Women's Empowerment Through Entrepreneurship Education: A Case From Aviation

Introduction

Although women make up more than half of the world's population, they do not contribute nearly as much as they could to measurable economic activity, growth, and well-being, which has major macroeconomic repercussions. Women's employment is essential for a nation's growth and competitiveness (ILO, 2015). Throughout the 20^th century, women's participation in the labor market significantly grew, supporting industrialization. The percentage of women in the workforce is rising globally, albeit considerably more slowly. While women in the 1970s, women made up 38% of the global workforce (ILO, 1997), the percentage of women in the labor force grew from 50.2 to 51.7 between 1980 and 2008 (Elder and Smith, 2010). Despite significant advancements during the previous 50 years, gender equality is still a work in progress. Women continue to carry most unpaid domestic and childcare responsibilities. Also, they typically labor illegally and cannot utilize their social rights when they work outside the home. Besides, any crisis has directly and disproportionately threatened women's social and economic potential, such as the 2020 financial crisis hit and COVID-19. Women are particularly vulnerable to the pandemic's consequences since they comprise most health, social service, and unpaid care employees. In addition, women continue to receive less money for doing the same job as men and experience a gender pay gap. Just around three-quarters of the legal rights granted to males are commonly possessed by women (World Bank Group, 2020).

Due to their complexity and multidimensionality, gender inequalities cannot be simplified into a single, globally accepted collection of objectives. However, women’s access to education, paid work, and participation in societal governance structures undoubtedly has the potential to empower women (Kabeer, 2005). Kabeer (1999) claims that “women's empowerment is about the process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire such an ability”. According to a popular definition of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, women empowerment “is the process by which women take control over their lives, acquiring the ability to make strategic choices” (United Nations Economic and Social Council, 2002). According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, the five pillars of women's empowerment are their sense of self-worth; their right to make and exercise choices; their access to opportunities and resources; their right to have the authority to manage their own lives, both inside and outside the home; and their capacity to direct social change toward the development of a more just social and economic order, both domestically and globally. In this context, key tools for empowering women and girls to assert their rights include education, training, awareness-raising, boosting self-confidence, expanding choices, increasing access to resources, and acting to transform the structures and institutions that support inequality (EIGE, 2016).

Fair treatment of men and women is not just the ethical thing to do; it is also beneficial to company performance. Women's full engagement in businesses and the greater society makes companies more competitive today and in the future. The Women's Empowerment Principles are business principles that advise empowering women in the community, the workplace, and the marketplace. They are an adaptation of the Calvert Women's Principles® and the product of a partnership between the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) and the United Nations Global Compact. A worldwide multi-stakeholder consultation process produced the Women's Empowerment Principles. It started in March 2009 and culminated in its release on International Women's Day in March 2010. Today more than 3000 companies around the world have accepted the seven principles of women's empowerment (UN Global Compact, 2022):