Gender, leisure and empowerment

In this paper, the author looks at one important but usually sidelined aspect of gender equity and female empowerment: the access that women have to leisure. Much of the research on empowerment is about women having the resources, technical, material and physical, to take decisions, to be physically mobile and to manipulate their larger environment. In turn, this empowerment is valorized because of all the good uses to which it is typically put according to the large and growing literature on female empowerment. The autonomous or empowered women is supposed to be good for society and for the family because her autonomy results in lower fertility, lower infant and child mortality, better household welfare, higher contributions to economic development, and other benefits. But there is much less concern with what autonomy and empowerment can do for women themselves, with the exception of the demographic outcomes like better health.