Browsing by Author "Woodhouse, Emily"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
  • Thumbnail Image
    Mobile phones and women's empowerment in Maasai communities: How men shape women's social relations and access to phones
    Summers, Kelly H.; Baird, Timothy D.; Woodhouse, Emily; Christie, Maria Elisa; McCabe, J. Terrence; Terta, Felista; Peter, Naomi (Elsevier, 2020-05-13)
    Mobile phones have been heralded by many as promising new tools to empower women throughout the Global South. However, some have asserted that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) may serve to amplify disparities between more powerful and less powerful people. Few studies have examined which women stand to benefit and under what conditions. This study seeks to better understand the relationships between mobile phones and women’s empowerment by examining diverse women’s experiences within Maasai agro-pastoralist communities in northern Tanzania. Specifically, we ask three guiding questions: (1) How do Maasai women access and use phones? (2) What processes of empowerment do phones support or undermine? and (3) How are these processes embedded in diverse social relations? To address these questions, we use a framework that integrates a Social Relations Approach with a modified version of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach. Our team conducted semi-structured and individual-stakeholder interviews with Maasai women in June-July, 2018 to learn their perspectives on phones, social-relations and multiple aspects of empowerment. We analyzed the content of these interviews using deductive and inductive qualitative strategies. These efforts yield multiple findings: (1) women’s access to phones is fluid; (2) multiple pathways to empowerment and disempowerment exist; (3) phones reinforce inequalities; (4) women’s identities are intersectional; and (5) women’s networks remain homogenous. Taken together, this approach and these insights provide a more conservative account of the benefits of mobile phones than many studies and also an important technology-empowerment narrative for development scholars and practitioners.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Mobile phones and wrong numbers: how Maasai agro-pastoralists form and use accidental social ties in East Africa
    Baird, Timothy D.; McCabe, J. Terrence; Woodhouse, Emily; Rumas, Isaya; Sankeni, Stephen; Saitoti, Gabriel Ole (Resilience Alliance, 2021)
    Mobile phones are recognized as important new tools for rural development in the Global South, but few studies have examined how phones can shape social networks. This study documents a new type of social tie, enabled by mobile phones, that to our knowledge has not previously been discussed in academic literature. In 2018, we discovered that Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania create new social ties through wrong numbers, a phenomenon with implications for theory on social networks and path dependency. We used a mixed ethnographic and survey-based design to examine the following: (1) the conditions under which wrong number connections (WNCs) are made; (2) the incidence of these connections in the study area; and (3) the association between WNCs and multiple livelihood strategies. Working in 10 rural communities in Tanzania, we conducted 16 group interviews with men about their phone use and found that WNCs are diverse and can provide households with important information, resources, and opportunities from an expansive geographic area. (Nine separate interviews with groups of women revealed that women do not create WNCs.) Based on early qualitative findings, we designed and conducted a standardized survey with 317 household heads. We found that 46% of respondents have had WNCs. Furthermore, multivariate regression models show a significant association between WNCs and the controversial practice of leasing land in one district. Taken together, our findings show that WNCs can be seen as innovations in social networking that reduce path dependency, increase the range of potential outcomes, and hold important implications for rural livelihoods in East Africa.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Mobile Phones, Social Relations, and the Gatekeepers to Women's Empowerment in Maasai Households
    Summers, Kelly (Virginia Tech, 2019-06-10)
    Throughout the developing world, the mobile phone has been heralded as a tool that can empower and lift women out of vulnerable situations. While many scholars and development professionals believe that phones empower women, some contend that phones amplify disparities for people who are not well-positioned in society. To better understand how the diffusion of phones has impacted women, this thesis examines the relationship between mobile phones and socially constructed gender-based inequalities in agro-pastoralist Maasai communities in northern Tanzania. Grounded in perspectives from scholarship on women's empowerment and rural liveihoods, I ask: (1) how do women access and use phones?; and (2) how are women's phone uses embedded in existing social relations? This research relies on semi-structured interviews and household surveys conducted in the summer of 2018 to identify Maasai women's perspectives on phones, social relations, and power. Through inductive and deductive qualitative content analysis, findings indicate that phone access is fluid. There are a multitude of relationships between phones and empowerment, and these relationships are not only a function of a woman's personal choice and characteristics, but often more importantly her position in the household, the household norms her husband controls, and her husband's attributes. These results help show how women's empowerment in patriarchal societies, which may be afforded by new technologies, is guarded by men and subject to their discretions. This study highlights the importance of engaging men and women in discussions of and interventions surrounding women's empowerment.
  • Thumbnail Image
    New pathways for women’s empowerment in pastoralist Maasai households, Tanzania
    Baird, Timothy D.; Woodhouse, Emily; McCabe, J. Terrence; Barnes, Paul; Terta, Felista; Runda, Naomi (Elsevier, 2024-07)
    Despite the extensive scholarship on women's empowerment and gender equality in the Global South, few studies have examined how changing livelihoods create new challenges and opportunities for women seeking access to intra-household decision-making. Here we examine pastoralist Maasai women's access to a range of household-level decisions that span more longstanding and more recent aspects of changing social and economic life. Our team conducted a mixed-methods data collection in 10 Maasai communities in northern Tanzania in 2018 and 2022. We (1) interviewed groups of women and men (n = 18) to identify key types of household decisions and the factors affecting women's access to them; and (2) conducted a survey of married women (n = 321) to identify individuals' perceptions of access to intra-household decision-making and other characteristics. We applied an information theoretic approach to model selection of fitted cumulative link mixed effects models. Our findings show that newer sources of human, social, and physical capital for women, including school-based education, land tenure, and community group membership, are associated with access to more contemporary decision types, including income generation, children's schooling, and children's health care. Alternatively, we find fewer pathways to decision-making for more longstanding decision types, including livestock management and children's marriage. Notably, agricultural land has a complex relationship with decision-making wherein basic access to land is associated with lower access to decision-making, but land tenure is associated with greater access. This study shows how marginalized women can leverage changing social and economic contexts to gain greater access to intra-household decision-making.