Women’s share of agricultural wage employment is rising across the Indian sub-continent. Studies examining this process of feminization tend to be divided along lines of an ideological debate following either the ‘poverty-push’ or the ‘demand-pull’ argument. This debate however has...

Impact evaluation studies routinely find that lending to women benefits their households, but not necessarily the women concerned. The reasons for this paradox are not well understood. This, I argue, is partly because of the obsession with viewing women’s empowerment as outcomes alone and...

In this paper, we address trust by combining (i) the self-reported trust and belief in trustworthiness of others from a general unpaid questionnaire, (ii) choices made in a social valuation task designed to measure subjects' distributional preferences, (iii) strategies submitted in a trust game...

This study examines the impact of microcredit on male and female time use and draws on this analysis to explore the linkages between credit and women’s empowerment. A study of time use can help understand these linkages because credit targeted at women with the intent of influencing their...

Poor women have complex financial lives. They borrow from a variety of sources. So far, however, research has focussed only on formal borrowing as a source of women’s empowerment. This study examines whether type of borrowing matters to women. We differentiate between ‘easy loans’ – that...

Poor women borrow from multiple sources. This study examines whether the source of debt matters for women’s role in household financial decisions. Drawing on a household survey from rural Tamil Nadu, we categorise women’s loans along the lines of accessibility and formality into ‘planned...

In this paper we analyze the role of ideologies in developing a culture of work and organization among disadvantaged women in societies entrenched in structures of patriarchy. We draw on evidence from Lijjat, a women’s cooperative in India. Through a careful consideration of the context and...

A combination of commercial interests, cultural constraints and illiteracy have shaped the period product markets in the Global South such that disposable pads have gained in popularity but relatively little is known about reusable innovations that could support the goal of eradicating period...