Conference Agenda

Estimating the government budget spending on childcare, elderly care and care for the disabled in monetary terms is important for the welfare of care receivers and has macroeconomic implications. Using the central government budget spending data for the last 5 years, before and during Covid-19, the Labor Force Survey, 2018 and 2020 and the Household Socio-Economic Survey of 2018 and 2021, we estimate the approximate size of paid care sector financed by the government and households in Mongolia. We find the preliminary size of the paid care sector in Mongolia is equal to 5.1 percent of the central government budget of the country in 2021. We still working on the household expending on childcare, elderly care and care for the disabled before and during Covid-19.

Economic policies have varying welfare consequences depending on the gendered distribution of labour across occupations, firms, sectors, and household production. Understanding the nature and extent of these structural inequalities is fundamental to sound economic analysis. This paper exploits an exogenous exchange rate shock to investigate distributional impacts by gender. In 2015, the Swiss National Bank unexpectedly unpegged the Swiss franc from the Euro, leading to a large and sudden appreciation of the Swiss franc against the Euro. The identification strategy is a triple difference, comparing women with men depending on their exposure to the shock, before and after the revaluation. Findings suggest that the Swiss franc shock increased women’s employment (intensive margin). Further heterogeneity analysis reveals that this has benefitted educated and permanently employed women. This paper adds to the sparse literature on the distributional impacts of monetary policy (Erten & Metzger 2019; Goldberg & Tracy 2001) and brings a novel contribution by investigating these dynamics using a natural experiment, allowing for a causal estimation of the dynamics. Changes in the distribution of work between genders can have profound societal implications and should go in hand with a reconsideration of the allocation of care work within the economy.

The paper situates itself as a contemporary contribution to the Wages for Housework (WfH) movement. The paper theoretically investigates the underlying causes of the triple-day problem by making the Single-Double-Triple-Day (SDTD) argument of maternal economic oppression which merges a Marxist-Feminist analysis of women and mothers’ domestic work and waged work with a capability-centered analysis of self-reproductive work. On the basis of the SDTD argument, the paper explores the potential of a universal basic income program, a guaranteed income program, and a state-paid-for-childcare program towards resolving the triple-day problem.

This study explores a rupturing way of understanding the value of domestic work from a feminist economics perspective based on the voices of Latin American migrant domestic workers in the Netherlands. Using a feminist standpoint view epistemology and qualitative methods of research, this document presents what is the value of domestic work according to their experiences and thoughts. The value of domestic work is defined by domestic workers into three levels: what is value for domestic workers, for employers, and for society. Value is relational, contextual-dependent, and contradictory. Despite its importance for human flourishing, devaluation appears at all levels of value, and it is expressed in the corporeal experiences of domestic workers Findings hope to contribute to making visible domestic work in a context of migration as well as enriching feminist economics epistemologies and methodologies of research

Time is the ultimate scarce economic resource that individuals and households use to generate welfare, but despite the clear link between an individual’s sufficiency of time and their well-being, both monetary and multi-dimensional poverty fail to consider the deprivation of time. Time poverty, which considers an individual’s sufficiency of time to engage in activities that maintain or improve their well-being, is measured at the individual level and can reveal gender and other inequalities within the household that are concealed by money-metric measures. This study uses the under-utilised South Africa 2010 Time Use Survey to analyse gender differences in time poverty when accounting for unpaid work, household structure and employment status. We fill a knowledge gap by constructing typologies of households for South Africa, where households differ between different race groups in the country and in comparison to international households. Modifying the approaches of Vickery (1977), Harvey and Mukhopadhyay (2007), and Antonopoulos and Memis (2010), we conceptualise a unique gender-sensitive time poverty framework, deriving two measures that emphasise and draw out the consequences of high burdens of unpaid work for women on their time poverty. The first measure deems an individual to be time poor if they do not have sufficient time remaining after completing their contracted work to do the minimum level of personal care and their per capita share of minimum housework, while the second measure provides a gender-sensitive measure of time poverty by accounting for any additional share of committed activities that an individual undertakes. Using the Foster, Greer and Thorbecke (Foster et al., 1984) headcount index to calculate time poverty rates reveals that how committed work is accounted for in the measurement of time poverty matters, especially for gender. Results further reveal that women in nuclear households experience significantly higher rates of time poverty compared to their male counterparts, regardless of employment status. This highlights the multiple work burdens that constrain women’s time, such as women undertaking a majority of the unpaid work tasks (including time-consuming tasks like fetching water and fuel), the prevalence of gender roles within the household, and the persistence of gender inequality in South Africa. A high incidence of time poverty for certain groups of women has adverse implications for their well-being more broadly.

In order to maximize economic and efficiency results, the gender dimension of decision-making is vital; this is particularly evident in the agricultural sector where gender inequalities persist in access to and control over resources, thereby threatening the sustainable development of local agriculture. This study was carried out to analyse intra-gender household decision-making and activities profile among rural cassava farming households in Ogun state, Southwest Nigeria. A simple random sampling technique was used to select the rural cassava farming households from whom data were collected. A total of 222 households were sampled for this study and the data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, and Harvard analytical framework to describe the socio-economic characteristics, productive and reproductive activity profile in the decision-making of the households. The finding from the study revealed the mean household size was 5 persons, with a mean age of 43.5 years, and 77.0% of the respondents were married with a mean household size of 5 persons. Results from the Harvard analytical framework showed that most of the productive activities were majorly carried out by the male gender (adult males/young boys). These include farm labour (71.6%), land clearing (74.4%), planting (55.4%), and weeding (59.5%), while harvesting activity had a mix (61.4%) of the gender groups (adult male/adult female/young boys/young girls). Furthermore, the reproductive gender roles revealed that all the reproductive roles were carried out mostly by the adult female gender group with support from the young girls. Of the female gender (adult females) were involved in firewood collection (60.8%), water fetching (50.0%), child care (92.3%), cooking (89.2%) and house cleaning (67.6%) activities in the study area. It can be concluded that the decision-making and participation of women and men in cassava farming households in Ogun State are highly gendered. This is because the intra-household gender dynamics shape the roles of women and men in the different cassava production activities. This study, therefore, recommends that migration of the young energetic youth to the urban towns should be put in check as this lowers the food production level by the old and aged adult male farmers left behind in the rural areas to continue with agricultural activities, likewise infrastructure that can ease some of the reproductive roles of the female gender should be put in place such as in-compound water source and modern clean energy cooking stoves to reduce the burden and time spent on firewood collection and cooking.

Financial literacy has been seen as a global concern both in developing and developed countries. It affects both genders though women tend to have a lower financial literacy level compared to men. In Uganda, the government has implemented many programmes to support women to come out of poverty, but results are astonishing in terms of value of money and effort invested in these initiatives. Among the factors that may contribute to this challenge is low level of financial literacy among women. This study investigates the determinants of financial literacy levels among rural women: a case study of Luweero district. Using a multi-stage sampling strategy with a cross-sectional quantitative research design, a sample of 150 rural women operating small businesses and are subsistence farmers was selected. A binary logistic regression was used to predict the likelihood of determinants influencing financial literacy levels. Results indicated that: the average level of financial literacy score of women was 62.32; 53.55% were financially illiterate; and 46.45% only were financially literate. Rural women that had ever received financial training were 13.35 times more likely to have high financial literacy levels than their counterparts (OR=13.35, p=0.001, 95% CI=2.74-65.03); the same with those with secondary education (OR=12.04, p-value = 0.01, 95% CI=1.80-80.65); and tertiary education level ((OR= 82.34, p-value = 0.02, 95% CI=2.23-3042.23) compared to those without any level of education (OR= 82.34, p-value = 0.02, 95% CI=2.23-3042.23). Again, women who prepare budgets and are specialist buyers with (OR=7.07, p-value = 0.001, 95% CI=2.16-23.13), (OR=2.25, p-value = 0.03, 95% CI=1.08-4.69) had higher financial literacy levels compared to their counterparts respectively. The findings provide a rich understanding of factors associated with financial literacy levels among rural women in Luweero district of Uganda. Constant training programmes on financial literacy and financial education can propel high financial literacy levels in Uganda.

Gender inequality in education is a well-researched area in the literature. With several policy interventions, including the target to minimise gender inequality in the educational opportunity of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is a significant improvement in educational attainment among girls worldwide. This is also the case for India; the GER in elementary education (class 1 to 8) is 97.8 per cent for girls, which is higher than boys, i.e., 96.7 per cent in 2017-18 (U-DISE, 2020). While gender inequality in access to school education has reduced significantly in India, there has been relatively little research on the gender gap in the demand for private schools. This is important to look at as the entry of the private sector into school education has been considerable in the last three decades after the 1990s. Why does expanding private schools not provide more school choice options for girls in India? What are the factors responsible for the pro-male bias in private school participation? While examining these concerns is critical in a patriarchal society such as India, where parents often view additional investment in their daughters’ education as extra burden for them, studies addressing these questions are limited, particularly using the recent household survey dataset. This study analyses the role of household resources (economic status and educational attainment of the families) in explaining the gender gap in private school enrolment, separately for rural and urban India. We use the 75th education round data of the National Statistical Office (NSO), a nationwide survey covering 1,13,757 households (64,519 rural households and 49,238 urban households), conducted between 1 July 2017 and 30 June 2018. Results reveal that economically well-off households in India are 20.8 percentage points more likely to send their daughters to private schools than their poor counterparts. Also, household heads with graduation and above level of education are 19.5 percentage points more likely to send their daughters to private schools vis-à-vis illiterate household heads. The analysis further shows that girls in rural India have significantly less chance to attend private schools than urban areas. The study also finds significant gender inequality in private school participation across different states in India. Our findings provide important implications to minimise gender inequality in access to quality school education, recommended in the National Education Policy 2020.

Budget decisions are not innocuous – what taxes to levy, what services to provide, and how much debt to take on – have significant consequences for all. This paper discusses the feasibility of including a gendered budget chapter for the South African National Treasury's annual Budget recognising a gendered analysis of fiscal policy has the power to advance equality and socio-economic rights in South Africa. In South Africa, relatively little attention has been given to the implications of macroeconomic policy on reducing gender gaps and improving women's lives.

South Africa has made some advances in gender equality and women's empowerment, with more women serving in high-ranking positions in government than ever before to increasing access to education for young girls and women. Yet, there is still more required to achieve gender equality. A 2022 Lancet report found that a staggering one-third or up to 50% of girls and women aged 15 and older in the country had experienced gender-based violence. Women and girls aged 10+ spend 15.6% of their time on unpaid care and domestic work, compared to 6.5% spent by men. Women manage 42.1% of homes in South Africa, and such households are 40% poorer than those headed by men.

In South Africa, Gender Responsible Budgeting (GRB) dates back to 1995, when the South African Women's Budget Initiative (SAWBI) – initiated by the Parliament of South Africa - began working on gendering budgets for a post-apartheid transition and launched the first women's Budget in 1996. Fast forward to 2019, the Cabinet-approved Gender Responsive Planning, Budgeting, Monitoring, Evaluation and Auditing Framework (GRPBMEAF) formalised South Africa's strategy giving National Treasury the mandate to lead its implementation.

Yet, the National Treasury's Budget fails to provide a meaningful analysis of the Budget's impact from a gendered perspective. By incorporating a gendered analysis chapter in the South African Budget, we argue that the government and all in South Africa would better understand the effect of government budget decisions. We propose a framework for analysing and unveiling gendered dimensions, including:

● Analysis of social spending areas like social grants, health, and education through gender outcomes;

● Review on economic indicators such as the gender pay gap, labour force participation and earned income;

● Examination of Gender-related Development Index, Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and Gender Equity Index (GEI);

● Reflection of investment in combating gender-based violence and its impact.

Le genre semble constituer un critère de différenciation particulièrement fort en matière d’attribution des salaires. Le plus étonnant est que cette inégalité concerne l’ensemble des pays du monde. En effet, les statistiques du Bureau International du Travail (BIT) révèlent que l’écart de salaire entre hommes et femmes pour un même poste peut varier de 21% en France à 38% pour la Corée du Sud . Nous sommes donc bien loin de la parité des salaires entre hommes et femmes, même dans les pays les plus développés.

L’article s’intéresse à la perception de ces écarts de salaire en Tunisie, au travers de néologismes sur la scène tunisienne, tels que equal pay day, inequité, inégalité. Pourquoi les hommes sont-ils partout plus payés que les femmes ? Par quels mots les féministes qualifient-ils cette situation ? Pourquoi cette inégalité semble-t-elle « culturellement acceptée » en Tunisie ? Comment s’expriment les féministes tunisiennes, et comment se réapproprient-elles des néologismes ayant fait leur preuve ailleurs ? Quelles sont les réactions des féministes ? Telles sont les questions auxquelles je me propose de trouver quelques éléments de réponse au cours de ma communication.

Ma réflexion se fera en trois grandes étapes. Je commencerai par examiner les statistiques pour démontrer l’existence de profondes inégalités de salaires entre les deux sexes en Tunisie, et en particulier chez les jeunes. J’examinerai ensuite les néologismes qualifiant cette situation. Dans la dernière partie de l’article, je m’attacherai aux diverses réactions face à ces inégalités (gouvernement, société civile, syndicats,…), en m’intéressant plus particulièrement aux mots et expressions employés pour soutenir les plaidoyers.

We study the heterogenous effects of monetary policy shocks on labor market outcomes for women and men in a panel of 22 countries using quarterly data from 1990 to 2019. We find that men’s unemployment rate increases more than women’s after contractionary shocks, narrowing the unemployment rate gender gap (for the wrong reason). The employment fall in the industry sector is higher than in the services sector, most likely due to its capital intensity. However, labor force participation decreases more for women than men. The transmission of contractionary and expansionary shocks is asymmetric, with contractionary shocks driving the overall results.

This paper estimates the impact of changes in the time spent by mothers in care and domestic work on children’s diets and nutrition. It is hypothesized that a decrease in the time spent by mothers on childcare and home production negatively impacts these outcomes. We use primary data collected from women traders in markets of two regions in Ghana; greater Accra and Bono East to estimate this impact. To overcome the empirical challenge in estimating such a relationship, we exploit the differences in the time spent by women in care and domestic work due to the differing demands on their overall time on “market” and “non-market” days. “Market days” are specified days for markets in a given geographic location and have heightened activity. Market days are characterised by more buyers and more competition; traders arrive at the market earlier and leave it at a later time compared to non-market days. A comparison of the diets of traders’ children on market and non-market days will allow us to attribute the effects to changes in the time spent by their mothers in care and domestic work keeping all other factors constant. Survey data were collected from women traders on both market and non-market days. The survey includes data on the time spent by women in various activities in the previous 24 hours, the food consumed by children in the previous 24 hours, the incidence of illness among children, socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the traders’ households and access to infrastructure, services and technologies. Using this data, we further assess the mediating impact of infrastructure, paid childcare services in the markets and mobile phones on these outcomes. The paper attempts to make a few key contributions to the literature on time use, care work and children’s nutrition. First, to quantify the impact of unpaid care and domestic work on development-related outcomes. Second, in line with SDG goal 5.4, to make visible the contribution of women’s unpaid work to these outcomes. Third, to identify relevant technologies and services that mediate the impact of women’s time use on children’s diets and nutrition. The results will enable us to guide policy that considers the contribution of unpaid work to development outcomes while facilitating women to effectively participate in income-generating activities that are fundamental to their empowerment.

In this article, I offer a feminist constructivist political economy perspective to trace the dual phenomenon of female entrepreneurship in modern history. First, I establish the development of female entrepreneurship as an aesthetic of good institutions rooted in the microcredit movement of the late twentieth century but with expanded resurgence into the global North in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. I illustrate how this aesthetic is rooted in and reinforced by the moral legitimacy that female (micro)enterprise programs afforded to international organizations, NGOs, and later corporations, financial institutions, and states. The analysis shows how growth of women’s enterprise has not only aligned with the increasing austerity, economic turmoil, social tension due to worsening inequality and poverty and environmental stress, but women entrepreneurs have been positioned to stabilize, legitimize, and subsidize the neoliberal capitalist political economy. Second, this paper examines the development of the mythos around female entrepreneurship that was the key to the moral legitimacy logic behind the female entrepreneurship aesthetic, despite clear and persistent evidence that this mythology was increasingly dissociated from the outcomes for real women globally. As a result of this dual phenomenon, I argue that despite the mythology of women’s empowerment through enterprise, women’s entrepreneurship promotion continues to serve the established global hierarchies of race, class, and gender and instrumentalizes women’s social reproductive roles for the benefit of large institutions. It is through the dual mechanisms of aesthetic and mythmaking that ‘entrepreneurship feminized’ has been created and sustained – an explicitly marginalized experience of enterprise that is distinct from traditional men’s enterprise, artificially created by strong institutional programs, persistent gender, racial, and intersectional discrimination, and women’s instrumentalization on the basis of their social reproductive roles. As a result, and in direct contradiction to the myth of empowered entrepreneurial women - entrepreneurship feminized reinscribes the neoliberal, capitalist order, provides moral legitimacy to institutions, and maintains women’s secondary economic status. Further, entrepreneurship feminized presents a framework for engaging enterprise for other marginalized populations (e.g., refugees, indigenous populations) to minimize claims on institutional supports and social protection frameworks, and promote neoliberal subjectivities of self-reliance as empowerment.

Argentina is one of the countries in which paid domestic work represents a higher percentage of total female employment. Almost one out of every five employed women is employed in this sector. At the same time, it is one of the sectors with the worst working conditions.

Unlike most critical economic perspectives that argue that the country's economic crisis can be analyzed on the basis of the lack of productivity of vast sectors, here we argue that it is not possible to understand the deterioration of the population's living conditions without looking at how households, belonging to different income strata, meet their domestic and care work needs. This paper asks what is the role played by domestic workers in the different stages of the Argentine economy over the last 30 years (1990-2020).

The process of privatization and commodification of life in general has meant that there are fewer shock absorbers for times of crisis, and this particularly affects women in the lower income deciles, who become the first adjustment variable in the face of a drop in the wages of those who hire them. This could be seen especially after the COVID-19 crisis. The analysis of the evolution of both the supply of and demand for these services provides clues to understand three characteristics of the Argentine economy in recent years:

- The privatization and deterioration of public services.

- The social and economic fragmentation that is expressed in the different ways in which households resolve their care needs.

- The feminization of poverty, associated with the previous two points.

"The girl who cleans" is a local expression that many people use to refer to female domestic workers and which is constitutive of the little recognition they have both at the remunerative and social and cultural levels.

This paper seeks to recover a classic problem of feminist economics - the inseparable relationship between unpaid domestic and care work and the labor market in general - in order to place it at the center of the interpretation of the prolonged social and economic crisis that Argentina is going through.

This paper is the first to use rich transaction based household scanner data to estimate pass-through rates for value-added tax (VAT) reductions on menstrual hygiene products in five European countries. We exploit different tax reforms and apply quasi-experimental methods to estimate price and volume effects of VAT reductions on extremely inelastic goods. We show that in response to a one percentage point reduction in the VAT prices decrease on average by 0.6%. The implied country-specific pass through ranges from 56% to 110% for standard VAT reductions, with a larger shift for low-income households. Our results are consistent with inelastic demand of menstrual hygiene products as purchased quantity does not respond to the VAT change strongly and suggest relatively strong intertemporal substitution effects.

Assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have long played a crucial role in helping married couples who experience medical infertility to form families. Access to ARTs for single and cohabiting couples of varied sexual and gender identities irrespective of their marital status has unlocked the potential of ARTs to help reimagine more inclusive forms of kindship and family making. The terms on which access is mediated are however crucial to realising the right to form a family on one’s terms without discrimination. Access to ARTs also involves third parties such as gamete donors and surrogates. Reproductive justice therefore implicates not only the right of a woman to form a family but also intra-gender redistributive gender outcomes for gamete donors and surrogates who perform the bodily work of reproductive labour.

In the postcolonial context of India however, state policy has long prioritised population control policies at the expense of individual liberty. The absence of state investment in ARTs has further led to the formation of a largely private ART sector with meaningful access to ARTs being reserved for the elite. The emergence of transnational medical tourism and an unregulated market in surrogacy services meanwhile led to its ban in 2015. After more than a decade of legal uncertainty, the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, 2021 (ARTA) and the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021 (SRA) were passed in December 2021. The laws already left much to be desired even on paper. While the LGBTQIA community, cohabiting couples and single men have been denied the right to access ARTs under the laws, the Acts demand that women be altruistic when donating eggs and performing surrogacy thus coercing women to render their services for free. Based on in-depth interviews with fertility experts, ART banks, intermediaries and donors in various states a year after the laws came into force, we assess how the ART sector has been realigning itself with the regulatory changes and delineate how the law is already producing reproductive injustice on multiple registers implicating all relevant stakeholders including clinics, commissioning parents and female reproductive labourers alike. Through a social-legal study of the interface between the law and political economy of ARTs, we revisit prospects for feminist visions of reproductive justice.

In recent years, there has been growing attention towards women's empowerment on the international stage. This is mainly because achieving gender equality is crucial in accomplishing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and promoting inclusive and equitable growth. To achieve these goals, it is important to focus on promoting political and economic participation for women and empowering them through institutions and organizations.

However, there is still a long way to go when it comes to political and economic leadership. The largest gender disparity exists in political empowerment, with a gap of 77.1%, while the economic participation and opportunity gap follows with 41.9%. Despite this, progress has been made in increasing the political participation of women in parliaments in Rwanda, South Africa, and Namibia. Rwanda ranks first in political participation, followed by South Africa in seventh and Namibia in tenth place. However, when it comes to economic participation, only Rwanda has surpassed the 50% gap mark, with South Africa and Namibia lagging behind at less than 40%. Despite they have close 72% of its gap in average of economic empowerment, the gaps in control of financial assets and unpaid tasks also contribute to economic disparities between men and women, highlighting the need for affirmative action agendas to promote their political and economic empowerment.

Women continue to be marginalized from decision-making structures, perpetuating an institutional culture that lacks sensitivity towards gender inclusivity. Empowering women is not only about increasing their political and economic participation but also about encouraging them to use their positions of influence to promote gender equality in decision-making processes.To evaluate progress and identify obstacles, this article examines the political empowerment of women through four main dimensions: a) political participation in elected positions, b) economic participation in the labor force and remuneration c) affirmative actions promoting equality, and the index of political and economic empowerment.

Feminist pedagogies is informed by a feminist argument that teaching gender studies as a unique academic arm of the women’s movement cannot be done by conventional pedagogies embedded within the eurocentric and androcentric principles which perpetuate unequal power relations. Yet, the School of Women and Gender Studies adopted conventional pedagogies and ‘business as usual’ approaches that cannot disrupt unequal power relations in academia. No wonder, Makerere University with a gender studies school still struggles with escalating sexual harassment cases and gender inequalities. The ongoing study on feminist pedagogies aims at exploring the existing transformative pedagogies that can be leveraged on to reduce unequal power relations and create a more inclusive academic environment. Methodologically, the study employs qualitative action research methods informed by feminist principles that privilege participants’ experiences.

The pretest findings have revealed that there are some lecturers who are using feminist pedagogical approaches that critique the basis of all knowledge and ways of knowing but have not been intentional in highlighting them. These lecturers focus on social change and liberation based on two fundamental principles of learners’ experience and collaboration through group work. The identified course units are; the International Women’s Movement and Men's Studies: Masculinities and Development which critique knowledge production and ways of knowing that that treat learners as receivers and lecturers as givers. Students pointed failure to tap into students’ experiences leads to churning out disempowered gender students who cannot identify and provide solutions to gender related problems in their communities. I recommend adopting the use of experience as a resource. The students’ and teachers’ own lived experiences should be used as ‘learning materials’ to transform learning and teaching and make students not only consumers of knowledge but also co-creators. Gender studies teaching should not just lead to acquisition of new knowledge, but to shift their thinking towards a new direction that requires critical reflection.

The United Republic of Tanzania Constitutional amendment to cater for multi-party politics, quota system and decentralization was influenced by participatory democracy of which gender representation will be significant for inclusive development at all levels of governance. Despite the initiative there is a persistent low level of women representation at the local government level. Given the women and men’s needs diversity in planning and budgeting the minority’s needs (i.e., women) will not be featured leading to undemocratic policymaking. This paper derives from a project that explored the factors influencing and limiting women’s representation and participation at the Ward Council in Ngara District Council, Tanzania. Given that the Ward Council exercise its functions through the Ward Development Committee (WDC), this paper assesses how the under-representation at that level influences and/or limits gendered planning. The study noted that women do not chair any sub-committee out of the four available at the WDC. With women’s under-representation as Ward Councillors, it has been difficult for them to be voted to chair the sub-committees. Such a situation lessens their ability and morale to influence women’s needs in such sub-committees.

This study examines the effect of couples' employment status on violence against women based on the 2017 Gender-based Violence Survey (GBVS) database. Using a probit regression model, the study used data from 6,090 women from the GBVS data and evaluated the effect of couples' employment status on violence against women.

As a result of the probit regression analysis, we found that the employment status of the couple affects the violence against women. For example, we found a couple that employed only men were less likely to be violent against women than unemployed couples. Furthermore, both couples were employed compared to unemploying couples, while violence against women was statistically significantly low.

This paper draws on recently undertaken qualitative fieldwork in Budhwar Peth, Pune's rapidly gentrifying red-light district, to analyze how sex workers secure the right to housing despite the criminalization of almost all aspects of sex work including the tenancy arrangements for spaces where they live and work. The brothels in the area are a mixture of centuries-old 'wadas' that are primarily rent-controlled and recently developed flats rented on an informal rent agreement but falling outside the purview of the rent control law. When renting a flat, the sex workers usually go through existing informal networks in the area and negotiate the rent and the deposit. Since most sex workers are migrants and lack adequate identity documents, it is very easy to extract a large amount of money from them and force them to take up accommodation as per the terms and conditions of the property's managers/ owners/agents. Women accept such arrangements because they fear being identified as migrants. However, this paper shows that these arrangements are not as exploitative as they might seem at first glance, as sex workers and allied stakeholders forge intricate sub-leasing arrangements by moving between formal ownership and informal norms of respect, reciprocity, and obligation. Indeed, these arrangements come to their rescue in times of crisis and need, offering support which would otherwise not be possible. Pune offers an illuminating case study against the broader Indian context where migrant women, especially sex workers, experience frequent evictions and suffer from housing insecurity. It also offers insights into why, unlike red light areas in other Indian cities, Budhwar Peth has survived despite the rapid gentrification of surrounding areas of Pune. Through a feminist examination of the interface between the law on the one hand and the political economies of sex work and informal housing, it assesses prospects for economic justice for sex workers.