How can we measure women’s empowerment? This article from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) discusses various frameworks of indicators that have been introduced by feminist scholars and by international organisations. It then presents its own framework, based on a conceptualisation of women’s empowerment in terms of the achievement of basic capabilities, legal rights, and participation in key social, economic and political domains. It argues that data collection methods need to improve and countries need to provide more extensive quantitative information on gendered participation across various domains.
The Beijing Platform for Action (1995) was a call for action to realise women’s human rights and empower them economically, politically and culturally. Although not a legally binding treaty, it retains considerable moral authority and legitimacy. Institutional mechanisms for women constituted one of the 12 critical areas of concern, and a key objective identified was the development of gender-disaggregated data for planning, gender impact assessments and gender budgeting. Consequently, new research programmes, policies and instruments to measure aspects of women’s lives have been developed, along with new databases and sources of statistical information.
The Beijing Platform represented a conceptual shift from the focus on the ‘status of women’ and ‘gender inequality’ to the objectives of ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’.
- Women’s empowerment is a multi-dimensional process of achieving basic capabilities, legal rights, and participation in key social, economic, political and cultural domains.
- While many useful data sets and several good frameworks exist, measuring women’s empowerment runs into problems of data deficiencies as well as issues of conceptualisation.
- Gender comparisons alone are not sufficient measures of social inequalities; aggregate data and statistical averages do not reveal anything about within-group inequalities.
- Data deficiencies limit the ability to capture household dynamics, fully understand societal patterns and trends, and make accurate comparisons over time and space.
- Available data sets do not measure women’s informal work or labour within the family and community; nor are indicators on violence against women readily available.
- Women’s cultural rights have yet to be theorised, let alone operationalised. Indicators on women’s cultural participation and rights are largely unavailable from international data sets.
Timely, accurate and comparable data will allow for better assessment of the extent to which the broad policy objectives of the Beijing Platform for Action have been realised, and women’s empowerment across diverse domains has been achieved.
- The proposed framework measures women’s empowerment across key domains and as such is an assessment of women’s participation, rights, and capabilities.
- It focuses on socio-demographic indicators; bodily integrity and health; literacy and educational attainment; economic participation and rights; political participation and rights; and cultural participation and rights.
- Data collection methods need to improve and countries need to provide more extensive quantitative information on gendered participation across various domains.
- UNESCO regional commissions should try to obtain data on women’s cultural participation and rights for the countries in their respective region and include it in their own data sets.