According to the National Census of China in 2000, women have an average of 1.1 years less schooling than men, but the unexplained gender wage differential against women in rural areas has been relatively constant, with some decline in the period 1988-95 (Rozelle et al., 2002). The major share (93.5%) of the wage differential between women and men is attributed to discrimination rather than to capital differences between the genders (Wang and Cai, 2006). The wage differential is largely due to gender discrimina­tion which encourages women's engagement in low levels of occupation, like unskilled and semi-skilled work, low level management work and other related productive work (Hirway, 2006). The wage differentials between women and men agricultural workers therefore appear to be based on a pre-assumed gender character. Employers or contracts sim­ply lower women's wages regardless of job performance. In a pervasive climate of social and economic neglect, women have no better options and work longer and harder to make ends meet, leading to exhaustion and injuries from stress and overwork.
     A large proportion of women in ESAP countries are not able to retain their earned income: over 40% in Bangladesh and Gujarat, India and over 70% in Indonesia. In China only 53% of women said that they alone decided how their in­come is spent; this proportion was far less in Bangladesh and India (IFAD, 2005b). Thus, it is not sufficient to stop analy­sis at the point of household income level, but is necessary to examine how much control women have over that income and work out measures to increase their control over it.

5.5.3     Microfinance groups
Microfinance reaches over 10 million members of savings and credit groups in the region, nearly 90% of whom are women (Donaghue, 2004). Whether or not microfinance has increased the economic agency of members is debatable (Goetz and Sen Gupta, 1996). There is, however, a continu­ous creation of new norms and social contexts in favour of women as income earners and their access to resources,

as evident in a study of four districts in rural Bangladesh (Kelkar et. al., 2004). The rise of women's Self-Help Groups (SHGs) or women's microcredit and microfinance groups, in India and other ESAP countries, has made women's in­come a permanent component of household income and weakened patriarchal gender relations, reducing women's dependency on the male provider.
     The weakening of discriminatory gender relations has been noted in a number of ways: (1) women's greater pres­ence in the market as buyers, though very restricted (in South Asia) as sellers; (2) women's participation in various types of agricultural field work; and (3) women's unescorted move­ment, though often in a group and not alone, to markets, schools and training. Although women's production activi­ties are still largely confined to the homestead or hamlet, when women engage in activities outside their households and/or villages, the increased interaction they have with the outside world goes a long way towards establishing social and economic equality.
     The roles that women in microfinance groups can play in development need not end with instilling new cultures of savings and repayment. In India, SHGs have gone be­yond savings and individual loans to take up management of community-based projects—contracting to construct mi­nor irrigation works or undertake soil conservation. Unlike men's groups doing the same tasks, they have saved consid­erable amounts of capital and used their savings to invest in tractors and other forms of mechanization. In a village in Andhra Pradesh, India, SHGs have even invested in elec­tricity generation with diesel saving pongamia seed oil and sold the carbon saved in the international market. Women's microfinance groups can thus serve as agencies to introduce new and advanced energy technologies to villages and as links to the world.
     The SHG concept can be used throughout the region to foster women's agency and extend to community-based organizations of women whose members often struggle for adequate supplies of food, water, housing and employment.