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Strengthening Economic Rights and Women's Occupational Choice : The Impact of Reforming Ethiopia's Family LawThis paper evaluates the impact of
 strengthening legal rights on the types of economic
 opportunities that are pursued. Ethiopia changed its family
 law, requiring both spouses' consent in the
 administration of marital property, removing the ability of
 a spouse to deny permission for the other to work outside
 the home, and raising women's minimum age of marriage.
 Thus both access to resources and the removal of
 restrictions on employment served to strengthen women's
 bargaining position within the household and their ability
 to pursue economic opportunities. Although this reform now
 applies nationally, it was initially rolled out in the two
 chartered cities and three of Ethiopia's nine regions.
 Using nationally representative household surveys from just
 prior to the reform and five years later allows for a
 difference-in-difference estimation of the reform's
 impact. The analysis finds that women were relatively more
 likely to work in occupations that require work outside the
 home, employ more educated workers, and in paid and
 full-time jobs where the reform had been enacted,
 controlling for time and location effects. As the relative
 increase in women's participation in these activities
 was 15-24 percent higher in areas where the reform was
 carried out, the magnitude of the impact is significant too.
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Women's Movements, Plural Legal Systems and the Botswana Constitution : How Reform HappensCollective action by women's networks has been a strong driver of legislative change in many countries across the world. Women's groups in Botswana have used advocacy tools such as testing the implementation of gender equality principles in the national court system. In 1992, women's legal networks in the Unity Dow case successfully challenged discriminatory statutory citizenship laws. This victory triggered far-reaching reforms of the citizenship law, family law, and even the Constitution itself. Two decades later, another successful "test" case, the Mmusi case, has challenged the customary law practice of favoring male heirs as contrary to constitutional principles of equality. The paper explores the role that judges and national courts play in implementing gender equality principles and upholding state commitments to the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. The paper also highlights the role of governments in taking on the concerns of their citizens and cementing the principle of equality in national legal frameworks. The backdrop to this process is a plural legal system where both customary and statutory laws and courts exist side by side. How women negotiate their rights through these multiple systems by coalition building and using "good practice" examples from other countries is important to understand from a policy perspective and how this "bottom-up" approach can contribute to women's economic empowerment in other national contexts.