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Organising Concepts of ‘Women’s Empowerment’ for Measurement: A Typology

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 ev...

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Autores principales: Gram, Lu, Morrison, Joanna, Skordis-Worrall, Jolene
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Netherlands 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6548747/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31231148
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-2012-2
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author Gram, Lu
Morrison, Joanna
Skordis-Worrall, Jolene
author_facet Gram, Lu
Morrison, Joanna
Skordis-Worrall, Jolene
author_sort Gram, Lu
collection PubMed
description 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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spelling pubmed-65487472019-06-19 Organising Concepts of ‘Women’s Empowerment’ for Measurement: A Typology Gram, Lu Morrison, Joanna Skordis-Worrall, Jolene Soc Indic Res Article 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. Springer Netherlands 2018-10-11 2019 /pmc/articles/PMC6548747/ /pubmed/31231148 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-2012-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Article
Gram, Lu
Morrison, Joanna
Skordis-Worrall, Jolene
Organising Concepts of ‘Women’s Empowerment’ for Measurement: A Typology
title Organising Concepts of ‘Women’s Empowerment’ for Measurement: A Typology
title_full Organising Concepts of ‘Women’s Empowerment’ for Measurement: A Typology
title_fullStr Organising Concepts of ‘Women’s Empowerment’ for Measurement: A Typology
title_full_unstemmed Organising Concepts of ‘Women’s Empowerment’ for Measurement: A Typology
title_short Organising Concepts of ‘Women’s Empowerment’ for Measurement: A Typology
title_sort organising concepts of ‘women’s empowerment’ for measurement: a typology
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6548747/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31231148
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-2012-2
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