While employment can substantially improve women’s welfare and empowerment, it can also increase the risk of gender-based violence, particularly from intimate partners, as a form of backlash against employment-induced changes in empowerment. While there is no quantitative measure of this risk in Africa to our knowledge, Vyas et al. (2015) conducted semi-structured interviews in Tanzania to shed light on the issue. Findings suggest that a woman’s access to money increased her confidence and reduced her frequency of negotiating money with men, a trigger of violence. In some settings, women are also restricted in their movements by families and intimate partners because of the risk and perceived risk of incurring physical harm on the way to work, which may constrain labor market entry. Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data indicate that many women ages 15 to 49 report the belief that a man is justified in beating his wife if she goes out without telling him: prevalence of this belief ranges from 5.3 percent in Malawi, to 32.5 percent in Kenya, to 49.4 percent in Ethiopia, to 86.2 percent in Guinea. In some countries, younger women report this belief at higher rates than older women. In Zimbabwe for example, 26.1 percent of young women (ages 15-24) reported this belief, while 20.5 percent of women ages 25 to 34 and 18.7 of women ages 35 to 49 reported the same.

Constraints on mobility may directly affect women’s preferences for seeking work outside the home, and indirectly affect livelihood development by increasing the time required for domestic responsibilities, and limiting access to education, markets, banks and credit, and social networks. For example, an apprenticeship program in Malawi experienced high rates of dropout. Young women, in contrast to men, often cited distance as an inhibiting factor in program participation (Cho et al., 2013). Women in rural and urban areas experience different burdens and risks associated with travel and transport. While mobility constraints are not well-documented or understood in the region, case studies and qualitative data indicate that women in rural areas contend with social norms that require them to walk long distances, consuming time and putting them at risk for violence and injury. In some cases, women’s use of bicycles is considered inappropriate; in others, women are responsible for the collection of firewood and water, which requires traveling long distances and carrying large loads (Porter, 2008; Porter et al. 2011). Though women in urban areas may have more transportation options, they are still more likely to walk and more likely to find work close to home. This may be a result of the inhibiting cost of transport and risks of harassment while using transport (Salon & Gulyani, 2009; Uteng, 2011). Women and youth in both rural and urban areas may also have lower access to a household’s transportation assets, which could have eased mobility constraints related to norms and safety.

Additionally, young women are likely to contend with a much higher risk of sexual harassment in the workplace. Norms regarding sex and control over women’s bodies,<sup>16</sup> weak enforcement or lack of laws, and limited capacity to prevent and respond to harassment, all contribute to an environment which limits female mobility and puts women at risk in the course of their employment. While nationally representative prevalence statistics are not available, smaller-scale surveys have found that experience with harassment and the perceived risk of harassment from bosses and other authority figures factors highly into a woman’s choice of type of work. For example, in surveys of young female apprentices in one city in Nigeria, two-thirds reported experiencing physical violence, and 39 percent of this group

> 16 For example, only 64 percent of surveyed boys in a school in South Africa identified forced sex with rape (DeVries et al., 2014). In addition, among women in select African countries who have experienced sexual violence, DHS data suggest that women’s first experience often occurs between ages 15 and 22 (DHS, 2015).

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