Introduction to Special Issue of Social Politics: Legal Regimes, Women's Work, and Women's Empowerment

The second-wave feminist movement called attention to the endurance of discriminatory laws that deny women equal rights and opportunities. Since the 1970s, most countries around the world responded to feminist demands and reformed family law, labor law, reproductive rights, national constitutions, and the welfare state. Yet almost nowhere do women enjoy the same status, power, and opportunities as men, and differences among women along the lines of class, racial identity, and region are pronounced.

Why does the gap between women's de jure and de facto status persist? Is there any connection between egalitarian laws and women's agency on the ground? Which groups of women have benefited the most from the expansion of formal rights? What cultural practices and norms are most resistant to change? Are there unexpected, subtle, or contradictory ways in which legal change has shaped women's work and women's empowerment?

The five papers in this Special Issue analyze historical and cross-sectional observational data to explore connections between gender-related legal regimes, women's work, and women's empowerment. They identify key factors that intervene between legal provisions and the status of women on the ground. The papers demonstrate that context matters: wealth inequality, social norms, infrastructure, political regimes, and labor market characteristics shape the ways that discriminatory and emancipatory laws take hold—or not—in society.

The papers cast doubt on the ability of quick-fix interventions to empower women. Given the importance of contextual social structures and norms for women's lives, well-intentioned reforms and policies do not always produce their intended effects. The entrenched behaviors and cultural values of an unequal society are resilient. It may take a diversified strategy, or a long time, to change them.

Finally, this Special Issue identifies some of the groups excluded from big processes of economic growth and political change. As we see in the papers, upper-income women in Latin America take advantage of formal labor market opportunities by leaning on low-paid domestic labor. Low-income women, with fewer people and gadgets to lean on themselves, are less likely to see benefits from expanding economies. Meanwhile, women who work in urban Ethiopia, far from seeing their horizons expand toward greater interest and participation in politics, experience the opposite.

Collectively, the papers draw on a wide range of data and methodological tools. Tønnessen analyzes in-depth interviews with women wage earners from the middle and upper classes in Sudan. Htun, Jensenius, and Nelson-Nuñez, and Filgueira and Martínez Franzoni, rely on rich country-level data from international agencies, such as the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the International Labor Organization, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Finseraas and Skorge analyze Norwegian administrative and survey data. And Aalen, Kotsadam, and Villanger present findings from an original survey of women applying for jobs in the manufacturing industries in five industrial parks in Ethiopia.

Each of these empirical approaches offers us a fresh perspective, which ranges from the bird's-eye view of cross-country observational data, the precision of register data covering the entire Norwegian population, and the personal narratives collected through interviews in Sudan and Ethiopia. They enable us to see what empowerment—and the lack thereof—looks and feels like from inside and outside, from the ground up and the top down.

Htun, Jensenius, and Nelson-Nuñez's paper frames the Special Issue by addressing the big picture of gender discriminatory laws and their connection to patterns of women's economic agency. They use cross-national data covering most countries in the world to show that legal regimes affecting women are multidimensional, which implies that rights to basic legal capacity, workplace equality, and work–life balance do not always overlap. Although we might think that workplace equality is the bigger predictor of women's economic agency, in fact the basic legal capacities upheld in family law—such as property, inheritance, and guardianship rights—seem more consequential. In addition, their work shows that...