 I'm Paul Webley. I'm the director of SIAS. I'd like to welcome all of you in the audience here tonight, particularly those of you who've travelled a long way to be here, and to Professor Nyla Caerbier's husband, friends and colleagues. We've got guests from many institutions here tonight. Some people have travelled a long way to be here. I won't list them all, but just to say that we really appreciate you all coming. SIAS inaugurals have a really nice atmosphere. Today we've got a very full house, which is a tribute to what everyone's looking forward to, which is Nyla's lecture, and it's great to see everyone here. SIAS inaugurals are a ceremony. It's a rite to passage for the speaker. Nyla said to me earlier that actually what she was looking forward to was the food afterwards. What we're all looking forward to, Nyla, is what you're going to tell us. But it's also a celebration, and it's an enjoyable intellectual event. Now to make sure that we all enjoy it, can I ask you all to turn off your mobile phones, and I always forget to do this myself, so here I am modelling good behaviour for you. Trying to model good behaviour. I still haven't managed it. My phone is now switched off. I hope everyone else is. The other thing just to say about housekeeping is the fire exits are the places where it says fire exit. We're not expecting a fire alarm. So if there is a fire alarm, could you please leave in an orderly fashion out of the fire exits? I'm really pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture, first one of 2013, the fourth of the 2012-13 series. You'll hear more about Nyla Cabir from Professor Amwed Whitehead in a moment, so I'm not going to say anything about him. Just to say, Nyla, how pleased we were when you agreed to join SIAS, because SIAS seems to be a natural home for you. And if you want to know more about her, she's got an absolute brilliant website, nyla-cabir.com. And we'll tell you something, but if you want to know more, go to the website. Meritus Professor Amwighthead will introduce Professor Cabir tonight. She's Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sussex and a Professor of Social Anthropology at the Sussex Centre for the Migration Research and Centre for Gender Studies. I hope I've got that right. And her research and policy interventions have been mainly in the fields of gender, poverty and development. And she carried out research through the Migration Globalisation and Poverty University of Sussex on internal regional migration, links between poverty, livelihoods of migration, independent child migration, and on gender and generational issues. She also specialises in the collection interpretation of qualitative and life history data. And we're very grateful to you and for coming here this evening to introduce Nyla. The vote of thanks will be given by Professor Denise Candiotti, who's very well known to hear at SIAS. Like me, Professor Candiotti was educated in the Social Psychology Department at LSE. She's had a very interesting career doing work first on political economy and rural transformation, then gender nationalism and Islam. From 69 to 80 Denise worked at universities in Turkey, but then she saw the light, moved to England and took up a position at SIAS. She's been a stalwart of SIAS. She's been the key to the development of expertise in Central Asia. And one of the things I'm really pleased about, she's played an absolutely vital role in developing the next generation of scholars. We're very grateful to them both for being part of today's event. Afterwards, as I've already hinted, there is some food, so you'll be invited upstairs to reception in the Brunel suites for some wine and canapes. So, at the end of the lecture, you know what to do. You then all leave upstairs, that's where the food is. So, to introduce Professor Gabir, I'll pass over to Professor Whitehead. Over to you, Ann. Not only is it an honour to make this introduction to Nyla's inaugural, it is also a great pleasure. I find that I have now known Nyla for nearly 30 years. This is very hard to believe. Not least because I think of Nyla as very much younger than me, which of course she is. But the evidence tells me that we are beginning to approach being in the same generation as far as the young are concerned. So 30 years almost, and how hugely exciting, challenging, intellectually rewarding and fun she has made those years. I met Nyla in 1985 when she was first appointed to the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex. She had then recently completed her economics PhD at the LSE after her undergraduate and master's degrees there, also in economics. Her PhD was an early and personally significant indication of her rebellious intellect. It required considerable persuasion to get her economics teachers to sanction her study of fertility children and the household economy in rural Bangladesh, especially as she chose to do village field research. When she arrived at IDS, the gender work there was gradually being expanded under the leadership of Kate Young. And Nyla and I were immediately drawn into a range of joint gender and development activities then going. There were going on in and between the University of Sussex, where I was in the Anthropology Department, and IDS. It was also soon after this that she joined the editorial collection of Feminist Review, a specifically socialist feminist journal, and this provided another altogether very different arena for our joint activities. Since these early contexts, Nyla and I have maintained an ongoing intellectual engagement in numerous structured and unstructured ways. Our direct professional contact has been through teaching, training and very occasionally joint writing, where I learnt first hand not only what an exhilarating thinker she is, but what a hard worker. Nyla has opened many worlds to me and in many ways, but perhaps particularly through our joint participation in all those numerous workshops and events, either organised by Nyla or for which a piece of Nyla's work has been a catalyst and where some key gender and development issue has been discussed and argued over with a variety of other scholars and practitioners. These conversations and arguments have, for me, provided a constant and profound intellectual stimulus and excitement, as they must have for many, but I have particularly prized their character as interdisciplinary dialogues. Interdisciplinarity is a complex beast. It has huge merits in relation to gender and development as a field of study for social change, and for me the best possible learning about how to do it has been through my conversations direct and indirect with Nyla. Conversations from our initially apparently very different starting points, she as an economist and me an anthropologist. During this time Nyla has become a deservedly international renowned gender and development specialist and one of the most influential thinkers in the field. She has made outstanding contributions to developing the intellectual field of gender and development, to changing the face of many areas of development theory, but she has also genuinely opened up many pathways for improving women's lives in the majority world. She's a most exciting professorial appointment for SOAS, where she joins the Development Studies Department of Longstanding Influence and Distinction. In coming to think about making this introduction, I have found it exceedingly hard to summarise the range, the extent and sheer number of her research areas and publications, or to give a concise account of the intensity and extent of her international engagement. So what I want to do instead is to spend a few minutes looking back at the first 10 to 15 years of her work when she was at IDS, in order to look for clues as to how Nyla was to become to emerge as such a powerful, incisive and influential public intellectual and such an effective and eloquent advocate for gender justice, particularly in the majority world. It's clear to me that in retrospect that IDS in the late 1980s and through the 1990s was absolutely the right place for her, as aid and development had come to characterise one of the major ways in which Britain adapted to its post-colonial global position and to the rigid structure of the international relations of the Cold War, IDS was playing a crucial role in the evolution and application of theoretical ideas about development. It provided itself on being at the cutting edge of theory and concepts, on its interdisciplinarity and its role in putting ideas into practice through its links with the UK and other governments and with global institutions. It had some of the brightest and best development thinkers and of course, with very few exceptions, these were men. This is not a cheap point. The social sciences in general were at that time not only themselves the sites of gender inequality, they had huge difficulty in finding ways to think about gender issues. The invisibility of gender and women within development studies was chronic, no more so than at the IDS, despite the little enclave of gender work that had been fought for there. As Nyla describes in the Preface to Reverse Reality, a wonderful book published in 1994, her intellectual agenda at that time was to explore how feminist analysis of mainstream social science ideas applied to development studies, hence its subtitle, Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. The twin experiences of the institutional basis of male power and privilege in both the IDS and in the Bangladeshi village of her PhD pushed her with characteristic energy and vigor to make sense in reverse realities of how theory, concepts and practice contributed to the intellectual absence of any gender analysis in development studies and its consequent failures in relation to women's lives. Reverse realities really is an astounding work and thoroughly deserves its place as the most read, most cited and most influential book on gender and development. It contains incisive analysis of the ways in which economics was unable to address gender issues. It develops a distinctive array of gender relational conceptual tools and explores the development practice of a wide array of development actors, including those she describes as unofficial. Re-reading it just now, I found it shows well the hallmarks of all Nyla's subsequent work, summarising madly these are a very sharp mind, a refusal to accept theory, concepts or representations of empirical reality at face value, a powerful drive to develop conceptual tools that will do a much better job of making theory do the work of analysing the gendered empirical world about which she has an insatiable curiosity. More informally, I particularly prize in Nyla's work, a she is utterly fearless in her theorising and critriking. Utterly fearless. I'm sure she doesn't think so, but that's what it looks like from the outside. She's prepared to do unlimited amounts of slog. Her work is not only thoroughly empirically grounded, but the areas of empirical evidence she draws on are extraordinarily wide-ranging from international and national statistics, statistics through careful quantitative case studies and a myriad of qualitative and ethnographic evidence. Finally, of course, I prize her work because of its commitment to social change through policy and action. As I said, one of the dimensions to reverse realities was its emphasis on development institutions and development actors. Her engagement with these was, of course, encouraged by IDS's own institutional mandate. A significant thing that Nyla did in her early years there was to take a three-month IDS residential training course called Men, Women and Development and put it on a firm theoretical and conceptual foundation. Out of this came a highly influential gender training framework, the core of which showed practitioners at all levels how to analyse gender power within a structural framework, a structured framework of key social institutions. Nyla and her colleagues used this framework for gender training around the world within development institutions of all kinds from the World Bank to local NGOs and grassroots feminist organisation. As Nyla describes it to me, it was this that laid the basis for her subsequent policy-based research and advocacy in partnership with a host of the world's major global, national and local development institutions. The early years at IDS also saw the beginning of Nyla's interest in women and work. She had to make several grant applications, younger scholars, please note, before she succeeded in getting the funds for her study of the garment workers in Dhaka and London, which resulted in the justly acclaimed book The Power to Choose Bangladeshi Women Workers' Labour Market Decisions in Dhaka and London. This was published in 2001. This is a profoundly important book for a number of reasons, not least because it centres on the issue of human agency, specifically women's agency. Its sophisticated account is thoroughly grounded in the reality of women's lives and its analysis powerfully derives from talking to women, the unofficial development actors of reversed realities. It was only very recently that I came to understand some of the part that Nyla's PhD fieldwork research has played in her intellectual formation. When I discovered that she spent 18 months living in the village she was researching, 18 months as an economist, it's an extraordinary long period of immersion. As I see it, it gave her a deep understanding of the complexity of what needs to be explained and changed in women and men's lives and hence of course of what needs to be explained and understood. But it also gave her the confidence to talk to all women and to see that it is from the unofficial actors in development processes that one can seek answers. A confidence that was put to such good effect in the research for The Power to Choose. It seems fitting then that Nyla has chosen as a subject for her inaugural lecture, reflections on researching women's empowerment, journeys, maps and signposts where women's own interpretations of their lies will loom large. Thank you very, very much Annie, I'm very moved. And not having had an inaugural in my life before, I am very grateful to SOAS for having organised this. It's obviously a little late in the day but better late than ever and I think I am going to enjoy it, especially the food and the wine afterwards. And I'm also very grateful to Denise who has come in from the warmth of Istanbul to be with us here to give the vote of thanks. Now the reference to the journeys and the title of this talk that some of you will have already guessed relates to two kinds of journeys. The idea of women's empowerment as a journey that they embark on is a recurring metaphor in the literature on this topic. And indeed this metaphor of a journey featured in a five-year research programme that we have recently been involved with that was called the Pathways of Women's Empowerment. But the metaphor of a journey I have also used to capture my own attempts to understand what the concept of empowerment means for women themselves in the different contexts in which they are located. There's both a professional and a personal motivation to this latter journey. By women themselves I'm talking about those women who feature in the secondary literature written by other feminist academics who work on empowerment but also on my own primary research particularly that carried out in Bangladesh. I have drawn heavily on my field work in Bangladesh for this talk, not surprisingly because it is the one place outside the UK that I know best and it is where I can carry out my interviews in a language other than English that is understood by those who I'm talking to. And I believe that one gains certain insights from this direct interaction with people in a context that one knows well. But my interest in researching women's empowerment is not purely professional. It is also motivated by my experience of growing up in a culture that devalues women on a daily and structural basis. So in a sense it is also personal. Gender inequality is not unique to any particular region or country of the world but it takes different forms with different consequences. I was born and brought up in the region of the world which Denise has characterised as the belt of classic patriarchy which stretches from North Africa across the Middle East across the northern plains of India to Bangladesh and also includes East Asia. This is a region where principles of inheritance and descent are patrilineal. Men matter in property and in lineage. It is a region where there are strict controls of women's sexuality in their mobility in the public domain restricting them to purely reproductive roles that can be carried out largely within their homes. These regions have some of the lowest female labour force participation rates in the world although economic growth has made East Asia an exception now. Women must leave their homes when they marry to live in their husbands homes often at a distance from where they were born and brought up and where they arrive as stranger brides and where their status is extremely low until they start to bear children, particularly sons. This is a region of strong son preference. It is also the region that Amartya Sen has described as characterised by high levels of missing women. Missing women refers to the fact that active gender discrimination and malign forms of neglect lead to much higher levels of mortality amongst women relative to men and missing women are those women who are no longer there women and girls because of this discrimination. The estimates of the percentage of missing women in these populations may rest on some dry statistical calculations but the causes behind them are a pervasive and taken for granted aspect of everyday existence of men and women who live in these regions. And while the overall disparity in mortality rates has declined in these regions it seems to have been replaced in some countries by the phenomenon of missing daughters excess female mortality in the 0-5 age group and combined with female selective abortion. As an only child I never did find out what it would be like to be a daughter in a culture that valued sons but I did grow up hearing from my mother that whenever her mother my grandmother was asked how many children she had she would reply very proudly I have six precious diamonds, six such amoti by which she meant her six sons. Her daughters were never counted. So I grew up in a culture where not only did society treat women as inferior but women themselves, women perceived themselves and treated each other as inferior. So my interest in researching women's empowerment stemmed from my desire to find out how this could be changed. It also explains why it is change in women themselves that I have been interested in in women's gendered subjectivities which are of course acquired through the full set of social relationships in which they grow up, in which they participate but as Denise has pointed out gendered subjectivities in the Middle East the area about which she is writing and which applies to South Asia gendered subjectivities are achieved as a byproduct of the most restrictive and oppressive controls over female sexuality but they are not experienced as necessarily restrictive or oppressive simply as what it means to grow up to be a man or a woman in these contexts. So my concerns with women's empowerment has always begun with the issue of women's consciousness before I start working out how changes in women's consciousness might lead to changes in their rights as citizens and I've always liked this particular quotation from my friend Shareen Huck an activist in Bangladesh that our experience of discrimination as women led us to demand fair treatment and respect for our dignity as human beings and only thereafter to claim our rights and entitlements as citizens. When I first started thinking about gender issues as an aspect of my academic work I was influenced by two poles within the social sciences on the one hand as Annie has mentioned there was neoclassical rational choice theory that I was learning in the classroom the view that all our actions are motivated by rational calculations about our self-interest subject of course to how much purchasing power we have at our disposal the other pole was constituted by sweeping structural narratives along with theories of Marxism and modernisation that were battling it out in development studies there was an equally sweeping strand of literature that invoked ideas about the patriarchy to explain the subordinate status of women there was very little interest in gendered subjectivities with any of these narratives what people thought was assumed to be determined by their culture and tradition by the relationship to the means of production or by their position in the patriarchal order my efforts to navigate my way through these different poles began when I decided much the horror of my supervisor at the time that I would spend 18 months in a village in Bangladesh doing field work now you have to understand this was a very odd decision because as someone who had been trained in economics it was strange for other economists to think that you might actually go and do your own field work and collect your own data since they generally rely on other people's data and large data sets but I was influenced by the work of anthropologists who were working in this field on these issues people like Ben White and Meet Cain and I wanted to do what they did however I hadn't been trained to do what they did so basically I spent 18 months in the field collecting quantitative data but talking to people I talked to a lot of people and I got a sense of village life I got a sense of a life that had so far been very distant from me as a middle class urban person and what I did I suppose during those 18 months beyond collecting data was to compile a cultural inventory of what patriarchy looked like in Bangladesh so it took me a little bit away from the abstractions of rational choice theory and a little bit closer to a much more empirically informed understanding but my analytical efforts still lacked actual people it focused on structures and read-off motivations from these structural principles the views and the voices of the men and women that I had talked to during those 18 months and I clearly talked to many I didn't know how to incorporate them into my PhD research it was when I joined the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex after my PhD that I began to understand what qualitative insights might look like and it helped to carve out a very different analytical terrain in which I've worked ever since the work of Sussex was influenced by critical anthropologists like Anne Whitehead, Hilary Standing who's here who used the rich tradition of ethnographic fieldwork as a tool of methodological inquiry not only to challenge the colonial mindsets that dominate their own disciplines but also to build an alternative understanding of economics to the one that I had been taught one that focused less on men and women as individuals and much more on their relationships and the positions that they occupied in them it was this analytical framework that informed my first research project as an independent researcher what became the power to choose the project itself was motivated by what appeared to be a paradox Bangladesh was portrayed in the literature of the time as characterised by poverty, patriarchy and many many pregnancies very conservative, no tradition of female labour force participation strict controls over women's mobility because of partha yet within a few years of my completing my fieldwork we found that the streets of Bangladesh were now packed with young women going to work to the newly emerging government factories export-oriented government factories now these women appeared to be competing very directly for jobs in the global market for garments with women in the clothing industry in Britain much of it located in the east end of London with workers drawn largely from the Bangladeshi community settled here while many of the workers in London were Bangladeshi women and some of the people who worked with me there are here while many of them were women some of them worked in the factories and workshops that made up the garment industry in London it was the Bangladeshi men who worked in the workshops women worked from home on a peace rate basis in apparent compliance with partha norms so the paradox for me was why was it in a conservative country like Bangladesh women were going out in the factories in a so-called progressive country like the UK women were working at home of course the paradox like many paradoxes is less puzzling once you look more closely at it but it was the motivation for this research and I decided to do something which I think at the time was quite novel I decided to take economic theories of labour supply decision-making and subject it to an ethnographic method in other words I would ask people how they made their decisions and what motivated them how they made who resisted etc etc and it seemed to me I could use their life histories both to get a sense of the context in which they were making decisions but also how they perceived their choices whether they saw them as choices and how they experienced the consequences of their choices in other words I was asking them though I'm not sure I phrased it that way if they felt empowered by their experience of paid work the concept of empowerment was just about emerging when I started this research it was an important addition to existing analysis of power within the feminist literature which had focused mainly on power in terms of male domination as Amy Allen put it the concern with empowerment does not rule out acknowledgement of male power but it puts the focus on a different notion of power the power as the ability to transform oneself, others and the world the idea of asking people for their own accounts of what they did was in fact quite novel for an economist mainstream economists are notoriously reluctant to ask people why they do what they do although a lot of their focus is on choice and the reason they are probably quite reluctant is they're not willing they think that people will not be willing to own up to the kinds of narrow self interests which neoclassical economists attribute to them similarly sociologists often discount people's own explanations of their action because they believe that the assumption is that institutions and structures work behind the backs of social actors who never will not have any worthwhile understanding of the circumstances of their actions others have also questioned the idea that the stated perceptions of subordinated groups cannot be necessarily truth, complete truths if they have internalized dominant values appear to consent to their own subordinate status I think Amartya Sen was one of the first economists I read who made this point about how people unconsciously adapt their perceptions of what is desirable to their perceptions of what is possible all of these kinds of theories spoke to my concerns with understanding the subjective dimensions of empowerment coming from a culture in which women are expected to be dependent on men for much of their lives I did attach a great deal of importance of material dimensions of gender disempowerment and of importance of women exercising some degree of independence but as I said earlier it seemed to me that there was something else that stood in the way of change and this was women's apparent acceptance of their inferior status my work on the garment workers was illuminating for me in a number of ways it highlighted a conundrum within the paradox that I was researching that went something like this if women's subordinate status within the Bangladesh family was indeed underpinned by their dependence on the male breadwinner then an access to an independent income of their own would threaten men's dominant position within the household and would always be met with male resistance indeed many of the men in my sample appeared to subscribe to this view asserting that women who earned money became insubordinate they did not feel so threatened in London where the kinds of money that women earned from home based peace work were so irregular and so small that it didn't really threaten the domestic hierarchy but they were very threatened by the idea of women going out to factories to earn regular wages and in fact it became very evident that many more women might have been working in the factories if they had not been forbidden to do so by their husbands so the conundrum was if women's wage work did indeed threaten male power then how was it that so many women in Dhaka were to have gained male consent to their jobs the answers that emerged to this question illuminated many aspects of the complex and contradictory nature of the process that made it possible and of the journey of empowerment that women had embarked on it illuminated first of all that one set of resources that women had at their disposal were discursive was based on their very close understanding of the nature of the resistance that they faced and what it was that concerned their husbands their mothers or their fathers and because of the intimate relations of the family etc they were able to find a set of arguments that addressed precisely these concerns I put some of the quotes from these women up on the board because they illustrate some of the changes that were going on so the concerns that they addressed were concerns about women's public visibility they argued that their partha would remain intact because they would behave modestly in the public domain that they would be working in a female dominated environment that earnings were necessary for their families welfare their children's future and in the case of husbands that they would not neglect their domestic duties many handed their wages back to their husbands arguing as it is he has let me work how would he feel if I kept the wages there were a number of other findings that stayed with me from that study one was the importance of the outside environment in shaping what was going on within the home it wasn't simply the availability of factory work versus piecework in London and Darker that made the difference but also the nature of the labour market for men the existence of a welfare state in the UK and the cultural organisation of the workplace whether it brought women into contact with others like themselves or other kinds of women who might give them ideas the other major finding goes back to this objective it was clear that it was not simply the objective fact of factory work that distinguished the impact of work on women's lives in Darker but also the conditions under which they took up this work for those women who had been forced to take up this work by the death of a husband or the loss of a male breadwinner it did not feel like a choice it was an optionless choice they had to work in order to survive but this was not what they wanted from their lives but for those others for him it represented an expansion of their options these jobs were extremely valuable and they fought hard to get them shifts were taking place in power relations within the household below the surface even as women sought to maintain the fiction that nothing had changed so if households were as economists were now acknowledging sites of cooperative conflict it was their cooperative aspects that shaped negotiations among family members leading them to give up something in order to gain something it was only when conflict came out in the open as it did in some cases that it became clear that there had been an important shift in power relations that women now had an exit option this exit option was most often exercised when they found out that their husbands had taken on second wives without telling them or even with telling them or when their husbands failed to fulfil their roles as male breadwinners domestic violence interestingly did not appear to constitute sufficient cause for women to walk out on marriages the fact that power relations within the Bangladesh household operate primarily through implicit acknowledgments of change rather than explicit bargaining means and this is within a context of shared ideology about cooperation and complementarity means that attempts to capture changes in power relations on the basis of a very individualised notion of empowerment often misses the point this is very clearly illustrated in the growing literature attempting to measure and capture women's empowerment in the context of microfinance one study for instance interpreted the fact that men were using the loans that were intended for women as evidence that women had no control over these loans another study said the fact that women who had access to microcredit were more likely to report joint decision making rather than male decision making was not evidence of change we all knew that in Bangladesh joint decision making is simply a disguise for male dominance and yet my own interviews with microfinance beneficiaries found that what outsiders valued was not necessarily what women valued themselves they did not attach the same degree of value to individualised forms of control over resources particularly in a context where the possibilities opened up by individualised control in rural areas in Bangladesh was very limited they could not walk out on their husbands while some of them utilised the loans themselves some of them were forced to hand over their loans to their husbands sharing their loans with sons and husbands did not carry connotations of loss what they cared about much more was the extent to which the profit from the loans were used in ways that they approved of similarly in a society women are marginalised by from decision making it is unlikely that change will happen overnight as a shift from male dominated decision making to female dominated decision making we would expect the change to take place as a move from the margins to a more shared role in decision making rather than seeing the shared role in decision making as a disguise for male dominance so the language of autonomy that has featured very prominently in some of the literature on women's empowerment seems particularly ill suited to capturing how processes of empowerment have unfolded in the lives of Bangladeshi women it may be that in the more individualised societies of the west the search for autonomy makes some kind of sense Paula England for instance has suggested that rising access to employment by women in the US since the 50s and the rise in the rates of single motherhood and divorce are not coincidence women use employment to get out of unsatisfactory marriages but in context where households are organised around corporate lines where women are denied a great deal of agency in the public domain divorce is not necessarily the first option instead in these situations of unequal interdependence they seek greater equality rather than greater independence UNRUS gave me an opportunity to pull some of these ideas together I won't go through this because of time constraints but basically it helped me to try and conceptualise empowerment in terms of women's capacity to exercise agency not just observed agency but also the sense of agency that they bring to their actions and also collective forms of agency which feminists have valued choice as exercise through access to important resources material, associational and social and achievements what are you able to achieve through the resources and agency at your disposal a sense of achievement is the exercise of the achievement issue is less about actually achieving what you want but much more about being willing to attempt to change things so the issue of achievement is more about giving women a sense of agency a sense of change than about actually winning the gains that you are looking for but one of the things that has remained very interesting is in all the research that I was doing we found very little evidence of collective action and in the next piece of research which was the pathways of women's empowerment we decided to quantify the impact of work of access to land, of associations, of collectivities and so on and to ask ourselves to what extent these access to resources impact on women's lives not just within the household and decision making but also in terms of community participation and political participation in terms of their perceptions of themselves and their place in society and we looked at a number of resources that might make a difference these are some of the pathways different categories of work as compared to economic inactivity education, membership of associations access to land, routine watching of television whether they were valued by their families and so on and so forth and the indicators of empowerment included economic agency within the household freedom of movement outside the household in the case of Egypt and Bangladesh access to financial resources position within family and community how they were regarded by members of family and community political agency as measured by whether they had voted in local elections and their attitudes whether they thought they had some control over their lives or not and in the case of Egypt and Bangladesh their attitudes towards sons I won't go into this again because I... how much time do I have left? 20 20, oh ok this was done as a very quantitative econometric study we took the help of econometricians as I'm not one myself and essentially the sum of the story was that paid work empowered women in Egypt, Ghana and Bangladesh much more than economic inactivity however within paid work different categories of work mattered work outside the home and Whitehead wrote many years ago about being outside the control of your kinship and family so in that sense work outside the home or off the farm was more empowering than work within the home and finally formal paid work was far more empowering than any other form of work now so we can rank these different empowerment potential of these different kinds of work in terms of their income and security of working conditions in terms of their potential for exposure to new ideas and relationships and in terms of degree of control over earnings but the background context to these findings is that in all three contexts the kind of work that most empowered women was on the decline formal work particularly formal public sector work has been shrinking in all three countries most slowly in Egypt which still has a massive public sector but even in Egypt we are seeing a decline in public sector work and only in Bangladesh have women gained any kind of a foothold in private formal work in the shape of the garment industries and even here we use the word semi formal because the conditions in the garment industries certainly do not resemble conditions in the public sector education interestingly and perhaps boringly proved to be very empowering in all three contexts and this was not education via the job market because we controlled for the job market it was education through cognitive, relational I am not quite sure what but certainly in Bangladesh where we did qualitative research women put a great deal of value on what education could offer you they said education made you human education made you be able to plan and think secondly only in Bangladesh did ownership of housing and land prove important but this may have to do a problem with how we measured it but the other point I want to highlight is why the impact of individual resources like employment and education did spill over into the public domain in the community and voting it did not lead to any increased collective action amongst women in fact so low was the extent of collective action in all three contexts that we dropped that as a variable we didn't even bother trying to look at what might influence it nor with the exception of Bangladesh was membership of association did membership of association prove to be important and even in Bangladesh where it was largely NGOs development NGOs membership of NGOs did not facilitate collective action in other words even if changing attitudes and behavior might be leading in unobserved ways to unintended change in these countries none of the resources education, work, NGO membership church membership etc was leading to any kind of the purpose of collective commitment to bringing about change that has featured in so many definitions of women's empowerment the differences in the impact of the organizations in all three contexts is interesting it suggests that the membership of groups organized by development NGOs in Bangladesh most of them organized around microfinance was more empowering than membership of the state managed organizations that we found in Egypt or than the church based faith based organizations that we found in Ghana so what was it about the development NGOs in Bangladesh that was having this impact one thing we should point out is while they are funded by donors and accountable to donors there is much more scope for independent activity in Bangladesh than there was in Egypt and the values that development NGOs promote in Bangladesh have greater affinity to our indicators of empowerment than church based organizations in Ghana there was Muslim and Christian but why did development NGOs have any impact at all one point to make is that in a separate study of development NGOs in Bangladesh we looked at the impact of different kinds of NGOs and we located them on a continuum from narrow minimalist microfinance through to intermediate organizations that combine microfinance and social awareness building and so on to social mobilization organizations and we found that as you might expect narrow minimalist microfinance organizations have the least impact but to this day there are intermediate organizations like BRAC that provide microfinance but combine it with awareness raising legal literacy and so on but the organizations that had the greatest impact were those that did not provide any services at all those that specialized in social mobilization and these organizations in Bangladesh had the kind of impact that if we could scale it up would really change the culture of governance in Bangladesh it would be grassroots democracy challenging the structures of corruption that characterize governance in Bangladesh but of course social mobilization organizations are on the decline along with the formal public sector because the bang for the buck lies in microfinance financial sustainability lies in microfinance nobody wants to finance social mobilization because the impacts are so intangible now research into these organizations tell us the social mobilization organizations tell us that they combine quite different kinds of resources which help to explain their collective impact their impact in the public domain there is the material dimension they do not provide microfinance but they do encourage women and men to save on a regular basis and they train them in livelihood activities they train them to bargain for better returns for their labor so it's a different set of material resources then there are the cognitive dimensions all of these organizations have been influenced by the work of Paulo Freire and they all seek to develop the critical consciousness of their members through interactive training and discussion groups which encompass both everyday concerns as well as the nature of the society in which they live it is very evident that some of these organizations are planting the seeds of deliberative democracy which is very clear in the emphasis put in the women's narratives on the exercise of reason on local conflict resolution on distinguishing between justice and injustice and all of this is a contrast to complying with norms which had been their experience in the past as this woman said if a husband is beating the daylights out of his wife five of us women go there and warn him not to make trouble and they do and husbands are embarrassed and shamed knowing that now their wives have this other collective forum in which to discuss their actions it's no longer restricted to the private domain and finally there is the relational dimension these organizations put a great deal of emphasis on regular meetings, regular discussions building group solidarity, collecting funds together and learning how to protest so over time women who may have known each other before they joined these groups anyway the nature of their relationship changes they are no longer see themselves as belonging to the given relationships of family, kinship, neighbourhood but as building chosen relationships in which they have a much greater say in what is at the heart of these chosen relationships so as one woman said one stick can be broken but a bundles of sticks cannot you cannot achieve anything on your own you have no value on your own so as I said there was very little evidence of collective action in our survey to look for collective action we have to be far more purposive we have to focus on organizations collective action doesn't come spontaneously to the kinds of work that these women are doing which is isolated, it goes for Ghana, Egypt and Bangladesh isolated, often home based, very dispersed what the development NGOs in Bangladesh and particularly the social mobilization organizations are doing are in a sense taking the role of trade unions but using strategies that are tailored to local contexts, local constraints and the local pace and so as a part of the pathways research we've also worked and talked and discussed with people, other people who are organizing in the informal economy and they arrange for people working with waste pickers sex workers, domestic servants, Brazil Ghana Thailand and so on and their stories and their experiences and their strategies tell us what is at how these organizations are able to offset their lack of confrontational power which has characterized a great deal of old trade union action in the past they tell us how these organizations put a great deal of thought on whether they're going to be registered as unions whether they're going to be associations or whether they're going to be unregistered all of these choices have strategic consequences they put a lot of effort into building a shared community which brings women together as workers and crosses their divide as from different cast or different legal status and so on they use the resources of soft power which is publicity information including training their own members about their rights and also informing the public about the kind of conditions in which women work and with the farm working on farms in South Africa women were brought to Tesco's meetings to talk to Tesco's shareholders about the kind of conditions that they were working under and the shareholders apparently made a commitment to improve them they also put a great deal of emphasis as I said on the material imperatives some of them will provide cooperatives others will provide loan facilities but extremely important in all of their efforts is the search for social security is seeking to be included in the social security provisions that exist in their countries so whether it's in India with waste pickers wanting the municipality to give them a pension sex workers wanting a pension rural women in Brazil seeking to be included in social security arrangements the issue of social security is clearly provides a firm ground on which these women can negotiate making the law work for women workers once you have given women a knowledge of their rights what the constitution says etc organisations have been able to support them in taking their cases to court and their cases may be around issues of sexual nature of rape in Thailand or it may be bread and butter issues around wages but with the support of these organisations women have found these workers have found that the law does not always work against them that it can be made to work for them engaging in policy and politics and my final point I think is that what is made I think these organisations and all of these organisations have existed for a very long time the ones I talked to in the social mobilisation groups have been members for 10, 15, 20 years these other organisations all have been working over a long time and what that tells you about is the pace of change in the lives of marginalised groups you cannot dictate the pace of change within a logical framework you cannot dictate priorities as you might do assuming that they are working class and these are the issues that they must organise around change takes place at a pace that is dictated by local constraints and local needs and it is motivated by local priorities so change may begin with very practical concerns about bread and butter issues but as women get the confidence to organise we see them moving into a much more political and strategic domain thank you as Annie and Nyla are rather hard intellectual acts to follow I thought I would end this evening on a personal note I met Nyla in 1985 when she had just joined the institute of development studies as a research officer we got together I remember over a rather troublesome UNESCO project I think we were both at sea in different ways at the time Nyla was trying to find her feet in her first job and I was trying to navigate the treacherous waters of thatcherite higher education as an emigre academic we had little inkling at the time of the many ways in which our paths would cross and recross and how close our academic and political interests would eventually turn out to be but we rapidly established some common ground of an existential nature not least that we were both single daughters with rather non-standard biographies for our respective countries Bangladesh and Turkey it was therefore not the powerful intellect you have seen displayed this evening that formed my first impressions of Nyla but her mischievous chuckle the twinkle in her eye her vibrancy and her love of fun and of course beyond all her wonderful achievements and her public persona these will always endure at least for me our paths have since crossed in very memorable ways I was privileged to preside over the launch of our first book Reverse Realities a book that I would use as a textbook for my gender and development class for many many years to come when Nyla joined SOAS in 2009 upon my retirement I felt a glow of satisfaction in the knowledge that the gender and development field was more than safe in her hands may all my retiring colleagues be equally blessed Nyla of course brought much more to the department than the field of gender although this evening we have mainly concentrated on the gender and development field I have to mention here that she has worked very broadly in the development field making critical contributions to the field of poverty social safety nets citizenship her register is enormous and I don't think it was fully reflected this evening it would be fair to say that the two major architects of the field of gender and development as we know it today are right in this room they are Annie Whitehead and Nyla Cabeer there is hardly a groundbreaking concept in the field that does not bear their stamp Nyla went even further by developing tools and instruments that could be used to inform development practice from project design and evaluation to macro level policy formulation how did that happen I think that Nyla was never afraid of getting her hands dirty she entered into head-on engagement with the power institutions that define the parameters of contemporary development multinationals like the World Bank bilateral like DFID and many others and numerous UN agencies now although academics who work in the field of development have a great deal to say about these institutions they often display a certain squeamishness and I include myself in that number when it comes to taking them on directly and dialoguing about policy formulation and implementation this is something Nyla did with great success many of the concepts and tools she developed were absorbed into the mainstream and with that came a new challenge as is often the case this absorption carried the risk of blunting the radical edge of our proposals which never stopped short of being transformative and this ushered a period a self-replexive period of interrogation for those of us who are in the field of gender and development looking at the decades behind us what we have achieved where we have fallen short and what we must do next so there is a sense in which this process of reflection in gender and development which started with the foundational work of Nyla, Annie and many others took a new impetus and it is still continuing we are still engaged in this process of critical reflection assessment and reassessment now what I also found quite interesting in Nyla's case was that at a time when academic feminism was threatening to turn into a mandarinet under the influence of post-structuralist and post-modern influences Nyla had absolutely no time at all for approaches that had cut off their moorings from the struggles for social justice and equality that feminism had been a part of remains a part of she remained an activist at heart and an optimistic one at that because she always believed that resistance and transformation would eventually carry the day may her wishes come true I have never stood in the way of good food and good drink so I shall end by inviting me to join to join me in my vote of thanks for Nyla Cabeer