Public decision making by women’s self-help groups and its contributions to women’s empowerment: Evidence from West Bengal, India

Despite considerable efforts made by development scholars and practitioners to address women’s subordinate status, gender inequality remains pervasive. Feminist scholars have advocated for a reframing of the notion of women’s empowerment that shifts away from a purely economistic approach to one that encompasses individual consciousness, resource access, and collective action components. Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) present an opportunity to address such goals. Yet, evidence of how SHGs can leverage their collective power to generate positive change and transform perceptions of women’s abilities remains scant. Using process tracing, we demonstrate how women’s collective decision making in the public sphere can lead to women’s empowerment by illustrating how a group of SHGs in West Bengal, India formed a group identity and leveraged its power to execute community-based initiatives. This involved: (1) the establishment of trust, unity, and solidarity among group members via effective leaders who emphasized the consistent participation of all members in group activities; (2) the development of the SHGs’ sense of self-sufficiency and their legitimacy as decision-making bodies within their community through a self-led project to establish a grain bank in their village; and (3) the exercise of that legitimacy and developing sense of authority via organization around a controversial goal—alcohol prohibition—that sought to change male behavior for women’s benefit. We conclude that public decision making by SHGs working collaboratively at scale can lead to enduring empowerment because it can put women in a position to challenge patriarchal norms.