Measuring Women's Empowerment in the Global South

Abstract

Over the past two decades, we have seen an explosion in research on the topic of women's empowerment and its related dimensions, yet there remains much to be done in terms of clarifying conceptual pathways and best practices in measurement. This review traces the intellectual and historic context in which women's status and empowerment in lower- and middle-income countries have been measured, the conceptual and operationalization challenges in shaping research questions, the use of empirical measures and their connection to levels of social analysis, and the identification of emerging directions for future research. With the recognition that empowerment is as much a collective process as it is individual, we argue that a more integrative and multidisciplinary approach to empowerment is needed. This would require incorporating an intersectional lens, employing the life course approach, and tapping into diverse sources of data that can together strengthen future research. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 48 is July 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Aligning household decision-making with work and education: A comparative analysis of women’s empowerment

“…Considering life course paradigms also helps in this conceptualization of women's empowerment and its various components as being both determinants and outcomes. Life course perspectives view women's empowerment as a lifelong process manifested in different ways along timelines, which enables us to identify interdependent pathways in different life domains, such as work or family (Desai et al 2022). In this paper, in the absence of longitudinal data to map out the sequences of different events, we take a holistic approach by assigning education and work not as resources or achievements but rather as components within the wider process of empowerment that spans the life course.…”

“…However, such cause-and-effect analyses largely exclude the possibility that education and work can be both achievements and outcomes of women's agency (Richardson 2018a). This is particularly important from the life course and intersectionality perspectives, which emphasize the need to consider varied timings and circumstances of education and work in relation to women's empowerment (Desai et al 2022). Thus treating employment and education as either a basis or a consequence is as problematic as using them as full proxies of women's empowerment (Presser and Sen 2000;Malhotra, Schuler, and Boender 2002;Mason 2005).…”

Refugee women's entrepreneurship: where from and where to next?

“…Instead, it can be high risk, precarious, low paid, and with no or little protection Refugee women's entrepreneurship especially when undertaken within the informal economy of host nations located in the Global South. As such, exploring the disempowering aspects of refugee women's entrepreneurship, rather than continuing to focus on the minority of success stories as measures of empowerment (Desai et al, 2022), also offers a useful research direction to enhance our understanding of alternative models for promoting and supporting refugee women's entrepreneurship.…”

Contraceptive Adoption and Changes in Empowerment in Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal

“…Both family planning and empowerment are dynamic processes that unfold over the life course (Desai et al 2022). Indeed, empowerment, rather than women's status or equality, is explicitly conceptualized as a measure of change (Desai et al 2022;Eger, Miller, and Scarles 2018, 208;Richardson 2018), in which individuals acquire the ability to make strategic life choices (Kabeer 1999, 435), for example, having the agency to leave the home alone and make decisions on healthcare and household purchases (Dhak, Saggurti, and Ram 2020).…”

“…Both family planning and empowerment are dynamic processes that unfold over the life course (Desai et al. 2022). Indeed, empowerment, rather than women's status or equality, is explicitly conceptualized as a measure of change (Desai et al.…”