Introduction: What is Women's Empowerment

I wrote this as an assignment, and consulted various books. I posted this with the hope that it will help students and other who are looking for quick answer.  So the basic content is broken down into 3 different posts, as a series, and the references are kept with the last post. keep on scrolling :)

1. Introduction: What is women's empowerment?
2. Approaches to/for Women's Empowerment
- South Asian Approaches (Batliwala)
- Women Empowerment in Development (WED) or Developmental Approach
- Women in Development (WID)
- Women and Development (WAD)
- Gender and Development (GAD)
- The Welfare Approach
- The Equity Approach
- The Efficency Approach
- Anti-Proverty Approach
- The empowered Approach
3. Strategies for Women's Empowerment
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Introduction: What is Women's Empowerment?

The concept of women’s empowerment as understood in the South Asian context defined it as a bottom-up process, and the results/outcomes of that process, of transforming the relations of power between individuals and social groups.  It acknowledge the unequal distribution of power in the society and the challenging of that power relations so that women, as an individual and group, can have equal control over their access to  resources and to participate equally in decision making.

For an individual or group to be empowered, they must have the power to control or equal access to these five broad categories of resources viz. physical, human, intellectual, and financial resources, and the self (Pamei, 2001).  Similarly, they must have the power to control ideology, which means ability to determine beliefs, values, attitudes, and virtually, control over ways of thinking and perceiving situations. This process of gaining control over the self, over ideology and the resources, which determine power, may be termed as ‘empowerment’. (Hajira and Varghese, 2004).

According to Batliwala (1994), empowerment is both a process and a goal. She states that: …the goals of women’s empowerment are to challenge patriarchal ideology (male domination and women’s subordination); transform the structures and institutions that reinforce and perpetuate gender discrimination and social inequality (the family, caste, class, religion, educational processes and institutions, the media, health practices and systems, laws and civil codes, political processes, development models, and government institutions); and enable women to gain access to, and control of, both material and informational resources.

The term ‘women’s empowerment’ is often equated with other terminology like ‘gender equality’, ‘female autonomy’, or ‘women’s emancipation’.  However, they are not the same and can be distinguished by two elements which are present in women’s empowerment. The first is that of process (Kabeer, 2001; Oxaal and Baden, 1997; Rowlands, 1995). None of the other concepts explicitly encompasses a progression from one state (gender inequality) to another (gender equality). The second element is agency—in other words, women themselves must be significant actors in the process of change that is being described or measured. Thus, hypothetically there could be an improvement in gender equality by various measures, but unless the intervening processes involved women as agents of that change rather than merely as its recipients we would not consider it empowerment. (Malhotra, 2003)

The concept of empowerment has several different and inter-related aspects.  It is not only about opening up access to decision making or control over resources or power, but also must include processes that lead people to perceive themselves as able and entitled to occupy that decision-making space (Rowlands, 1995).  Empowerment is sometimes described as being about the ability to make choices, but it must also involve being able to shape what choices are on offer. 

Empowerment is a process of transition from a state of powerlessness to a state of relative control over one’s life, destiny, and environment. This transition can manifest itself in an improvement in the perceived ability to control, as well as in an improvement in the actual ability to control.