Underpinning Principles: the Empowerment of Ethnic Minority Women

There is no one way or one specific method of achieving self empowerment.

As Bello, B, G., (2008) notes in "Intersectionality: an approach to empower women at the crossroad":

What empowers "white middle class women" will not necessarily be what empowers a young Roma or Muslim woman. Culture, tradition, needs and wants differ across the spectrum. An awareness and understanding of this, both by workers and the young women themselves, will be critical to the success of any empowerment process.

> Read Barbara Bello's paper in the Salto toolbox - Click here.

Key steps in the empowerment process:

1. Individual awareness raising: to become aware of the existing gender balances
2. Collective awareness raising
3. Development of actions to strengthen the group and practice competences and skills

The collective empowerment process impacts at the individual level as the process to empower a group of young ethnic minority women influences their self-awareness and identity.

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Internal & External Empowerment

This means empowerment has an internal and external level: internal - the role of women and girls within their specific community and external - gender discrimination, negative stereotypes, racism.

Internal empowerment:

The focus is on the ethnic minority cultural identity and the power that is initiated from her cultural values.

The empowerment process of young ethnic minority women means in general the search for a positive self-image.

As a consequence they often collide with man-woman balances within their ethnic minority community, or different expectations concerning male and female roles and behaviour .

This is an individual process, but the general aim is ownership of choices.

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External empowerment:

This concerns the role in public life, and is linked with participation.

The influence of active participation in public life, in their community, effects their personal life and traditional male-female balances. This means that empowerment and participation are inextricably linked.

As mentioned earlier, the empowerment of young ethnic minority women is not the same as empowerment of "Western" women. Their empowerment has to be seen in the different contexts these women live and move.

There is not just 'one' group of young ethnic minority women, but many differences and groups. Therefore, the empowerment process of ethnic minority women differs from context to context.

For example:
For some the empowerment process is a search for the freedom to make their own choices within the Islamic context.
Empowerment for this group is very much linked with family life, marital status, children and so on.

Gender and ethnicity go hand in hand for young ethnic minority women and both have an influence on their life and future perspectives. They are both "women" and "from an ethnic minority".

The concept of "" is a valuable way of understanding these complexities.

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