Empowerment and grassroots women in Hong Kong: A case study of Hong Kong Women Workers' Association

Abstract

Since the 1980s, with the local economic transformation driven by globalization, grassroots women in Hong Kong started to face increasingly serious employment problems like overlong working hours, low wages and unemployment. All of these problems have posed negative influences on women’s everyday life. In this regard, both older and newly-established women’s concern groups sought to adopt various empowerment strategies for enhancing the personal, interpersonal and political power of grassroots women. This research project aims at delving into the women’s empowerment strategies adopted by local women’s organizations and their effectiveness through applying such qualitative research methods as the case study method, historiography and in-depth interviews. Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association, as one of the local women’s concern groups, was selected to be a case for study. The focus was on the strategies taken by the Association for empowering grassroots women as well as how effective these strategies are. The research framework was constructed mainly by reviewing women’s empowerment strategies and the evaluation approach. Consciousness raising, skill training, collectivization and leadership training are the major strategies used by the Association, and the results of evaluation showed that such strategies tend to be highly effective. The author tried to argue that the high effectiveness of the strategies is attributable to the relevant programmes of particular empowerment strategies.