Gender Empowerment in Yemen

Résumé

The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) seeks to determine the degree to which women and men participate actively in economic, professional and political activity and take part in decision making. The GEM uses variables constructed explicitly to measure the relative empowerment of men and women in political and economic spheres of activity. The GEM calculates inequality between women and men in three main dimensions. These are:

1. Political participation and decision- making power and measured by women's and men's percentage shares of parliamentary seats

2. Economic participation and decision-making power, measured by women's and men's percentage shares of administrative and managerial positions and their percentage shares of professional and technical jobs.

3. Power over economic resources and measured by earned income for women and men.

This study used descriptive analysis method and has gone through the issue of empowering the Yemeni woman and analyses the factors affecting the empowerment of women by economic, social and demographic characteristics through a set of indicators, namely: women’s education, women’s work, and political participation in Yemen The results of the study reveals that Yemen ranked 121 , among 177 countries of the world , in terms of the Human Development Index related to gender with Index ( 0.556). Yemen has a gender inequality index (GII) value of 0.834, ranking it 162 out of 162 countries in the 2018 index. In Yemen, 0.5 percent of parliamentary seats are held by women, and 19.9 percent of adult women have reached at least a secondary level of education compared to 35.5 percent of their male counterparts. The education of women without their participation in economic and political decision making activities is a waste of human capital and the removal of a large sector of human power in society and disable it to contribute to the process of economic and social development.