Women's Studies books

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 5 has revealed the undeniable truth that women’s empowerment remains a critical challenge, and that gender inequality is an essential building block to a fair and prosperous society. But what progress has been made? This edited collection offers a critical insight and evaluation of the public policies targeted at improving the condition of women living in developing countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America.  Utilizing new and existing data, as well as theoretical and practical insights which bridge the academic and policymaking spaces, the authors frame an essential discussion about women's empowerment and public policy. Viewing SDG5 as an ethical and political responsibility, they point out the advances, scope and limitations of this ambitious goal endorsed by the international community. Each chapter contains a public policy recommendation so that readers are set to develop and act upon a key understanding of how to create change. Crucially, this volume showcases that in order to have better policies, it is necessary to evaluate achievements and failures, and understand how different strategies have had diverse impacts on women's wellbeing and empowerment.

Women in conflict zones face steep challenges, and nowhere is this clearer than in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, regions that face reduced foreign aid, foreign occupation, violence, instability, ingrained social conservatism and perpetual political crisis. Yet the stereotypical view that women are unable to act politically in the socially conservative contexts of the Middle East is a long way from the truth.  Here Ibrahim Natil shines a spotlight on how young Palestinian women work through civil society organizations (CSOs) to improve their communities’ and their own resilience and empowerment. He first outlines the impact of CSOs upon peaceful struggle, human rights and community development relief assistance, highlighting how CSOs respond rapidly to the needs of the population by delivering social, health, cultural and educational services to all sectors of society during humanitarian crises. He then asks how empowered Palestinian women contribute to CSO missions and how CSO missions reciprocally contribute to Palestinian women’s empowerment. Ultimately, young Palestinian women’s engagement with CSOs proves to strengthen cooperation, communication and cross-fertilization between CSO groups, which in turn increases these young women’s agency.  Conflict, Civil Society, and Women’s Empowerment: Insights from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is a little-known success story, one that makes for required reading for scholars of development, peace studies, conflict resolution and conflict strategy, and which will inspire women’s rights activists around the globe.

To challenge gender discrimination and to secure the world's prosperity and peace, we urgently need pro-girls and pro-women policies in the contemporary, globally developing world. Such policies could mark an era of building greater gender equality across the world by sheltering domains of women's well-being that are shown to decline. These needs can be best summarized by Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations in 2005: "When women are fully involved, the benefits can be seen immediately: families are healthier, they are better fed, their income, savings and reinvestment go up. And what is true for families is true of communities and, eventually, of whole countries." The desperately needed gender equality would honor women's place in the world, would greatly honor each country's political constituencies and enrich democratic institutions. This volume of Research in Political Sociology addresses a broad range of gender equality issues from women's status and opportunities at work, education, health, political participation, community involvement and global migration; from a vast domain of countries in Europe, America, Australia, Asia and Africa.

Since 2013, company boards in India have been legally required to have at least one female director. However, gender diversity in boardrooms across India remains below the global average, and a number of the women who do serve on boards were appointed largely because they are related to a founder or owner of a company. Since India is recognised as one of the world’s fastest growing emerging economies, it is important to study in detail why gender diversity at board level remains so low. Is this a result of workplace bias, a pipeline issue, or due to other reasons? Gender Equity in the Boardroom: The Case of India offers just this sorely needed study. Drawing upon interviews with board members and executives of both public and private companies, as well as with aspiring female leaders who are currently at mid-management level, and supplementing this with the authors’ own survey of the make-up of 305 Fortune India 500 companies, this book offers incisive insights into questions about board-level gender representation across industries. Offering both rigorous research and analysis as well as suggestions for practical policy changes, this book is essential reading for HRM and leadership scholars, and is also of keen interest to policymakers throughout the world.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online. Online Anti-Rape Activism examines the nature, use and scope of online spaces for anti-rape activism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with activists from around the world, survey data from participants in these spaces, and a content analysis of social media pages, weblogs and websites, this book explores the complexities, contradictions, possibilities and politics that underscore the ways these online spaces are engaged with, regulated and their potential to contribute to social change. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, this book offers a critical commentary on the limitations and potentials of online anti-rape campaigning. It provides a foundation for understanding the emergence of #MeToo and sheds light on the complex history associated with keeping rape on the public agenda and the enduring tension between the personal and the political within feminist activism. The interdisciplinary and international approach makes this book suitable for a broad audience, including academics, students and activists working in the fields of gender and women’s studies, media studies, politics, sociology and criminology worldwide.

In the global South there is growing concern about the dynamics of global politics that have the potential to marginalize the diverse voices and perspectives of subaltern communities. Exploring ongoing and new feminist dialogues in the global South, this book examines the ways in which dominant epistemologies are challenged, unique identities formed, and the implications for the global feminist agenda.  With chapters addressing feminist issues in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the authors explore how feminist scholars and activists consciously challenge dominant hegemonic discourses and methodologies. The volume raises several critical questions: How do Southern feminist scholars and activists conceptualize and interpret the multiple facets of women’s lived experiences in their societies? What factors shape their positionality and identity as feminist scholars and activists? How do Southern feminist discourses offer possibilities of new insights that reflect the multiple and shifting conditions in their societies? What might their perspectives bring to global feminist agendas?  This volume offers a space within which feminist voices from multiple locations in and on the global South can find expression in conversations that redefine, reconfigure, and envision knowledge production from their standpoints and in ways that positively impact the lives of women in the global South.

Not all research careers look the same. Not all academics spend their working lives in labs, or dark offices surrounded by dusty books. A research career can mean working in theatres or schools, influencing policy, working with the world’s leading brands and businesses, and much, much more. Showing the true diversity of scholarship, and the women leading the way, ResearcHER offers an A-Z of research and researchers from around the world, exploring who researchers are and what they really do, all whilst celebrating female scholarship. Each short chapter offers an insight into a real-life researcher, their background and journey into a research career, what they’re currently researching, their top tips for budding researchers, and fun facts and activities to explore yourself. ResearcHER smashes stereotypes to show you that research is not just conducted by men and women in lab coats or stuck in stuffy offices; researchers are women from all backgrounds, researchers come from diverse geographies, are disabled and able-bodied, are transgender, nonbinary, queer. Researchers look just like you, and you could be one too.

In a male-dominated higher education sector characterised by overt and subtle adversities for women, the path for women in academia is rarely a simple and easy one. This book sets out to empower women in academia to unite in sharing their stories, inspiring and encouraging one another.  Providing international perspectives from Asia, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom, and packed with real examples, success stories and practical advice from academic women at all levels, this timely text equips readers to understand how we can move higher education institutions beyond the constraints that have held highly competent women back for far too long. Chronicling both the challenges and opportunities posed by the higher education sector, and cutting across the fields of leadership, management and gender studies, the contributors offer a finely curated collection which empowers women not only to better navigate the academic world, but thrive in it.

Young women are a group often neglected even in feminist scholarship. Interrogating conceptual ideas around power, punishment and abandonment with specific reference to the experience of young women, this book examines the particular challenges that young women face within the criminal justice system, and traces their journeys in, out and beyond confinement. Contributing ethnographic insights from multiple sites of incarceration to explore how secure care, prison and closed psychiatric facilities impact on young women's lives, Schliehe's study goes further than individual carceral spaces by delving into the wider context of young women's journeys through different types of institutional spaces and beyond. The exploration of these journeys challenges and re-develops our understanding of extreme mobility, and showcases how this can lead to the abandonment of a group of young people who live on the margins of social and legal norms. Merging theoretical and empirical findings to highlight how age and gender matter in discourses on crime and justice, Schliehe demonstrates how we have to look beyond institutions to understand confinement in our age of prison crisis, austerity and marginalization. Curating findings from across human geography and criminology, this book fills an important gap in the literature, offering up essential reading for practitioners and researchers interested in gender, age and confinement.