The Dynamics of Women’s Political and Economic Empowerment: Q&A With Rachel Brulé

By Maureen Heydt

Rachel Brulé, Associate Director of the Human Capital Initiative (HCI), Associate Professor of Global Development Policy with the Pardee School of Global Studies and 2024-2025 SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University has been awarded a US National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award to study the dynamics of women’s political and economic empowerment around the world. 

Her project will advance a path-breaking research and educational program that leverages scientific innovation to facilitate inclusive development, social welfare and gender equality by exploring the conditions under which political, economic and social systems rebalance gendered power in favor of equality around the world.  

Her work will investigate the scope of gender backlash that seeks to undo gender-equalizing progress as well as what predicts its impact on broader processes of social, economic and political change. She theorizes that backlash may also be a constructive force for gender equality when it catalyzes women’s solidarity. Consequently, she asks: when does backlash amplify women’s solidarity and when does such solidarity promote universal welfare improvements that benefit everyone?

The grant, the first of its kind to be awarded through the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, builds on her work with HCI and the Program on Women’s Empowerment Research. 

Below, Rachel Brulé discusses her research plans and shares the one policy change she would make overnight:

Q1: You have built your academic career focusing on the dynamics of women’s political and economic empowerment. What motivated you to pursue this topic?

RB: I began with a simple question: under what conditions can states build policies that bring about more equal social and economic organization? I am particularly interested in whether state-led reforms can tackle hierarchical social norms that create enduring constraints on access to economic resources, social status and political voice for members of certain groups.

While my question is a very general one, the clearest example I found of enduring global exclusion with a very concrete reform with the power to end this exclusion concerned women in India. With a series of state-level and then national, constitutional reforms, the Indian state addressed crucial challenges for women globally: their economic and political exclusion. I was deeply interested to understand both what policies are effective at reducing exclusion and what infrastructure is required to bring about the intended impact.

After nearly two decades of research, I am still amazed at the ways in which policy (and other) interventions which are intended to improve the well being of traditionally-excluded groups can do the exact opposite of what we anticipate: reducing the well-being of the intended beneficiaries. Building and implementing policy that improves welfare requires substantive, enduring engagement with the groups intended to benefit at every stage of the policy-making process, from the design, implementation, evaluation, to the re-design of policies.

Given what is currently a widespread process of women’s underrepresentation (or men’s overrepresentation) in states, as is true for many other groups, we cannot expect that inclusion is an automatic, mechanical process. It requires work, in the design and redesign of institutions, in which we should be continuously invested.

Q2: How will the NSF Career Award support and impact your research in the coming years? What will it enable you to do? 

RB: I am very excited to have NSF support to think big about my next work, which is fundamentally about the conditions under which we can leverage challenging times to support transformative change that benefits everyone. In my work, I also seek to engage and help support students across BU and beyond, including the breadth of fantastic universities in the US, India, Bangladesh and students from Afghanistan working and attempting to study, particularly abroad.

My five-year CAREER research agenda will achieve four objectives: 1) document the scope of gender backlash and women’s solidarity in my initial case: India; 2) build measures of backlash and solidarity that travel across cases; 3) hone and test my original theory on the causes and consequences of gender backlash by leveraging natural and field experiments that alter women’s rights and resources; and 4) implement a multi-faceted educational program to establish the Open Backlash Data Project–a replicable system of data collection, processing, digital infrastructure building and analysis based in four core study cases–coinciding with an interdisciplinary educational program of courses, practicums and workshops. The project will integrate students from social science, law, gender studies and computing and data science in hands-on research projects and data collection with the training them to deploy data science to analyze geo-spatial patterns of backlash alongside shifts in gendered rights, resources, networks and power. This work will leverage established partnerships with the Empirical Study of Gender Network, the Government Innovation Lab and BU’s GDP Center, the Pardee School, and Computing and Data Sciences Faculty.

Q3: Efforts to improve women’s political and economic empowerment are not limited to the Global South, but are also necessary in Global North countries, like the United States. Do the factors limiting women’s empowerment differ greatly between Global North and Global South countries, or are they largely the same?

RB: One institution that I think we consistently underestimate globally – in the Global North as much as the Global South – is that of the patriarchal family. While we see remarkably similar organization across countries, I would argue that the opportunities for building more egalitarian, and more effective, families are at least as evident, if not more so, in the Global South as in the Global North. In a recent Journal of Politics article, Nikhar Gaikwad and I explore the radical democracy that exists within matrilineal families in Meghalaya, in North East India.

Q4: You are also the primary architect and lead scholar working on the Alliance for Afghan Women’s Economic Resilience, a public-private partnership between the United States Department of State and the Pardee School of Global Studies that aims to promote the economic rights and well-being of Afghan women. How is your work on the Alliance complementary to your NSF Career Award? 

RB: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken launched the Alliance for Afghan Women’s Economic Resilience, in partnership with Boston University, in fall 2022. Our core aims are to support ways to improve Afghan women’s access to education, jobs and broader economic opportunities via an ever-more inclusive coalition of actors across sectors and countries.

This is in direct response to Taliban dictates since taking power in August 2021, which are applying extreme, sustained pressure on Afghan women in ways that many would have deemed inconceivable just a few years ago. They have attempted to remove women from public life, livelihoods and education. Today, Afghanistan is the only country in the world which bars women and girls from most levels of education and their voices from public space altogether. 

In our work, we aim to build pipelines for Afghan women and their allies to work with – and become – BU students to collaboratively design, evaluate and improve the impact of programs to improve Afghan women’s economic opportunities. This project is distinct from existing public and private sector development and gender empowerment initiatives, as collaboratively-designed, evidence-based research with the primary priority of identity protection for all women and girls who participate. This is because we anticipate backlash to reforms that disrupt patriarchal power. We are working to identify and respond to backlash at every stage in the development and implementation of this project, to raise the bar for future policy.

Q5: If you could make one policy change overnight regarding women’s political and economic empowerment, what would it be?

RB: Quotas for women, which intersect with quotas for members of other typically-excluded groups, in decision-making institutions, until we reach parity. 

*