The Limits of “Empowerment”: Towards Justice and Accompaniment | 25, Issue 14
In specialty coffee, the term “empowering women” is ubiquitous: Women’s empowerment is featured in the mission of global and local organizations devoted to women’s equality; in associations that seek to unite women to use their voices and band together; and in programs from soil management to latte art that seek to train women.
ERIKA KOSS explores the nuances of the word “empowerment,” the complications of its twenty-first century usage, and why an update to our vocabulary is required. [Editor’s Note: After going to print, we regrettably found a proofing error in paragraph two, column two on page 040 that could affect readers’ understanding of the premise set out by the author. The text is corrected below.]
If the words we choose reflect our thoughts, the word “empowerment,” most popularly juxtaposed with equality for women,[1] is problematic. When our words lack precision, the policies and practices we seek to create are tarnished.
Rarely is the term “empowerment” itself defined on the websites for specialty coffee organizations, programs, and businesses, although many claim the goal of their work is specifically to “empower women.” For this reason, this article begins by analyzing the word’s history and etymology to explain why this word is not sufficient to convey the intent it tries to communicate, or to create the change so often desired.
The Etymology of Empowerment
First used in 1657 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English verb “to empower” [em– prefix + power, verb] means: (1) To invest with legal or formal power or authority; to authorize or license to do something; (2a) To confer power on, make powerful; or (2c) To give (a person) the means, ability, or strength to do something; to enable.[2]
As with all transitive verbs in English, “empower” requires an object. This means that the focus of any “empowering” emphasizes the agency of the subject, not the object. In other words, when we analyze the grammar and sentence syntax, we discern that the subject is the agent who effects “empowerment,” because they possess the power to “invest,” “authorize,” or “confer”; therefore, the object lacks their own power, hence the reason it is needed from another source (the subject).
Deconstructing this further, sentences such as “we seek to empower coffee farmers,” as one popular example, logically expresses that in order for farmers (grammatically speaking, the objects) to receive power, it comes from an external source (subject, “we”). Put another way, both the word itself and the concept of “empowerment” can perpetuate a (nuanced but nevertheless tangible) form of dependency between the subject and object. When the Global North focuses on the goal of “empowerment,” they center themselves as a savior, as the one with power who, even when altruistically intended, holds the power to “save” women.
This is why the twenty-first century concept ofempowerment may preserve unequal social relationships. And, if we aren’t careful, the word itself and the concept that follows can perpetuate a devious reenactment of past colonial calamities, wickedness, and heartbreaks.[3]
Empowerment as Disempowering?
Empowerment shines like a silver bullet that seems to hit the world’s “Wicked Problems”: after all, isn’t it true that if you empower a woman, then you empower a community, a nation, even the world?
On the surface, empowering women seems to be a noble goal, one that promotes human rights and ends the suffering of women around the world, leading women to have more voice, more choice, and more income. But “women” do not comprise a monolithic global group, and as poet Audre Lorde said in a speech in 1980, “ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to the mobilization of women’s joint power.”[4] The ways women seek agency, as well as the intersectional barriers women face, are as diverse as women themselves.[5]
But the assumption that gendered inequality is a problem that can be solved—or at least improved—by Global North development policies or better business practices is rife with complications that are ineffective at best and disempowering at worst. Now considered by many scholars to be a buzzword, “women’s empowerment” is often used ambiguously to maintain the status quo, and leads “feminist activists into a cul-de-sac.”[6] Even international organizations confess that, at times, they prefer to use “safer and less challenging discourses” to obtain consensus.[7] Yet without a more vigorous and precise vocabulary, how will injustice be transformed?
100 Years from Gender Equality?
That women around the world both need, and deserve, more power, both at the state and household levels, is unquestionable.
In October 2020, an unprecedented virtual meeting commemorated the 45th anniversary of the historic adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action that took place in China, in 1995, where a robust roadmap for global women’s rights originally launched. During the October 2020 meeting, leaders from more than 100 countries vowed to accelerate and realize their intention on empowerment for women and girls, because they acknowledged “that the redistribution of power and resources between women and men in the public and private spheres, which is inextricably tied in with the broader goals of achieving equality for all, has not been achieved.”[8]
From the top: General view of the Main Committee of the Fourth World Conference on Women, at its first meeting, held on 5 September 1995 in Beijing (Credit: UN/DPI 051114/Zhang Yan Hui); A general view of the Plenary Hall at the Beijing International Convention Centre (BICC), during the address by Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton of the United States on 5 September 1995 (Credit: UN/DPI 051331/Zhang Yan Hui); A member of the Delegation of Yemen to the Fourth World Conference on Women at a working group meeting on 8 September 1995 in Beijing, China (Credit: UN/DPI 080835/Yao Da Wei).
This historic confession is particularly notable given the international attention and changed public discourse about the rights of women in the last 20 years. Internationally, the spotlight on “women’s empowerment,” instigated by The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the year 2000 and designed to be achieved by 2015, contributed to the focus on “empowerment” that became (and remains) regularly combined with the adjectives “gender” or “women,” through its Goal #3: “to promote gender equality and empower women.” When such equality wasn’t attained, the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. This call for gender equality was directly stated in Goal #5 (“achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”) and embedded throughout many of the other 17 goals. The desirable aims for the “full empowerment of women and girls” and to “end all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere” are intended to be accomplished by 2030—yet a long road endures for either goal to become a reality in all rural communities and agricultural sectors, including coffee.
In fact, despite the real progress that both the MDGs and SDGs advanced in some countries, especially in education and health, the Global Gender Gap 2020 report argues that we remain 100 years away from global gender equality: meaning that “none of us will see gender parity in our lifetimes, and nor likely will many of our children.”[9]
If this is true, then the focus of the last 50 years on “empowerment” isn’t enough. But why not?
How Many Women in Coffee?
Let’s consider some global data. Although gendered inequalities and inequities are ubiquitously considered to be among the twentieth-first century’s most urgent development challenges, there remains a dearth of literature that analyzes gender policy and practice in the global coffee industry.
At the time of writing, there is an absence of any reliable, verifiable global data about the specific number of women involved in producing coffee globally. However, the International Coffee Organization estimates in its 2018 report Gender Equality in the Coffee Sector that “between 20% and 30% of coffee farms are female-operated and up to 70% of labor in coffee production is provided by women, depending on the region.”[10]
The 2019 report Empowering Women in the Rural Economy from the International Labour Organization corroborates this data generally, estimating that while rural women comprise a quarter of the world’s population, working as farmers, wage earners, and entrepreneurs, fewer than 20% of landholders are women and the gender pay gap for rural women is as high as 40%.[11] Rural women, on average, are paid 25% less than men, and they typically work longer hours. They are also often engaged in labor-intensive work in difficult conditions, which lack occupational safety and health measures, or social protection from gender-based sexual exploitation and/or violence.
In coffee, we can infer that most of the “wage labor in export-oriented agriculture is female labor,”[12] as demonstrated by several research reports and articles, such as a 2014 report based on more than 1,000 hours of research conducted on Ugandan and Ethiopian coffee cooperatives.
However, such specific reporting with disaggregated data on gendered labor is rare, and even global coffee associations—such as the SCA—lament the “scant data on gender and coffee,” especially that what might lead to “real, measurable results.”[13]
Insights derive from nongovernmental organizations that work with coffee farmers,[14] or white papers from professional organizations such as the SCA’s “Gender Equity and Coffee: Minimizing the Gender Gap in Agriculture.” These, as well as similar research articles and reports, most often advocate for gender equality in the coffee value chain by focusing upon the gender gap in four key areas: distribution of labor, income, ownership, and leadership/decision-making.[15]
While these four areas remain key touchpoints of inequity for women in coffee’s 70+ producing countries, even less research is available about the gendered inequities in roasting, importing/exporting, café ownership and management, or baristas—and women working in these areas of the chain also deserve equity.
Contesting Empowerment
Literature on agriculture, labor, and development tends to frame the discussion of “empowering women” using one of two major arguments—the intrinsic or the instrumental—to persuade its audience of the reasons why gender equality matters.
At times, this distinction is clearly stated as in the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equity and Development, which names the “intrinsic” argument first: meaning that gender equality is a basic human right. This is deserved “because the ability to live the life of one’s own choosing and be spared from absolute deprivation is a basic human right and should be equal for everyone, independent of whether one is male or female.”[16] Yet the bulk of the report focuses on the “instrumental” argument, often articulated in economic terms: “because greater gender equality contributes to economic efficiency and the achievement of other key development outcomes.”[17] The World Bank’s Gender Action Plan of 2006 argues that “economic empowerment” is “smart economics” because nothing else will increase a nation’s GDP faster than women’s participation in the labor force.[18]
But are women merely to be valued for the possibility of their contribution to capitalist cash-based systems that, when it comes to coffee, were often created under colonialism? Can we find ways to create more dialogue so that diverse women’s voices and desires for agency will be included?
Those who seek to decolonize their views of empowerment might begin by clarifying these distinctions: Are you focusing on women as deserving of human rights for who they are, or for what they do? Are you asking women what they want or need, or are you providing top-down services based on technocratic “solutions”?
Towards an Alternative Vocabulary
Among the remarkable qualities of specialty coffee is the quest for a transformed world that is truly equitable. If this is what we really want, then let us employ a better vocabulary than “empowerment.”
Too often, even benevolently intended initiatives based on “empowerment,” may focus on women as valuable merely as economic vessels. If we seek to decolonize coffee, one way to begin is to reexamine the way women’s labor—both visible and invisible—has become commodified.
This is why I suggest that one way forward is to utilize the language of human rights, which centers on justice, and, in the case of women and girls, would focus on both as human beings (the intrinsic argument). If the justification for empowerment continues to be based merely on women as more productive and more responsible (the instrumental argument), then our power is stripped away from ourselves as women, and instead focused upon those “authorizing” it upon us.
Despite the reality that gender talk is popular, this rhetoric itself does not lead to equality or equity.[19] However we may define these terms, I believe, along with feminist scholars such as Andrea Cornwall and Althea-Maria Rivas, that because power is relational, real “empowerment” must not only improve “women’s capacities” but must fundamentally change “powerrelations.”[20] Anything less turns empowerment into another way to promote neoliberal philosophy that disadvantages an imagined community called “women.”
In the international development discourse of the 1990s, many scholars and practitioners insisted that “empowerment was not something that could be bestowed by others.”[21] As a result, the “empowerment” narrative moved towards “collective action (‘power with’) and the development of ‘power within’.”[22]
In addition, “power with” alternatives may create clearer terminology that leads to more respectful and imaginative possibilities, such as pluriversality and various feminisms.
The principle of “Accompaniment,” rooted in Liberation Theory, literally means “to walk beside or alongside another,”[23] and focuses on long-term relationships and empathetic action. Perhaps most popularly applied in the public health and medical work of Dr. Paul Farmer, this “elastic concept” is a movement away from aid, instead based on mutuality, self-determination, and shared listening. While putting these principles into practice takes more critical reflection and more time, they can be applied to the human actors in the coffee value chain, providing one alternative for a more inclusive path where all women can flourish, rather than the deficit-based rhetoric of empowerment.[24]
Ferocious Accuracy
Limitations always exist with language; words can wound, or heal. Along with poet Adrienne Rich, I want words that move “with ferocious accuracy,” but “empowerment” is not one of them.[25] Without transforming the structures of power between the sexes and genders, the rhetoric of empowerment remains ambiguous and stilted.
As we move forward through the twenty-first century, can we refine, reinvent, or use “empowerment” in ways that are more inclusive of individual, family, or community goals?
One thing remains clear: whenever we use these words—empowerment, equity, and equality—women need to be more than merely “mainstreamed” or “added” as people integrated into business plans and development programs of specialty coffee. Power for women must be more than instrumental, but instead rooted in justice, so that equity will be rooted into the very heart of what it means to plant, pick, produce, transport, export, import, roast, brew, and drink coffee.
Certainly this will take time, but we must not wait 99 years—and changing the language of the Global North is a good place to start. ◇
ERIKA KOSS is an Authorized SCA Trainer for the Sustainability Coffee Skills program, a PhD Candidate in International Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, Canada and a Research Associate at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi in Kenya.
The author extends her gratitude to Nora Burkey and Ann Njuguna for shared conversations that enriched some ideas in this article.
References
[1] The author recognizes that “gender empowerment” cannot, and should not, be isolated from race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, indigeneity, ability, or nationality, especially among voices of women historically marginalized (LGBTQ+, racialized minorities, indigenous communities, the disabled, the socioeconomically oppressed in Global South), and that the phrase should include discussions for other genders, but given the limitations of this article, she focuses here on “women” as a general category used widely in global human rights rhetoric. She hopes this article will provide a basis upon which others may analyze if “empowerment” is a benevolent term, or not, for them.
[2] "Empower, v.". OED Online. December 2020. Oxford University Press.
[3] “Empowerment” as a term is further by its absence in many languages in the coffeelands; for example, in Kiswahili, there is no literal translation for “empowerment,” and may often be substituted with “enable.”
[4] Lorde, Audre. 1984. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press.
[5] “Intersectionality” is a term created by lawyer and professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in late 1980s, which refers to the ways various interconnects in social settings—such as race, class, gender, sexuality, education, nationality, among others—contribute to multiple forms of exclusion and/or discrimination. The term is now used in many disciplines to understand bias and prejudice. To learn more, Crenshaw’s 2016 Ted Talk is a good place to start (http://bit.ly/3dBiyUD).
[6] Cornwall, Andrea, and Rivas, Althea-Maria. 2015. “From ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ to global justice: Reclaiming a transformative agenda for gender and development.” Third World Quarterly, 36(2), 396–415. 397.
[7] Smyth, Ines. 2010. “Talking of gender: words and meanings in development organizations.” Deconstructing Development Discourse: Buzzwords and Fuzzwords. Eds: Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade. London: Oxfam GB.
[9] World Economic Forum. 2020. Global Gender Gap http://bit.ly/3pGMReZy
[10] ICO. 2018. Gender Equality in the Coffee Sector. London, ICO-122-11. https://bit.ly/3bAdwoM
[11] International Labour Organization. 2019. Empowering Women in the Rural Economy. https://bit.ly/3kgw2qj
[12] Cramer, C., Johnson, D., Oya, C., and Sender, J. 2014. Fairtrade Employment and Poverty Reduction in Ethiopia and Uganda: Final Report to DFID. London: SOAS, University of London.
[13] SCA. 2018. “Gender Equality and Coffee: Minimizing the Gender Gap in Agriculture.” https://bit.ly/2ZJYnvL
[14] For an admirable example, see the 2013 report Empowering Women Farmers in Agricultural Value Chains published by TWIN and Twin Trading.
[15] SCA, 2018; TWIN, 2013.
[16] World Bank. 2012. World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development. World Bank. © World Bank. http:/bit.ly/37EF8I6 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
[17] Ibid.
[18] World Bank. 2006. Gender Equality as Smart Economics: A World Bank Group Gender Action Plan. https://bit.ly/2ZEMR4P
[19] Various definitions of “equality” and “equity” are used throughout specialty coffee, but the author prefers “equity” as it focuses on transformative justice and fairness that takes into account historic barriers and diverse needs, rather than “equality,” defined as “the state of being equal,” which may not actually address gendered discrimination or violence. Angela Y. Davis’s 1981 book Women, Race & Class, is a starting point for this distinction.
[20] Cornwall and Rivas 2015: 405.
[21] Cornwall and Rivas 2015: 404.
[22] Cornwall and Rivas 2015: 405.
[23] "Accompany, v." OED Online. December 2020. Oxford University Press.
[24] To learn more about accompaniment, Paul Farmer’s 2011 Harvard Graduation speech, “Accompaniment as Policy,” is a good place to start. It can be found online or reprinted in his 2013 book, To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the New Generation, ed. Jonathan Weigel. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
[25] Rich, Adrienne. 1978. “Cartographies of Silence.” The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974–1977. New York: Norton.
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