Power shift: Women are the key to ending poverty

When it comes to managing the administrative tasks that are required to run a home and raise a family, women bear the brunt of the responsibility; according to one study of women in the United States, mothers take on seven out of 10 so-called mental load tasks, which range from planning meals to scheduling activities for children.

All that extra work takes a toll, including on society: Women who carry more mental load are less interested in national politics (men who carry more mental load also report less political interest, but fewer men are in that position).

But what about in a low-income country? Do women face similar burdens? Sigrid Weber, an affiliated researcher at the Stanford King Center on Global Development and postdoctoral fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab, wanted to find out.

In an ongoing survey that will eventually include about 1,300 male and female household members in Zambia, so far the answer seems to be yes: Women shoulder more mental load than their male partners (and more physical load too). But Weber’s research goes further, aiming to explore the advantages and disadvantages of different household responsibilities. For instance, do women seek out some tasks—such as shopping at the market or participating in school meetings—to increase their power or influence at home or in their community? 

“We want to learn if empowering tasks give women access to resources or community with other women and, if so, what does their political and economic participation look like” compared to women whose responsibilities keep them mostly in their homes, Weber explains, adding that women may have different reasons for preferring certain tasks over others. After all, “if you’re tired and food insecure, you might just want to sweep your floor and be done with it.”

Using gender and equity insights to drive better policy and practice is a top priority for the King Center, which supports scholars working to improve access to health care, education, economic opportunities, and political representation for women and other groups who have historically faced discrimination. Weber, a political scientist, is one of many researchers—including undergraduates, graduate students, pre- and postdoctoral fellows, and faculty—seeking to understand how gender affects development outcomes. 

The Problem of Violence

Any discussion about obstacles to women’s economic opportunities in any country or context inevitably includes gender-based violence. At the King Center, political science professors Lisa Blaydes and Beatriz Magaloni are co-principal investigators of the Gender-Based Violence in the Developing World initiative, which seeks to study not just individual risk factors for women—for example, educational attainment or alcohol use by partners—but also the larger context in which such violence occurs, including the household, workforce, and broader community. The initiative focuses on how social, political, and judicial institutions have enabled and shaped responses to the problem of gender-based violence.

Blaydes, who studies the Middle East, has a theoretical and conceptual approach to the topic and aims to fill a research gap in her own field of political science.  

Few scholars have looked at how the political realm shapes private harm—but that’s exactly where Blaydes is focusing her attention. “We haven’t really spent a lot of time thinking about the way political institutions and political culture influence intimate partner violence,” she says. 

In a recently published paper, Blaydes and her co-authors, including Professor of Political Science James D. Fearon, and political science PhD candidate Mae MacDonald, introduce a model that demonstrates how societal factors—such as economic opportunities for women, laws that criminalize domestic abuse, and social norms associated with gender equality—influence domestic abuse.

Appearing in the Annual Review of Political Science, the paper also provides an overview of existing research and invites political scientists to take on the topic.

“We really wanted to have a statement piece for how political science should engage with these topics,” she says. “Political science has a unique opportunity to contribute to this literature because most of the actionable remedies”—laws that criminalize domestic violence and social safety net programs that support survivors, for instance—“run through political science channels.”

Blaydes’ co-principal investigator Magaloni, whose work focuses on Latin America, takes a more experimental approach. Her ongoing efforts include a randomized controlled trial in four high schools in Mexico testing whether cognitive behavioral therapy combined with leadership training for highly influential students can change attitudes about gender-based violence. Current research also examines whether gang wars increase gender-based violence in the impacted areas.

Magaloni’s work is designed to identify interventions that might reduce gender-based violence; in May, she led, and the King Center co-hosted, a workshop for practitioners and academics to discuss the problem and possible solutions in Mexico and other developing countries.

“To be a woman in Mexico is to inhabit a field of threat,” says Magaloni, who also directs the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab at Stanford. “State and academic narratives link violence to cartels and the war on drugs, yet gendered violence remains cast as collateral. We dispute that. Violence against women is not fallout—it is foundational.”

Another King Center scholar—Quinn Mitsuko Parker, a PhD student in Stanford’s Oceans Department—is studying intimate partner violence in a very specific context, small-scale fisheries in Madagascar, as part of a broader study examining the experience of marginalized communities in the fishing industry.

Through her research, which includes qualitative interviews with key stakeholders and women who work in the trade, Mitsuko Parker hopes to assess whether small-scale fishery jobs expose women to more violence or, by providing women with a way to make a living, mitigate the effects of violence.

“We don’t just want to know if gender-based violence happens, and to whom,” Mitsuko Parker says. “We want to know how women are perceiving it and how they are experiencing it, which will help inform what they see as relevant interventions.”

Small-scale fisheries have an outsized impact: They are an important source of food and jobs for many people around the world, especially in rural coastal areas. That means whether women are helped or harmed by working in the industry matters for the economic prospects of the women and their communities, Mitsuko Parker says.

Blaydes echoes that sentiment.

“People don’t always think of gender-based violence as a topic related to economic development,” she says. “But it’s part of human thriving, to not be subjected to violence.”

Addressing Obstacles to Political and Economic Participation

King Center scholars are also exploring the experience of women in public life, including politics and the workplace.

In April, King Center researcher Suhani Jalota, MBA ‘22, PhD ‘24, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, gathered more than 150 people from academia, civil society organizations, government, private companies, and nonprofits for the inaugural Future of Work for Women Summit. Co-hosted by the King Center, the event was created by Jalota as a way for groups to discuss potential interventions and policies to address the problem of low labor force participation among women in developing countries, especially South Asia. 

The potential benefits of increasing women’s participation in the workforce are huge: According to data in the pre-summit report, companies in which women make up more than 30 percent of the executive team outperform those with fewer female leaders, and companies with gender diversity have lower turnover rates.

“This is not just about women,” Jalota says. “It’s about aligning incentives across different stakeholders to identify what solutions work in everyone’s interest.”

Jalota is intimately familiar with the issues: She founded Myna Mahila, an organization that seeks to empower women in their health and financial decisions, as an undergraduate student. Her dissertation at Stanford, where she earned her PhD in health policy and economics, was based on a randomized experiment she designed to compare the uptake of office and remote jobs among women in India who were previously not part of the labor force.

The labor force is only one arena where women are underrepresented; women are also vastly underrepresented in the political sphere. Soledad Artiz Prillaman is director of the Inclusive Democracy and Development (ID2) Lab, which was created in 2021 with support from the King Center to identify how and when the voices of marginalized people—especially women—are represented in political institutions in low- and middle-income countries; what policies best ensure such representation; and how political inclusion impacts broader development.

Prillaman is running a massive survey in two Indian states to assess how gender affects local politics, including the practice of proxy voting or pati sarpanch, a system in which the husband or a male relative of an elected woman actually makes the decisions.

Daniel Abraham Praburaj, who recently finished up a predoctoral research fellowship with Prillaman’s lab, helped design and implement the ongoing survey, which so far has more than 6,000 respondents, including elected local government leaders, their family members, bureaucrats, and citizens.  

In the two states, where half of local government seats are reserved for women, proxy voting “is one of the most important questions in political representation,” Praburaj says. “Does women being elected to office actually lead to real political power and influence?”

The results so far are revealing. In fact, both men and women share power with their families, but, when men hold political office, their wives’ help is “complementary” to the men’s power, Praburaj says. When women are the elected officials, “they don’t hold the final decision-making power.” Even more startling, society accepts the arrangement: 80 percent of those surveyed said family help is expected for elected officials. 

The team is still conducting qualitative interviews to understand the results—and design possible interventions that would increase women’s political power in the face of long-standing patriarchal norms and sociopolitical disadvantages, including less education and financial resources. 

Culturally Suited Solutions 

A hallmark of King Center research is informing policy that can unlock development in ways that respect local culture and customs. 

The report from Jalota’s Future of Work for Women Summit, based on conversations with 25 private companies in India, including IBM, Walmart, and Tech Mahindra, described how those companies increased the ranks of women in their workforces. Solutions include flexible or remote work arrangements; interventions that encourage men to share in household responsibilities; government-subsidized maternity leave, childcare, and transportation to and from work; and training women in industry-relevant skills.

Magaloni is testing how to break the cycle of gender-based violence in Mexico, where 70 percent of women and girls over the age of 15 say they have experienced abuse. And Weber’s research in Zambia will describe the differences between men’s and women’s household labor and assess how women’s responsibilities affect their political participation. That research, in turn, can be used to design more effective interventions at the family or government level.

Using information about household responsibilities in Jordan, for instance, King Center Postdoctoral Fellow Giulia Buccione has shown that women—who are generally in charge of water management in that country—reduce water consumption and are more likely to donate to water charities if they receive messaging on the sanctity of water in Islam, compared to women who do not receive such messaging.

That kind of intervention, however, can only be designed if aid organizations and policymakers know how families think about and handle basic tasks.

“We have to think about households as the basic political unit where negotiations take place and shape political preferences and outcomes,” she says. “Learning about who takes charge of these things is important.”

By centering women in their work—from investigating the hidden costs of household labor in Zambia to political exclusion in India and gender-based violence in Mexico—scholars are not just generating new knowledge; they are helping to identify and understand the systems that hold inequality in place. 

“A throughline to these studies is that they not only identify obstacles, but use their data and insights to tailor and test policies that can effectively alleviate those obstacles to better harness women’s skills and knowledge,” says Katherine Casey, faculty director of the King Center. “These are great examples of how research can shape policy design to move development forward.”