their genealogy of the use of the term “empowerment” by development institutions, current usages of the term differ from that of the 1990s when women’s empowerment was elevated from being something necessary for “development” to being a matter of social justice in its own right. Indeed, one of the successes of the gender and development movement was the location of empowerment within broader ideas about participation, power and equality. A decade and a half later, though the term is often used in contradic- tory ways (including within particular institutions themselves), it has become a much more technical term that is often narrowly associated with microcredit pro- grammes and political quotas for women. Empowerment here comes from the presence of women’s bodies in particular institutions rather than the promotion of gender issues per se. It is also linked to women’s ability to engage in paid labour and/or entrepreneurship.29 Empowerment has also been linked to results-based instrumentalist research agendas that seek to show how empowerment delivers specific development out- comes. An example of such a (TBF) research agenda is the “Third Billion Index” developed in 2010 by Strategy& (formerly Booz & Co., which is part of the global PwC group). This index ranks countries in terms of “how effectively they are empowering women as economic agents in the marketplace”. Women’s econ- omic participation is then correlated to countries’ general economic growth and well-being, mainly in the areas of health, early childhood development, security and freedom. In a recent report—for which Cherie Blair wrote an introduction— it is noted that women’s empowerment is no longer only the business of govern- ments and NGOs, but also the responsibility of the private sector, which is coming to realise that “women’s full participation in the world of work is not merely a social good but an economic necessity”.30 The private sector has a role to play in, among other areas, supporting female entrepreneurs and financing women-owned business. The Third Billion Index draws some of its inspiration from the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Index. The purpose of the index is to identify the gap between men and women in the areas of (1) economic participation and opportunity, (2) educational attainment, (3) health and survival and (4) political empowerment. These gaps are then mapped onto the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report and various measurements of GDP. Although its focus is wider than women’s economic participation, the WEF (which is a private, business-led international organisation) similarly claims that there is a “strong correlation between a country’s gender gap and its national competitiveness”. This means that those countries with the smallest gender gaps, namely in the areas of political and economic participation, health and education, are also the most competitive countries globally.31 According to the WEF, “[a] country’s competitiveness depends on its human talent—the skills, education and productivity of its workforce. Because women account for one-half of a country’s potential talent base, a nation’s competitiveness in the long term depends significantly on whether and how it educates and utilises its women”.32 Drawing on the first theoretical premise established above, it is a rather bitter irony that while these indexes do recognise the importance of a healthy and edu- cated workforce for the functioning of economies, they fail to acknowledge the work that is involved in these forms of biological and social reproduction. Rather, reproductive labour as a whole is obscured, as the index fails to account for household and domestic-related phenomena, including unpaid work. Accord- ing to Chant and Brickell, the same can be said for the Third Billion Index, the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s Gender Inequality Index.33 While unpaid reproductive labour is systematically ignored, women—or more specifically, women’s bodily capacities—are produced as “marketizable and exploitable commodities”.34 Drawing on the third premise, it also becomes evident that an exclusive focus on measuring gaps between men and women obscures much more complex gender dynamics at work under neoliberalism.35 In particular, it obscures the ways in which certain gender gaps, or gaps between women as a group and men as a group, are narrowing compared to gaps among women (i.e. along class, racial and other lines) and among men. For example, while the gap between male and female par- ticipation in the labour force has been declining globally since 1990, this has largely been due to a worldwide fall in male labour force participation rates.36 At the same time, according to the WEF’s methodology, where gaps have been closed, the index does not go on to measure those areas where women have achieved more than men. As such, it does not capture the closing of gaps as the result of falls in the political, economic and social attainments of men and boys. Thus, while women’s bodily capacities are valued as potentially untapped commodities, those of men and boys are devalued. Returning to the issue of the broader promotion of women’s financial empower- ment, a perspective of the body draws attention to the forms of gendered violence that have been shown to accompany particular forms of financial deepening and attendant collection techniques. Lamia Karim’s recent study of Bangladesh is only one of a plethora of studies documenting the link between microcredit and increased violence against women in the household and in public (i.e. through flog- ging and other means).37 Violence and aggressive intimidation techniques have also been used by debt collectors against women in the US, who are seen as more likely to submit to aggressive tactics than men, not least because their caring obligations tend to render them less geographically mobile.38 Debt-related suicide has also been documented across the globe, in countries at a range of levels of economic development.39 While issues of financial empowerment are deeply intertwined with the pro- motion of entrepreneurship as an almost unambiguous good, this also fails to capture the specific conditions under which different groups of people engage in this form of work, which has a differential impact on the production of bodies. As Sébastien Rioux reminds us, “Marx was particularly attentive to the ways in which capital is inscribed on the bodies and in the flesh of laborers, documenting as he did how long hours of work, unregulated environment, and dangerous working conditions produced tired, diseased, maimed, unhealthy, overworked, stunted and injured bodies”.40 Although I cannot fully survey the conditions under which different entrepreneurs labour, it has been well documented by groups such as the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor that women in the advanced OECD countries are much more likely to turn to entrepreneurship because of the earning potential it offers than women in the developing world who are more likely to engage in this work due to a lack of alternatives.41 World Bank research shows that while sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of women entrepreneurs of any region, they tend to have smaller businesses (which are often concentrated in the so-called “informal” sector), to be self-employed rather than employ others, to be concentrated in low value-added businesses and to have a lower value of return than men.42 In terms of finance, this then suggests that the latter group of women are prob- ably more likely to be borrowing to finance their immediate reproduction (as described by Federici above) than the former, where the link is less direct. They are also likely to work under difficult physical conditions. In one study of over 422 women street vendors in South Africa, for example, 54 per cent reported a work-related illness or injury. A significantly larger proportion of self-employed women reported illness or injuries, with 47 per cent reporting having received burns during their work, 12 per cent reporting cuts, 21 per cent reporting headaches and 11 per cent complaining of musculoskeletal problems. Approximately one in four women also reported some form of abuse while working, such as sexual har- assment, physical abuse or robbery.43