A Critical Understanding of Power Relations through Women’s Experience with the Mentorship Program, Carpe Sophia: Is Women’s Economic Empowerment a Way Out of Gender Inequality?

By applying a critical understanding of empowerment, this study explores the power relations in women’s daily lives through their experience with a mentorship program called Carpe Sophia and analyzes whether or to what extent this program has an impact on women’s empowerment that can bring about gender equality. Carpe Sophia is a women’s economic empowerment program with an aim to increase employment rate among women with foreign background in Malmö, Sweden. The first round of the program consisted of 20 participants and 12 out of them received an employment after their participation. The number however does not tell anything about empowerment without further investigation. The findings of this study showed that women share a common context of struggle due to traditional gender ideology. Their migration choice is gendered and it resulted in a series of negative impacts in their daily lives. Moreover, the multi-dimensional identities of women make it impossible to capture if the participants are being empowered as ‘women’, as ‘migrants’, or as ‘job-seekers’ although there are indicators of empowerment after their participation in Carpe Sophia. It is also debatable if the participants are being ‘empowered’, or just reclaiming the power they used to enjoy back in their home country. After all, the effort of the so-called women’s economic empowerment program is only to provide a temporary solution without solving the fundamental problem: the gendered power structure