ArticleSocial indicators research2019
Organising Concepts of 'Women's Empowerment' for Measurement: A Typology.
Article in Social indicators research, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Social accountability for reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health: A review of reviews.PloS one · 2020Pooled it
- Women's income and risk of intimate partner violence: secondary findings from the MAISHA cluster randomised trial in North-Western Tanzania.BMC public health · 2019Trial
- 'There is no point giving cash to women who don't spend it the way they are told to spend it' - Exploring women's agency over cash in a combined participatory women's groups and cash transfer programme to improve low birthweight in rural Nepal.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2019Trial
- Exercise empowerment: a scoping review of randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental physical activity interventions.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2025Review
- Effect of women's empowerment on lowering the number of children ever born in Bangladesh.BMC women's health · 2025Article
- Transforming women's health, empowerment, and gender equality with digital health: evidence-based policy and practice.The Lancet. Digital health · 2025Review
- Women's Empowerment and Health: A Narrative Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Review
- Construction of women's empowerment index for Bangladesh.Frontiers in sociology · 2024Article
- 'Our courage has grown': a grounded theory study of enablers and barriers to community action to address violence against women in urban India.BMJ global health · 2023Article
- Maternal mental health and economic autonomy in lowland rural Nepal: Do parents-in-law provide constraint or support?Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2023Article
- Women's Autonomy and Intimate Partner Violence in Peru: Analysis of a National Health Survey.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Mechanisms for community prevention of violence against women in low- and middle-income countries: A realist approach to a comparative analysis of qualitative data.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2022Article
- Impact of the DREAMS Partnership on social support and general self-efficacy among adolescent girls and young women: causal analysis of population-based cohorts in Kenya and South Africa.BMJ global health · 2022Article
- Reproductive transitions and women's status in Indian households.Population studies · 2021Article
- Exploring change over time in community mobilization domains: results from a maternity waiting home intervention in rural Zambia.International journal for equity in health · 2021Article
- Exploring the impact of a community participatory intervention on women's capability: a qualitative study in Gulu Northern Uganda.BMC women's health · 2021Article
- Socio-economic, demographic, and behavioural determinants of women's empowerment in Mozambique.PloS one · 2021Article
- Measuring the psychological drivers of participation in collective action to address violence against women in Mumbai, India.Wellcome open research · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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