WOMEN EMPOWERMENT
Generally empowerment is considered as
development of skills to make a person more confident, self-reliant and to
develop ability to take self-decisions.
Empowerment is a process of strengthening
/enhancing the authority/autonomy by giving information, delegation of
responsibility.
The meaning of Empowerment:
Empowerment refers broadly to the
expansion of freedom of choice and action to shape one’s life. It implies
control over resources and decisions. For women, that freedom is curtailed by
their voicelessness and powerlessness in relation particularly to the state and
markets. There are important gender inequalities, including within the household,
since powerlessness is embedded in a culture of unequal institutional
relations.
The office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights has defined empowerment as “ the process of
giving people the power, capacities, capabilities and access needed to change
their own lives, improve their own communities and influence their own
destinies.
Empowerment
Empowerment refers to measures
designed to increase the degree of autonomy and self-determination in people and in
communities in order to enable them to represent their interests in a
responsible and self-determined way, acting on their own authority.
Empowerment refers both to the
process of self-empowerment and to professional support of people, which
enables them to overcome their sense of powerlessness and lack of influence,
and to recognise and eventually to use their resources and chances.
The term empowerment
originates from American community
psychology and
is associated with the social scientist Julian Rappaport (1981).
Definitions
Robert Adams defines 'Empowerment as the capacity of individuals, groups and/or
communities to take control of their circumstances, exercise power and achieve
their own goals, and the process by which, individually and collectively, they
are able to help themselves and others to maximize the quality of their lives.'
Rappaport's (1984) definition includes: "Empowerment is
viewed as a process: the mechanism by which people, organizations, and
communities gain mastery over their lives."
Sociological empowerment
often addresses members of groups that social discrimination processes have
excluded from decision-making processes through - for example - discrimination
based on disability, race,
ethnicity, religion, or gender. Empowerment as a methodology is also associated
with feminism.
Objectives of Empowerment:
1. To develop sense of internal
strength and self-confidence to face life.
2. To improve the performances by
delegating responsibility.
3. To give authority/autonomy to
choose and to make self-decisions.
4. To enhance the participation in
decision-making at all levels.
5. To influence in the direction of
social change.
6. To contribute towards national
development.
Women empowerment
Women empowerment is the empowerment of women which helps them to take their own
decisions by breaking all personal limitations of the society and family.
Students are generally get this topic to discuss or write some paragraphs or
complete essay in their schools.
Empowerment refers to enabling people
to take charge of their own lives. For women, empowerment emphasizes the
importance of increasing their power and taking control over decisions and
issues that shape their lives.
Women empowerment addresses power and relationships in society
intertwined with gender, class, race, ethnicity, age, culture and history.
Power is identified with equity and equality for women and men in access to
resources, participation indecision making and control over distribution of
resources and benefits. Gender equality is addressed at these different levels
with the aim of increasing equality between men and women, and achieving
women’s empowerment.
Gender gaps in access to resources and services are a major obstacle to
women’s development. The process of empowerment includes mobilizing women to
eliminate these gaps. A corner stone of gender equality is women’s equal
participation in decision –making.
To empower women literally speaking, is to give power to women. Power
here does not mean a mode of domination over others, but a sense of internal
strength and confidence to face life, the right to determine one’s choices in
life, the ability to influence the social processes that affects one’s life, an
influence in the direction of social change a share in decision making and
capacity building to contribute towards national development.
Since poverty is
multidimensional, women need a range of assets and capabilities at the
individual level (such as health, education, and housing) and at the collective
level (such as the ability to organize and mobilize to take collective action
to solve their problems.)
Empowering women
requires the removal of formal and informal institutional barriers that prevent
them from taking action ln to improve their well-being individually or
collectively and limit their choices.
The key formal
institutions includes norms of social solidarity, sharing, social exclusion,
and corruption, among others.
Women must find ways to
empower themselves to fight imbalance in society, and to participate equally in
the ongoing process of development. When women feel they can operate in society
on the same terms as men, then we can all women empowered.
Facts on Women’s Empowerment:
1.
Women are the poorest of the world’s
poor, representing 70% or almost 900 million of the 1.3 billion people who live
in absolute poverty.
2.
Two-thirds of the world’s illiterate
population of 876 million.
3.
Between 1987 and 1996, the number of
female ministers in national governments worldwide increased two-fold-from a
mere 3.4% to still just 6.8%.As of 1996, 48 countries had no female ministers
in their national government at all.
4.
As of March 2002, women held just 14.2%
of representative posts in national parliaments around the world. As of 1999,
Women occupied more than30% of parliamentary position in just five countries
worldwide. In 31 countries at that same time, they held less than 5% of
positions.
5.
An estimated one in three women word
wide have been subjected to violence in an intimate relationship.
Why to empower women
Empowerment of women is attempted to address two important issues:
1.
Reducing gender inequalities
(discrimination).
2.
Building equality in nation’s
development (enhancing women’s participation).
1. Reducing gender
inequalities: “Girl child is born to inequality”.
There is no developed country for a women. Women because of their sex, have
essentially limited, indeedconditionalaccess to the ‘four freedom’, which the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights,and the consequent human rights
covenants, aspire to define; freedom from fear and want, freedom of speech and
belief
a) Gender and Human
Rights:Gender
Differentiation
The world over, women are denied their human rights. Gender
differentiation is about inequality and about power relations between men and
women.
Despite international
human rights law which guarantees all people equal rights irrespective of sex,
race, caste and so on, women are denied equal rights with men to land, property
to mobility, to education, to employment opportunities to shelter, to food, to
worship and over the lives of their children. Women are denied the right even
to manage, control and care for the health of their own bodies and their
reproductive function. In many cultures women’s bodies are ritually maimed and
mutilated and women are routinely beaten and even murdered in the name of
cultural tradition in spite of the fact that international human rights law
prohibits cultural practices which are damaging to women.Violence against women
is an abuse of human rights.
b) Women’s ‘Multiple’
Role: Gender Differentiation
Women are
usually the careers, the nurtures, the educators, the source of stability, and
increasingly they are major cash contributors. For the most part, women meet
their responsibilities to their children, their men and order of infirm
relatives with generosity, self-sacrifice and unstinting labour.
Few deny that women in
every society carry out multiple roles both within the familyandoutside. Women
have responsibilities which can be roughly categorized as; reproductive
(child-bearing, caring and rearing); caring for their family members, the ill,
the infirm and the elderly; household domestic work including food growing,
buying and preparation. Side by side with these is what is called productive
work.
Women are frequently
excluded from development planning and environmental conservation
decision-making, in spite of the fact that they are capable of carrying out
multiple roles, mainly because of biological differences and gender
discriminated roles. People are born female or male, but learn to be girls and
boys who grow into women and men. They are taught what the appropriate
behaviour and attitudes, roles and activities are for them, and how they should
relate to their people. This learned behaviour is what makes up gender identity
anddeterminesgender roles causing inequality to women. Women, whoconstitute
almost half of the populationinworld are disadvantaged in many ways. They constitute
the majority of the illiterates (reducedaccess to education and really dropout
from the schoolsystem), the poor (unequal sharing of family resources), the
underemployed (low paid) and the most economically and socially disadvantaged
groups.
In order to save women
against all those gender discriminated inequalities, she should be empowered to
have control over her possessions, to be self-reliant and capable of taking
self-decisions for their own good and also for building equality in families.
2. Building equality in
National Development:
An essential first step to building
equality is to remove gender based discrimination against women. In every
society, women profoundly influence the lives and well-being of their families
and their surrounding communities. In most cultures, women are the primary
managers of natural resources-including food, shelter and consumption of goods
within the family unit. Increasingly, they also hold jobs and have careers in
the formal economy.
Even though women have a pivotal role in the world’s future, their
needs, their work, and their voices are often ignored. They do not have equal
access to education, health care, employment, land, credit, technology or
political power and they are not equal participation programmes and decisions
that affect their future.
Women around the world, in the context of cultural traditions, are
victims of violence, such as bride burning in India and female circumcision in
some African countries. Even in the most advanced countries, women’s
perspectives rarely predominate in political or economic decision making. This
situation is an injustice in itself, but it also has larger social and economic
implications. Failure to provide equal opportunities for women to pursue
education and economic self-sufficiency has meant that a disproportionate
number of women are poor. Without education, they are stuck in low paying,
low-status jobs if they are able to work at all. These social
barriers-exclusion, low status, and poverty-are also barriers to a sustainable
environment.
Development programmes designed to raise the standard of living for
communities. Few women have held decision-making positions in development and
environmental management programmes.
Thus, development policies have been made by men and reflect their
priorities. Economic development policies in; many countries have focused on
the production of goods for export; cash crops, primary commodities, and
industrial goods-activities controlled mainly by men.
Agricultural extension services have been staffed almost entirely by men
and offered to men, even, though approximately half the world’s food is grown
by women, and in some cultures it is not acceptable for women to meet a man to
receive instruction in farming techniques.
Why do Gender Differentials Persist? (Determinants of Gender Gap)
The returns to schooling go first to the student. Yet, the decision and
the resources usually belong to parents especially in the early school years.
It is, thus, the perception of parents which may be the key factor. Parents may
have different preferences regarding their sons and daughters’ education.
Parents tend to favour sons in certain societies, not only in education but
sometimes also in the allocation of food at mealtime or the distribution of
inheritance. These behaviours may not be discriminatory in themselves.
When the expected returns to sending daughters to school do not exceed
the costs of doing so, then female education as an investment becomes
unattractive to parents. Daughters will then be educated to the extent that
parents think they should be given low economic returns.
Family and Home
Parents’ education bears an important influence on the gender
differences in education. Parent’s education may represent the value that
parents attach to formal education. The expected direction of the relationship
is generally that more educated parents value more highly formal education for
their daughters as much as for their sons.
It measures more generally the degree to which parents are open to
influences outside traditions. Hence, even in a relatively closely society
which restricts the activities of girls and women, the more educated parents
are less likely to see formal education as a threat to their way of life.
Parents’ education is a limited measure
of family income or wealth when more direct measures are not available.
School and Teacher
The school
environment exerts its own influence on female education. Compulsory education
legislation, open admission policies, and “free” education have got guaranteed
equal access of rights to education. For many other reasons, schools can be regarded
as “closed” or inaccessible to girls and women.
Employment and
Marriage
Although the
non-market benefits from education are manifold, the regional review suggests
that the returns to education in the labour market are also important in the case
of girls.
In East Asia and Latin
America where more women are entering the formal labor market, women workers
are still concentrated in a few jobs which are generally characterized as of
low skill, low wages and low mobility. In Malaysia, boy expects their salaries
to be higher than do girls; and girls believe that the range of jobs for them
is restricted. These expectations, in turn, affect educational aspirations.
The sharp distinction
between male and female socialization still persists in many countries. In Arab
countries, such as Egypt and Morocco, the socialization of girls emphasizes the
acceptance of the predominant sex-role where marriage and family, not
employment in the labour market, are the ultimate goals of women. For example, in Ehiopia, 20 percent of
primary school students surveyed in a study were already promised, married, or
divorced. In these contexts, girls will be educated if schooling is viewed as a
positive factor in marriage.
How to Empower Women?
In completely fair society, there would be no gap between men and
women in categories that are not based on gender opportunities and access to
resources would be the same for both men and women. There has been a growing
realisation among the world community that without the active participation of
women side by side along with men, the goals of national development would
remain a dream. Several ways have been devised to overcome the gender
inequalities and to empower women.
The following are some of the ways (means) to empower women:-
a)
Education, b) employment opportunities,
c) legislation, d) development of income generating skills, e) enhancing state
of women, f) reducing gender inequalities through change in attitudes, g)
capacity building etc.
Education a Means to Women Empowerment
Education liberates women from the clutches of inequalities.
Education is a force to reduce gender inequalities and access to mobility,
share in decision making and contribution to national development. Education enhances
women’s economic productivity in the farm and non-farm sectors.
Entry barriers
against women, explicit or implicit, in certain occupations serve as obstacles
to education. Examples are restrictions against the hiring of married women in
wage-paying jobs in the manufacturing or service sectors. Some of the barriers
begin even at the primary school promoting stereotypes of girls not being as
capable as boys in learning technical subjects or mathematics. Some begin at
the post primary education level with gender-specific admissions policies in
certain areas of study.
In the home, women’s
education has a greater effect on family welfare than men’s education. Studies
in demography, economics, medicine, and anthropology have found a strong link
between mother’s schooling and decreases in the incidence of mortality among
her children-a relationship that appears to be stronger in low-income
countries. These results show that an added year of education for a mother is
associated with a reduction of between 5 to 10 percent in child mortality.
Greater schooling of
the mother appears to lead to better hygiene, improved nutrition, practices,
and greater effectiveness in caring for the family’s health. Does education
simply encourage the use of these inputs, or does education actually provide a
mother with the capacity to cope with health risks and better manage her child’s
environment? In general schooling seems to equip mothers with knowledge needed
for more effective roles at home.
Mother schooling also improves
her own health status. One reason for this is that more schooling seems to
accord her greater control over the frequency and spacing of childbearing, and
to influence her use of health services during pregnancy and birth. Frequent
pregnancies take their toll on the mother, resulting in what is termed “maternal depletion
syndrome”. Particularly in poorer areas where the higher dietary requirements
of pregnant or lactating women often remain unfulfilled.
Mother’s education
improves the educational attainment of her children, particularly, that of
daughters. In many cases, it has been found to have a larger impact on
children’s schooling than father’s education and to exert a greater effect on
the schooling of daughters than sons.
Lastly educating women
supports or enables the exercise of their rights and obligations. The right to
avail credit or own land is diminished by not being able to read or understand
contracts, or perform simple arithmetic. The right to vote is meaningless
unless women can inform themselves of the issues of the day and protect
themselves through due process of law. Violence against women in the home or on
the streets have been associated not just with poverty but also with
illiteracy, which prevents women from asserting their rights. These benefits
are just as important to the lives of women.
Education empowers women in two ways: direct and indirect.
Directly it can be observed in enhanced productivity, wider employment
opportunities and life time earnings. Higher the earnings higher will be the
women empowerment.
Indirectly, education
among women is widely known to have a strong depressant effect on child
bearing, Literate women tend to marry later than illiterate women. They tend to
be more knowledgeable about family planning and therefore, more likely to seek
and accept the family planning services.
Conclusion:
The low social status, lack of
education of women and the consequent power imbalances between women and men
are the underlying reasons for harmful and discriminatory practices and
physical and sexual violence against girls and women in all societies. Low rate
of female literacy in India has always been a matter of concern. Female
illiteracy in India can be attributed to several economic and social compulsions,
but a change is discernible in people’s attitude to give education to girl
child to empower her to have access to employment opportunities, enabling them
to make their mark as income earners instead of mere ‘doers’ pf domestic
chores- as strong a life support as boys to parents in old age. The women
empowerment through education provides them an opportunity to see themselves
different, to become discomfited with their subordinated status, and empowered
to confront the situation and transform the aspect of family and income
relations that oppress them. Education empowers the women to develop more
self-esteem and courage to challenge authorities and individuals who oppress
them, Education empowers women to avoid dependence on others and escape exploitation
in everyday life, avoid humiliation before one’s own children, gain confidence
to work more productively, to do away with social stigma, to gain access to
useful information on health and other concerns and to have share in decision
making at all levels. Empowerment through education brings active participation
to contribute towards national development and empowers them to know that women
contributes 36 percent of the GNP exclusive of their services as mothers and
household manages in India.
Education of women benefits individuals, families and communities. By
Educating women, a country can reduce poverty, improve productivity, ease
population pressure and offer its children a better future. Recent studies show
that the economic and social returns to the family as a result of education for
women are greater than those for men. Educated mothers and fathers have better
educated children and maternal education tends to influence a girl’s education
in particular. As each generation of women is educated, so are the long-term
rewards for society to build quickly. So in order to reep all these benefits,
empowerment of women is essential through education.
Process
Empowerment is the process of
obtaining basic opportunities for marginalized people, either directly by those
people, or through the help of non-marginalized others who share their own
access to these opportunities. It also includes actively thwarting attempts to
deny those opportunities. Empowerment also includes encouraging, and developing
the skills for, self-sufficiency, with a focus on eliminating the future need
for charity or welfare in the individuals of the group. This process can be
difficult to start and to implement effectively.
Strategy
One empowerment strategy is to assist marginalized people to create their
own nonprofit organization, using the rationale that only the marginalized
people, themselves, can know what their own people need most, and that control
of the organization by outsiders can actually help to further entrench
marginalization. Charitable
organizations lead from outside of the community, for example, can
disempower the community by entrenching a dependence charity or welfare. A
nonprofit organization can target strategies that cause structural changes,
reducing the need for ongoing dependence. Red Cross, for example, can focus on improving
the health of indigenous people, but does not have authority in its charter to
install water-delivery and purification systems, even though the lack of such a
system profoundly, directly and negatively impacts health. A nonprofit composed
of the indigenous people, however, could ensure their own organization does
have such authority and could set their own agendas, make their own plans, seek
the needed resources, do as much of the work as they can, and take
responsibility - and credit - for the success of their projects (or the
consequences, should they fail).
The process of which enables
individuals/groups to fully access personal or collective power, authority and
influence, and to employ that strength when engaging with other people,
institutions or society. In other words, "Empowerment is not giving people
power, people already have plenty of power, in the wealth of their knowledge
and motivation, to do their jobs magnificently. We define empowerment as
letting this power out."[5] It encourages people to gain
the skills and knowledge that will allow them to overcome obstacles in life or
work environment and ultimately, help them develop within themselves or in the
society.
To empower a female "...sounds as though we are dismissing
or ignoring males, but the truth is, both genders desperately need to be
equally empowered. Empowerment occurs through improvement of conditions,
standards, events, and a global perspective of life.
In social work and community psychology
In social work, empowerment offers an approach that
allows social workers to increase the capacity for self-help of their clients.
For example, this allows clients not to be seen as passive, helpless 'victims'
to be rescued but instead as a self-empowered person fighting abuse/
oppression; a fight, in which the social worker takes the position of a
facilitator, instead of the position of a 'rescuer'.[8]
Marginalized people who lack self-sufficiency become, at a
minimum, dependent on charity, or welfare. They lose their self-confidence
because they cannot be fully self-supporting. The opportunities denied them
also deprive them of the pride of accomplishment which others, who have those
opportunities, can develop for themselves. This in turn can lead to
psychological, social and even mental health problems. "Marginalized" here refers
to the overt or covert trends within societies whereby those perceived as
lacking desirable traits or deviating from the group norms tend to be excluded
by wider society and ostracized as undesirables.
In economics
According to Robert Adams, there is a long tradition in
the UK and the USA respectively to advance forms of self-help that have
developed and contributed to more recent concepts of empowerment. For example,
the free enterprise economic theories of Milton Friedman embraced
self-help as a respectable contributor to the economy. Both the Republicans in
the US and the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher built on
these theories. 'At the same time, the mutual aid aspects of the concept of
self-help retained some currency with socialists and democrats.'[9]
In economic development, the empowerment approach focuses on mobilizing the self-help efforts of the poor, rather
than providing them with social welfare. Economic
empowerment is also the empowering of previously disadvantaged sections of the
population, for example, in many previously colonized African countries.
Legal
Legal empowerment happens when marginalised people or
groups use the legal mobilization i.e., law, legal systems and justice mechanisms to improve
or transform their social, political or economic situations. Legal empowerment
approaches are interested in understanding how they can use the law to advance interests and priorities of the marginalised.
According to 'Open society foundations' (an NGO)
"Legal empowerment is about strengthening the capacity of all people
to exercise their rights, either as
individuals or as members of a community. Legal empowerment is about grass root
justice, about ensuring that law is not confined to books or courtrooms, but rather is
available and meaningful to ordinary people.
Lorenzo Cotula in his book ' Legal Empowerment for
Local Resource Control ' outlines the fact that legal tools for securing local resource rights are enshrined in legal
system, does not necessarily mean that local resource users are in position to
use them and benefit from them. The state legal system is constrained
by a range of different factors - from lack of resources to cultural issues.
Among these factors economic, geographic, linguistic and other constraints on
access to courts, lack of legal awareness as well
as legal assistance tend to be recurrent problems.
In many context, marginalised groups do not trust the
legal system owing to the widespread manipulation that it has historically been
subjected to by the more powerful. 'To what extent one knows the law, and make it work for themselves with 'para legal tools', is
legal empowerment; assisted utilizing innovative approaches like legal literacy and awareness
training, broadcasting legal information, conducting
participatory legal discourses, supporting local resource user in negotiating with other agencies
and stake holders and to strategies combining use of legal processes with advocacy along with media engagement,
and socio legal mobilization
Sometimes groups are marginalized by
society at large, with governments participating in the process of
marginalization. Equal opportunity laws which
actively oppose such marginalization, are supposed to allow empowerment to
occur. These laws made it illegal to restrict access to schools and public
places based on race. They can also be seen as a symptom of minorities'
and women's empowerment through lobbying.
Gender
Gender empowerment conventionally refers to the empowerment of women, and has become a
significant topic of discussion in regards to development and economics. It can
also point to approaches regarding other marginalized genders in a particular political or
social context. This approach to empowerment is partly informed by feminism and employed legal empowerment
by building on international human rights. Empowerment is
one of the main procedural concerns when addressing human rights and development.
The, The Millennium
Development Goals, and other credible approaches/goals
point to empowerment and participation as a necessary step if a country is to
overcome the obstacles associated with poverty and development.[14] The UN Sustainable
Development Goals target gender quality and
women's empowerment for the global development agenda.
In workplace management
According to Thomas A Porterfield,
many organizational theorists and practitioners regard employee empowerment as
one of the most important and popular management concepts of our time.
In management
In the sphere of management and organizational theory,
"empowerment" often refers loosely to processes for giving
subordinates (or workers generally)
greater discretion and resources: distributing control in order to better serve
both customers and the interests of employing organizations.
One account of the history of
workplace empowerment in the United States recalls the clash of management styles in railroad
construction in the American West in the
mid-19th century, where "traditional" hierarchical East-Coast models
of control encountered individualistic pioneer workers, strongly supplemented
by methods of efficiency-oriented "worker responsibility" brought to the scene by Chinese laborers. In this case, empowerment at the
level of work teams or brigades achieved a notable
(but short-lived) demonstrated superiority.
Implications for company culture
Empowerment of employees requires a
culture of trust in the organization and an appropriate information and
communication system. The aim of these activities is to save control costs that
become redundant when employees act independently and in a self-motivated
fashion. In the book Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute, the
authors illustrate three keys that organizations can use to open the knowledge,
experience, and motivation power that people already have.[5] The three keys that managers
must use to empower their employees are:
Process
of Women Empowerment:
1. Creating Safe work places.
2. Women’s Education.
3. Raise against gender inequality.
4. Vocational skills,/job skills.
5. Creating part time jobs.
Indicators
of Women Empowerment:
1. Demography
Indicators: Its role in decides birth and death rates,
child death.
2. Health Indicators: Caring the health of mother and child,
improving resistance power, protective measures to both mother and child,
medical treatment decides women empowerment.
3. Economic Indicators:
Economic condition/status of the family depends on the income or earnings
of women, her profession. By getting proper education she will join higher
level occupation and earn more and improves economic status of the family.
4. Social
Indicator: Women having good respect, self esteem and behavior with the
other, adjustment with the society and environment indicates the women
empowerment.
5. Political
Indicator: Women those who are having leadership qualities such women
actively participate in political activities. They should have organizing
capacities, attractive personality in the society. She will succeed in retain
her name and fame in the political field. Ex. Smt. Indira Gandhi, Jhansi Rani
lakshmi bai, Smt. Sushma Swaraj, Smt. Prathibha
Singh patil (first women president of India), Kiran Bedi, Mayavathi,
Jayalalithaa, Sumitra mahajan, Meenakumari
( First women speaker in India), Benajir butto etc.
6. Educational
Indicators: The status of the women is decided on the basis of her
educational qualification. She will get low level job for her less educational
qualification. Illitrate women get ‘D’ Group work/jobs. If she highly qualified
like M.A, M.Sc, B.E, M.B.B.S, I.A.S, K.A.S, K.E.S etc. Professional course etc,
she will be at high level profession. So who having good educational background
she will succeed in getting good economic and social status. So that
educational indicators decides women empowerment.
Strategies
for the empowerment of women/Strategies to empower the women:
1. We should develop self confidence, self esteem, among girls.
She has to prove that she is not disenfranchising (revoke). So society should
provide the opportunities in different fields.
2. By developing different abilities through education programmes
so that we can develop life skills.
3. Schools should prepare them to become responsible parents and
make awareness about importance of health.
4. School should give illustrations such that both men and women
are equal in patriarchal society.
5. By providing nutritious food to women, through that we can take care of their health.
6. Giving good education.
7. Taking more care about health of pregnant women.
8. Fulfill the basic/fundamental needs of girls.
9. We should give priority and importance for their desires,
feelings etc.
10. By understanding her feelings and attitudes.
11. By allowing women to do according to her will and wish, self
confidence will increase.
Government
initiatives to promote “Gender equality”
1. Manaswini programme:-Economic support to unmarried girls.
2. Widow pension.
3. Providing Bicycles, mid-day meal, Free Uniform to girls those
who studying in high schools.
4. Providing sanitary accessories.
5. Shadi Bhagya for muslim girls:- 50 thousand will for the
girls.
6. Bhagya lakshmi yojana for girl child.
7. Udyodini:- Providing economic support to women to get self
employment in the year 1997-98.
8. Women training programmes:-
Government
organized many skill based training programmes for women. Under this programmes
small scale industries like sewing, art and craft works, stitching work,
preparation of Agarbatties, candles, free computer education training
programmes and provide the loan facilities to start the small scale industries.
9. State government started guidance and counseling centers in
1995-96 in Bengaluru for the benefit of women to lead their life with self esteem.
Women
Empowerment in different spheres of life:
1
Social Sphere: State and central government planned many programmes like
reservation facilities in education and profession.
--Provisions give to women to sustain their status in the
society.
---Providing
basic facilities and employment opportunities to lead their life independently
2.
Judicial Sphere: Whenever she face the problem of injustice/harassment from her
parents, husband or mother-in-law, or any other persons she can get the justice
from the family court, at the same time she will get ‘judicial support’ from
the court if she get violence, harassment from her husband’s family members.
3.
Economic Sphere: Government provides economic support to empower women through
self help groups, women organizations, co-operative societies and helping them
to improve their professional status.
--Provides skilled training to achieve self-dependent and
leading independent life.
4.Political
Sphere: Provided reservations in participating Gram Panchayat and Taluck
Panchayat elections in rural and urban areas.
--By compete in election and after winning the election she came
to power and improve her social status in political field, for that government
provides reservation to women.
Incentives
of central government for women empowerment gender equality:
1. Beti Bachayo, Beti Padavo Programme.
2. One Stop one centre.
3. Mahila Sahayavani Yojana.
4. Rehabitation centres for orphan Destitute(homelessness)
women.
5. Ujwala yojana.
6. Hostel facilities for working women.
7. STEP
Awards:
1. Stri Shakti puraskar.
2. Nari Shakti Puraskar.
3. State women Samman.
4. District women Samman.
5. Indira Gandhi Matrutva Sahayoga award.
