Women's Perceptions of Empowerment in Mongolia

• In Event: Managed Pluralism in Communist and Post-Communist States

Abstract

This paper explores the intersectionality of women’s empowerment in Mongolia created by the layering of three temporally simultaneous transformative processes from 1990 to the present: Mongolia’s post-socialist transition, the deepening and broadening of globalization, and Mongolia’s cultural reawakening after communism. The paper combines data from 40 interviews with women and women’s NGOs across three geographic locations in Mongolia with cross-national gender empowerment metrics to shed light on challenges and opportunities to women’s empowerment in Mongolia. The paper shows that Mongolian women have seen improvements in social and economic empowerment since the end of socialism, including decreased gender inequality, increased gender development, and increased female income. However, Mongolian women still lag behind Mongolian men and other post-socialist female peers on a number of key development metrics, including labor force participation. Women described a lack of social supports, a dearth of financial options for business development, gender-based cultural expectations in the private and public spheres, and women-on-women limiting behaviors as key impediments to economic empowerment. Women of all ages and in all three geographic locations presented a Mongolian understanding of female empowerment that featured strong males, traditional nomadic values and the privileging of family balance as a corrective to homogenous global gender empowerment expectations.

Author

• Cynthia M. Horne, Western Washington University