I examine whether policies that specifically target gender inequality improve the well-being of women and girls. In the first paper I study the impact of Ethiopia’s gendered land certification programs on household consumption patterns and infant and under-five mortality. After years of communism during which all land was nationalized, in 1998, Ethiopia embarked on a land tenure reform program. The reform began in Tigray region where land certificates were issued to household heads, who were largely male. In a second phase carried out during 2003-2005, three other regions, Amhara, Oromia, and SNNP, issued land certificates jointly to household heads and spouses, presenting variation in land tenure security by gender. I leverage this variation in land certification across regions and over time, to study whether inclusion of women yielded different effects. Using data from the Ethiopia Demographic and Household Surveys and longitudinal data from the Ethiopia Rural Household Survey I construct a treatment group of male-headed households in joint land certification regions and a comparison group of male-headed households in Tigray and study changes between the two groups after implementation of their respective land certification programs. I find that, compared to household-head land certification, joint certification was accompanied by increased household consumption of food, health care, women’s clothing, and girls’ clothing, and a decrease in girls’ infant and under-five mortality. These effects are largely restricted to households with illiterate mothers indicating that inclusion of women in land tenure reform empowered previously disempowered women who then used their improved position to allocate more household resources to their daughters. In the second paper, I examine the relationship between women's land ownership and participation in transactional sex, multiple sexual partnerships and unprotected sex, and HIV infection status. Using a sample of 5,511 women working in the agricultural sector from the 1998, 2003 and 2008–09 Kenya Demographic and Health Surveys, I find that women's land ownership is associated with fewer sexual partners in the past year and lower likelihood of engaging in transactional sex, indicators of reduced survival sex, but is not associated with unprotected sex with casual partners, indicating no difference in safer sex negotiation. Land ownership is also associated with reduced HIV infection among women most likely to engage in survival sex, i.e., women not under the household headship of a husband, but not among women living in husband-headed households, for whom increased negotiation for safer sex would be more relevant. The third paper examines the prevalence of son preference in families of East and South Asian origin living in the United States by investigating parental time investments in children using American Time Use Surveys. The results show that East and South Asian mothers spend more total time and more quality time with their young (aged 0-5 years) sons than with young daughters while fathers’ time with young children is gender neutral. I find gender specialization in time with children aged 6-17 with fathers spending more time with sons and mothers spending more time with daughters. These findings document health and social consequences of gender inequities within households. The findings also highlight that gender-sensitive policies have the potential to transform intrahousehold dynamics and help realize gender equality policy objectives.

Although the political participation and representation of women has been increasing in South Africa, in other political sectors, this is debatable. In other words, the transformed nature of South African government institutions suggests that in politics, gender transformation has been achieved. While this may be true of the national government, the same is the contested terrain in as far as other levels of political activism are concerned. For example, a look at student politics raises questions on the idea that there is gender equality in South Africa political sphere. Furthermore, there is an assumption that when women are in governance, they use their positions to influence policies to be responsive to issues that affect women. Even this is a highly contested debate, particularly in the context of student politics. In the context of South African institutions of higher learning, Student Representative Council (SRC) is a body through which students are represented in governance of such institutions. In most institutions of higher learning, SRCs have been dominated by male students. However, there has been development which has seen more women getting into SRCs, and this development is credited to policies of individual institutions as well as that of the student political movements which provide for gender transformation. The genesis of gender transformation in student politics has been on the question of presence. In other words, the focus has been on ensuring that women are part of the composition of the SRCs (descriptive representation). And when descriptive representation has been achieved, the focus will extend to the notion of substantive representation. It was therefore important for this study to use a specific institution, University of Kwa Zulu Natal (UKZN) and explore the composition of its SRC with the aim establishing whether the representation of women is descriptive or substantive in nature or even both. The point of entry was to acknowledge the presence of women in the SRC. In exploring the nature of their representation, the researcher focused on how they engage their political movements and the mandates thereof in order to advocate for the feminization of policies. The findings of this study firstly reveal that the SRC of UKZN has not achieved the descriptive representation of women, let alone the substantive one. This needs to be elucidated on. While there are some women in the SRC, their number is too small which is 10 out of 60 and that equals to 16.6%. Politics being the game of numbers, this would naturally make it hard for women to exert a lot of influence. Furthermore, this is a lot less than the target of the vanguard political movements. Secondly, of all the women that are in the SRC, only a small number of women indicated to be contributing a lot of substance in promoting the gender transformation agenda. What separates these women from others is political experience and will power which may translate into capacity. However, the same cannot be said of the other women. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2013.