1 October 2025, 13:30 CET
Seminar Room 1.205
Lucero Carballo-Madrigal
University of Passau
This paper examines the long-term evolution of women’s roles in Afghanistan, analyzing historical and recent power shifts through newspaper articles, surveys, and secondary sources. We trace changes from the pre-Soviet era through the Taliban rule, the U.S.-led intervention, and the subsequent troop withdrawal, assessing their impact on women’s agency. By employing several empirical approaches, including event study designs, we assess how power shifts affect women’s outcomes, ranging from beliefs about gender roles and perceived agency to actual economic participation and educational attainment. We estimate the causal effects of the most recent transition – the foreign troop withdrawal and the subsequent Taliban takeover in 2021 – using an established instrumental variable. Our initial findings provide suggestive evidence of a negative impact from the withdrawal of international military troops in women’s political agency and related outcomes, and indicates support for our hypothesis that the emergence of extremist groups (the Taliban) has a negative impact on female-related outputs.
Karin Wied Thomsen
DanChurchAid
From May to Oct 2024, DanChurchAid (DCA) and local NGO partners conducted research on barriers and opportunities to Women's Economic Empowerment (WEE) in the in Raqqa governorate in Northeast Syria (NES). Surveys and interviews – individual and group-based – were carried out within both urban Raqqa and in nearby informal settlements which host internally displaced people due to the ongoing conflict in the region. Respondents included both women and men. The research findings confirm the employment disparities between women and men with respectively 82% and 58% out of employment, and between the urban and settlement populations (54 and 97% respectively). Furthermore, research findings outine the key barriers to WEE as being restrictive gender norms, safety and security concerns as well as limited access to education and finance. In terms of opportunities for advancing WEE, the research points to both an openness and an eagerness among the Syrian women to engage in initiatives that can lead to employment, including within sectors that would not traditionally involve women. In combination with DCA and partners’ programmatic evidence from the region, the research highlights the importance of an approach which is gender- and conflict-sensitive and which integrates psychosocial support with skills building, mentorship schemes and start-up capital for the women to enter the labour market.
Xiao Hui Tai
University of California, Davis
Women’s empowerment and armed conflict have been some of the key topics on the international development agenda. We study the effect of being exposed to armed conflict during adolescence on women’s economic empowerment, using georeferenced surveys and conflict events data from 35 countries in Africa. Conflict exposure is associated with women being less likely to be employed in a skilled occupation or to report cash earnings, suggesting a decrease in accumulation of skills during the formative adolescent years. These women are also more likely to be married at an earlier age, potentially explaining this result. On the other hand, the same type of conflict exposure results in women being more likely to own a house alone — perhaps due to asset transfers — a potential silver lining that has not been explored in the literature. Similar to women, men are less likely to report cash earnings, but other effects are much more muted.