Abstract
Improving the conceptualisation and measurement of women's empowerment has been repeatedly identified as a research priority for global development policy. We apply arguments from feminist and political philosophy to develop a unified typology of empowerment concepts to guide measurement and evaluation. In this typology, empowerment (1) may be a property of individuals or collectives (2) may involve removing internal psychological barriers or external interpersonal barriers (3) may be defined on each agent’s own terms or by external agents in advance (4) may require agents to acquire a degree of independence or require others to ‘empower’ them through social support (5) may either concern the number of present options or the motivations behind past choices. We argue a careful examination of arguments for and against each notion of empowerment reveal fundamental fact-, theory- and value-based incompatibilities between contrasting notions. Thus, empowerment is an essentially contested concept that cannot be captured by simply averaging a large number of contrasting measures. We argue that researchers and practitioners measuring this concept may benefit from making explicit their theory-, fact- and value-based assumptions about women’s empowerment before settling on a single primary measure for their particularly context. Alternative indicators can subsequently be used as sensitivity measures that not only measure sensitivity to assumptions about women’s social reality, but also to investigators’ own values.
Highlights
Women’s empowerment is widely recognized as a global policy objective (UN General Assembly 2015) and a key component of strategies to promote health and combat poverty world-wide (World Bank 2012; Every Women Every Child 2017)
A woman might be asked if she performs work inside the house, outside the house or both followed by questions on whether she performs the type of work she has mentioned because she wants to, because it is personally important, because she will get into trouble with others otherwise, or because she is afraid of others’ ill-judgment
We present our typology as a pragmatic tool for researchers and policy-makers6 to provide greater clarity on the meaning of empowerment; short, broad definitions based on terms such as ‘choice’, ‘opportunity’, ‘agency’ or ‘autonomy’ often turn out just as unclear and ambiguous as the original ‘empowerment’ concept
Summary
Women’s empowerment is widely recognized as a global policy objective (UN General Assembly 2015) and a key component of strategies to promote health and combat poverty world-wide (World Bank 2012; Every Women Every Child 2017). We draw on feminist and political philosophy to clarify debates over the meaning of women’s empowerment and generate a typology for its plural interpretations. We argue for a series of fact-, theory- and value-based judgments inherent in most measures of empowerment that create fundamental incompatibilities between contrasting notions of empowerment. We argue researchers and practitioners might benefit from selecting a single notion of empowerment as their primary measure in empirical applications and treating other measures as secondary measures testing sensitivity to their own assumptions
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