Unbundling female empowerment

There is an ongoing push to place female empowerment at the centre of development policy because of its presumed link to poverty alleviation. This paper reflects on how the economics literature can contribute to a deeper understanding of this connection between female-focused policy initiatives and broader economic outcomes. Female empowerment is a multi-faceted concept that has grown to be appreciated by academics and policy-makers alike, however, it is not well understood how the various dimensions interact and co-evolve with each other and with society as a whole. Many policy objectives presume that different measures of female empowerment work in tandem. This paper, in contrast, argues that it is useful to conceptually “unbundle” female empowerment in a systematic way across multiple domains: within the household, within society as a whole and via the dynamics of norm formation. It highlights instead the complexity of interactions between these separate facets of female empowerment and extrinsic societal factors. This is important because overlooking these interactions across dimensions has the potential to lead policy astray.