Women's Empowerment

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The Women’s Empowerment Research theme at the BRAC Development Institute seeks to understand and contribute to transforming gender relations and societal structures of inequality and discrimination. The objective of projects undertaken in this area is to understand the factors that affect the lives of women in order to enable more equitable gender relations.

These projects will attempt to promote women’s empowerment by highlighting women’s negotiations in socio-cultural, political economic and developmental spheres and will also look at men, masculinity and minority communities in order to interrogate their relationships to women’s positioning.

BDI considers issues of women’s empowerment and rights as being integral to all the research it undertakes. Nevertheless it will undertake specific research projects related to women’s condition and position in relation to policies, programmes, institutions, movements, culture, economy, politics, peace and conflicts and other relevant areas.

List of Projects

• Domestic Violence: This project attempts to understand and distinguish women’s and men’s individual attitudes about Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and their perceptions of community norms about IPV in order to develop contextually appropriate interventions for change.
• Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Programme: The Pathways Programme at BDI is part of an international Research Programme Consortium (RPC) made up of activists and academics working to find avenues to bring about positive change in women's everyday lives.
• Revisiting the Devaluation of Daughters in Bangladesh: Continuity or Change?This research intends to understand why there has been greater reduction in gender disadvantage in Bangladesh, compared to India and Pakistan, in spite of higher levels of poverty.