Half the world's population now lives in cities. Governments and international development agencies have made housing the urban poor a priority, but few focus on women's needs. Based on research conducted in Ahmedabad in collaboration with the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), this book maps the constraints and opportunities that low-income women throughout the Global South face in securing property, which remains overwhelmingly in male hands. Their experiences and vulnerabilities open a window to assess not only land tenure and property laws but also potential solutions such as microcredit financing and diverse theoretical approaches to gender and development.

Quotas for women in government have swept the globe. Yet we know little about their capacity to upend entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies. Women, Power, and Property explores this question within the context of India, the world's largest democracy. Brulé employs a research design that maximizes causal inference alongside extensive field research to explain the relationship between political representation, backlash, and economic empowerment. Her findings show that women in government – gatekeepers – catalyze access to fundamental economic rights to property. Women in politics have the power to support constituent rights at critical junctures, such as marriage negotiations, when they can strike integrative solutions to intrahousehold bargaining. Yet there is a paradox: quotas are essential for enforcement of rights, but they generate backlash against women who gain rights without bargaining leverage. In this groundbreaking study, Brulé shows how well-designed quotas can operate as a crucial tool to foster equality and benefit the women they are meant to empower.

An analysis of gender and property throughout South Asia which argues that the most important economic factor affecting women is the gender gap in command over property.

This volume examines the role of women workers who are joining the workforce in urban India. Employment opportunities have opened up and are constantly expanding for women, but this book interrogates whether their working status is breaking gender stereotypes or reaffirming them. It argues that whether women are working in offices or from home, contributing to the IT sector or labouring as petty producers, they are unable to break out of the gendered codes that place them at the lower rungs of the occupational ladder. More importantly, the hierarchical social order, comprising caste, class and ethnic identities, seems to echo in the gendered structure of the labour market as well. This volume studies the intertwining of work with embedded patriarchal notions of women's places in designated spheres, and the overt and covert processes of resistance that women offer in defining new roles and old ones anew.

Developing regions are set to account for the vast majority of future urban growth, and women and girls will become the majority inhabitants of these locations in the Global South. This is one of the first books to detail the challenges facing poorer segments of the female population who commonly reside in ‘slums’. It explores the variegated disadvantages of urban poverty and slum-dwelling from a gender perspective. This book revolves around conceptualisation of the ‘gender-urban-slum interface’ which explains key elements to understanding women’s experiences in slum environments. It has a specific focus on the ways in which gender inequalities are can be entrenched but also alleviated. Included is a review of the demographic factors which are increasingly making cities everywhere ‘feminised spaces’, such as increased rural-urban migration among women, demographic ageing, and rising proportions of female-headed households in urban areas. Discussions focus in particular on education, paid and unpaid work, access to land, property and urban services, violence, intra-urban mobility, and political participation and representation. This book will be of use to researchers and professionals concerned with gender and development, urbanisation and rural-urban migration.

Across the world women constitute an integral part of the agricultural sector. This volume is based on feminist responses to farming women’s struggle for economic rights and social justice in Asia, and seeks to provide a greater understanding of the development consequences of women’s marginal, limited ownership rights to land and other productive assets. Using comprehensive analyses, quantitative and qualitative data, and case studies from India, China, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and other countries of the Asia-Pacific region, this volume brings together scholars and activists engaged with women’s unmediated entitlement to land and productive assets. While generally taking a position in favour of asset redistribution, the volume addresses two major issues: first, the conflict between legal measures and socio-cultural norms, in a context where laws that seek to secure gender equality and women’s economic empowerment are often overruled by norms that favour men; and second, how changes in the global economy in relation to traditional farming practices have adversely impacted women’s rights, especially in regions where they previously enjoyed more customary rights in asset control and management. The book draws attention to issues of economic security, gender equitable access to resources and asset-building, human rights and law, land-based livelihoods, caste and ethnic diversity, and voices in the women’s movements. This book will be useful to policy makers, civil society organisations, researchers and students of gender and women’s studies, development studies, sociology, economics and agriculture.

Exploring the relationship between place and identity, this book gathers 30 papers that highlight experiences from throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The countries profiled include China, India, Japan, Indonesia, and Thailand. Readers will gain a better understanding of how urbanization is affecting gender equity in Asian-Pacific cities in the 21st century. The contributing authors examine the practical implications of urban development and link them with the broader perspective of urban ecology. They consider how visceral experiences connect with structural and discursive spheres. Further, they investigate how multiple, interconnected relations of power shape gender (in)equity in urban ecologies, and address such issues as construction of Kawaii as an idealized femininity, diversity among homosexuals in urban India, and single women and rental housing. In turn, the authors present hitherto unexplored sub-themes from historiography and existentialist literary perspectives, and share a vast range of multi-disciplinary views on issues concerning gendered dispossession due to the impact of urban policy and governance. The topics covered include socio-spatial and ethnic segregation in urban spaces; intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and caste in urban spaces; and identity-based marginalization, including that of LGBT groups. Overall, the book brings together perspectives from the humanities and the social sciences, and represents a valuable contribution to the vital theoretical and practical debates on urbanism and gender equity.