This research explores how empowerment programs impact gender-based violence and the social structures that lead to such violence in the first place. Drawing from interviews with former participants in empowerment programs that focus on building community leaders, the study examines how grassroots women lead interventions and their effects on leaders’ and survivors’ lives. We find that although most survivors had displayed some agency in independently resisting violence, their efforts were more effective when coupled with a support network and access to resources. With the intervention of leaders, the survivors were able to better negotiate for justice with a renewed sense of agency. For the leaders, participation in programs gave them an identity independent of their status within the family. They promoted change by developing independent, innovative intervention strategies that worked despite the tight structural constraints of gendered norms.

Self-employment is an important component of many development strategies aiming to enhance earnings and employment among low-income populations. However, women tend to earn less than men through self-employment, calling into question the effectiveness of self-employment as a tool for bolstering women's earnings. In this paper, we identify a novel intervention that boosts women's returns from self-employment and narrows the gender earnings gap in an informal, residential market. We argue that micro-spatial resources offer gender-specific advantages to female business owners. We show how gendered constraints on women's labor market activity intersect with spatial resources to influence their likelihood of running a business and their self-employment earnings. Using data from a Colombian public housing complex, we find that the randomly assigned location of a resident's apartment significantly influences women's business activity, but not men's. Women who run informal, home-based businesses from favorable locations earn more than twice as much as comparable women, narrowing the gender earnings gap by 58.5% and earning an income that lifts them above the poverty line. This study offers a new perspective on how gender and micro-geography intersect to shape self-employment. More broadly, it reveals how an important but often-overlooked factor, micro-spatial variation, influences economic development.

Sociologists have much to contribute to the study of global health and development. Our discipline's fundamental concerns with power and inequality uniquely position us to leverage theoretical, conceptual, substantive, and empirical insights for the understanding of engines, outcomes, and processes of global health and development. This special issue highlights the diversity and depth of sociological engagements with the topics of global health and development. In this introduction to this special issue, I briefly outline how sociologists have approached the study of global health and development despite the fact that this is a nascent and not yet fully coalesced field. While medical sociologists and political sociologists have historically studied these topics, they have also marginalized them. Exciting sociological research is, however, underway. The challenge is in ensuring that scholarship on global health and development is in conversation across subfields in order to propel research on global health and development forward, both substantively and theoretically.

Development discourse has centered a female entrepreneur as the savior of the developing world, while feminist development studies has been ambivalent about the focus on women as ideal development agents, as well as of market-based approaches as solutions to inequality. This dilemma has fueled debates regarding the co-optation of feminist politics for a series of state, transnational and corporate interventions that are antithetical to feminist principles of social justice. This study examines how a women's cooperative in Costa Rica that works on entrepreneurship and technology challenges boundaries between autonomy and co-optation through a series of organizational practices and loving relationships among themselves, as well as with the communities they serve. The research is based on in-depth interviews with the cooperative's associates, collaborators, and workshop participants, with Costa Rican government officials and administrators at national technical universities, and participant observation at the organization in San José. I found that solidarity-based organizational practices enable a feminist technopolitical praxis that challenges market-centered strategies by forging collectivized ways of living and working, and that in this context technology is localized, collectivized, and felt. These findings suggest that examining process and implementation defies fixed narratives on the relationships between gender, entrepreneurship, technology, and development.

Research and policy analysis on gender, development, and globalization have focused extensively on the changing roles and social status of women as one of the keys to reaching global development goals and improving social well-being. Yet at the same time as scholars and advocates highlight the importance of women's autonomy as a key to economic development, the international media are filled with tales and reports of public gang rapes, acid burnings, honor killings, and gang kidnapping and enslavement. We combine observations about growing class inequality among men, theories of male overcompensation, insights on the global crisis of patriarchy, and transaction-cost analyses of asset specificity and sunk costs to explain this gender-based violence. The data required to assess the causes, prevalence, and effects of public gender-based violence are sparse, and this affects our ability to come to definitive conclusions and policy recommendations. In addition to recommending better and more vigorous data collection on public gender-based violence directed at women and girls, we briefly discuss two possible scenarios that could frustrate attempts to improve the status of women in rapidly developing societies or lead to long-term, sustainable gains.

The global expansion of the microfinance sector demands new conceptual work that recognizes microfinance's simultaneous imbrication in profit-oriented global finance and socially oriented development programs. Drawing from our respective areas of specialization in Latin America and South Asia, and an extensive review of the literature, we posit here that microfinance is best understood as a global industry, with traceable value chains. Microfinancial value chains are vertically organized by hierarchical relations of power, and populated by diverse actors performing various forms of gendered and class-stratified labor. Our conception of microfinance draws attention to the industry's reliance on the devalued labor of women, and the influence of class and geographic divisions on the functioning of microfinancial chains at all levels. Our chain-oriented conceptualization disrupts prevailing paradigms for studying microfinance by allowing us to analyze exactly where, and under what conditions, value is extracted across multiple global sites.

Classic migration theory predicts that individual and household migration decisions are partially responsive to economic pushes from origin communities and pulls from destinations. Recent theorizing argues that this basic relationship is fundamentally influenced by the experiences accumulated within migrant streams, connecting potential migrants with future migrants between origin and destination. Drawing upon a 16-year study of migrant departures and returns from 22 villages in northeastern Thailand, we extend current knowledge about these fundamental relationships before, during, and after Thailand's economic crisis of 1997. We answer the following questions: How are migrant departures from the origin affected by the crisis, how are migrant returns to origin communities affected by the crisis, and how do migrants’ accumulated experiences connecting origin and destination moderate these relationships? We examine effects separately for men and women since village and destination economies are sufficiently sex differentiated. We find that migrant selectivity partially explains year effects: that is, earlier periods are more highly selective. Migrant cumulative experiences facilitate migration throughout the time period and modestly influence the migration decisions during economic downturns, but these effects are far more important for women than for men. For return migration, year effects emerge only for the post 1997–98 period and only after controlling for migrant social capital and occupational sector. Origin-based migrant social capital slightly, but significantly, reduces the odds of return migration throughout the period of observation. However, migrant social capital does amplify the likelihood of return migration after the Asian Financial Crisis. Construction workers are the most likely to return to their origin villages after the Asian Financial Crisis, while manufacturing, service, and agricultural workers show little change in behavior.

This article explores whether a region's traditional type of agricultural production - “dry” (rain-fed) vs. “wet” (irrigated rice) - has long-term effects on women's equality and on development. It examines the three world regions with the widest range of gender stratification: a “dry” region (Middle East/North Africa/much of South Asia, the most gender-unequal) and two “wet” regions (East Asia, and Southeast Asia - traditionally the most gender-equal). Men are primary cultivators in “dry” agriculture but irrigated rice is so labor-intensive that both genders are producers. Participation in production is posited as a precondition for greater gender equality ( Blumberg 1984 ). Working toward a theory incorporating traditional production and region into gender and development, the article considers additional factors. One is the kin/property system: in the first two regions, it privileges men (patrilineal descent; patrilocal residence; male-dominated inheritance). In Southeast Asia, it is bilateral/matrifocal. And only in Southeast Asia do women traditionally earn and control income, i.e., have economic power, the key (although not only) factor affecting gender equality in Blumberg's theory of gender stratification. Cultural-normative variables remain least favorable to women in the “dry” region (especially compared to Southeast Asia). Today, the “dry” region has the least dynamic growth, with continued low female labor force participation (LFP) in oil-poor and, especially, oil-rich nations; the two “wet” regions have pursued successful export manufacturing development strategies with high female LFP, with Southeast Asia now having the fastest growth. Development prospects vs. potential problems align similarly from worst to best in the three regions.