What is missing in measures of Women's Empowerment?

By Hanny Cueva Beteta. 2006

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper argues that the Gender Empowerment Measure is an incomplete and biased index on women's empowerment, which measures inequality among the most educated and economically advantaged and fails to include important non‐economic dimensions of decision‐making power both at the household level and over women's own bodies and sexuality. After addressing in more depth the relevance and limitations of existent and potential indicators on women's empowerment in the political and economic spheres, this paper identifies and assesses potential indicators in those spheres currently absent in the Gender Empowerment Measure (household and individual dimensions). Finally, the paper stresses that empowerment is not primarily an outcome, but a process; as such, there are elements enabling or limiting it, such as — but not limited to — the legal and regulatory framework. Considering this, the construction of a new aggregated measure on the Gender Empowerment Enabling Environment of countries is suggested. The views ...

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dbb45362e5718b07ccef9b7df48c056dd1953c30

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

1. S. Seguino
2. Shivangi Bhatia
3. Seema Singh
4. N. Kabeer
5. Luisa Natali

In Safety Research

1. S. Seguino
2. Shivangi Bhatia
3. Seema Singh

Citations in the corpus

• Empowering Women Through Financial Inclusion: A Study of Urban Slum (2019, background): “Estimation of women empowerment is another glitch as it cannot be straightforwardly observed and has numerous features (Beteta, 2006; Mason, 2005; Swain & Wallentin, 2009).”
• Help or Hindrance? Religion's Impact on Gender Inequality in Attitudes and Outcomes (2011, background): “Scholars have rightly raised concerns about the absence of more comprehensive measures that could assess women’s differential care burden, gender-based violence, and gender empowerment (Cueva Betata, 2006; Folbre, 2006; Grown, 2008).”