Pros and Cons of Women Empowerment Methodologies/Approches: A Review

Abstract

As the concept of “empowerment” varies depending on the context or circumstances with different meanings and terminologies by different researchers the methods for systematically measuring empowerment differs. Multiple important instruments are constructed to monitor progress towards gender equality and women’s empowerment at a regional and global scale. The paper will highlight particularly on the approaches developed by UNDP like Gender-related Development Index (GDI), Women’s Empowerment Index (WEI) etc with special focus on pros and cons of each methodology. Although many studies and discussions around empowerment are commonly limited to activities like “economic”, “social” and “political” forms of empowerment. Therefore it sometimes also requires interventions that are beyond survey and are more holistic that explores other dimensions that have practical implications for to women’s empowerment. The paper also reflects on some different kinds of non-survey instruments that can be useful for measuring women’s empowerment with their pros and cons. Most of the non-survey instruments described in this paper can generate both quantitative and qualitative data and have many uses including the evaluation of a development programme. Like our survey questionnaires, we can also pretest our non-survey instruments extensively with people who are alike to respondents in our study, so that the logistic work could be easy to conduct and understandable by the researchers.