Women and Power in the Developing World

The prevailing view in political science and economics has been that women’s power in the Global North is greater than that in the Global South, where progress is viewed as slower and less impactful. Yet, across analytic levels, the developing world provides striking models of the assertion of women’s power, specifically the latest insight that opportunities for the articulation of women’s power are greater in the Global South than the North.

In a new journal article in the Annual Review of Political Science, Rachel Brulé performs a literature review to examine women’s negotiation of power in the developing world and contrast it against the comparatively limited extent in the Global North.

The review reveals three main findings: first, that exposure to trade is correlated with the development of kinship systems that organize enduring gender-inegalitarian social and political orders by structuring intergenerational identity, wealth and power around men. Next, policies that promote women’s formal political inclusion are evolving faster in the developing world; and last, that negotiations at the foundational site of political power, the family, hold the greatest potential for radical change.

Brulé argues power is interlinked across levels of analysis, which includes states, policymaking and families, and as a result, power should accrue across domains. This creates increasingly gender-egalitarian orders where women’s advantages overlap, as in a number of developing countries, and vicious, increasingly gender-regressive cycles where women’s disadvantages overlap, even in developed countries. Developing countries thus present manifold opportunities to reorder society from its very roots, creating resilience to challenges ranging from climate change to pandemics.