As a result of widespread mistreatment and overt discrimination, women in the developing world often lack autonomy. Towards Gender Equity in Development brings together leading scholars working on gender issues to explore key sources of female empowerment and discuss the current challenges and opportunities for the future.

Exploring three key domains, this book adopts a clear multi-disciplinary approach to present different perspectives from gender-focused economics and social research. It covers marriage and women's relative bargaining position within the household; the options available to women outside of marriage and in the context of their community; and overarching discriminatory laws and cultural norms. It engages with questions of how marriage, divorce, and remarriage practices have evolved and with what effects for women; how female empowerment can benefit from improving options and economic and collective action opportunities; and how the government can act as a lawmaker to contribute to modifying norms and practices that disadvantage women.

Siwan Anderson's profile page

Lori Beaman's profile page

Jean-Philippe Platteau's profile page

Siwan Anderson is a Professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Her research focuses on gender and local level political institutions. She is currently associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Globalization and Development. She is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). She is a research associate of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) at Berkeley and of the Theoretical Research in Development Economics (ThReD) consortium. Her research has been published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies, among others.

Lori Beaman is an Associate Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. A development economist working on microeconomic issues, Lori's research interests are centered on two themes: social networks and gender. Her work has evaluated the impact of a political affirmative action program on gender bias in rural India; how social networks affect labour market opportunities among women in Malawi; and how to encourage African farmers to adopt profitable agricultural technologies, particularly women farmers. Her work has been published in Science, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics among others. After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali for two years, she received her PhD in Economics in 2007 from Yale University.

Jean-Philippe Platteau is a Professor at the University of Namur, Belgium. He is the author of several books, including Islam Instrumentalized: Religion and Politics in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He has published widely in both development and general economics journals. Most of his work has been concerned with the understanding of institutions in economic development, and the processes of institutional change. The role of informal institutions and the influence of non economic factors and other frontier issues at the interface between economics and sociology have been a central focus of his work. Examples are: family structures, informal insurance and micro-insurance, customs and social norms, religion, and collective action problems.