Empowerment

Topics

• Empowerment
• Empowerment of Women
• Indicators of Women's Empowerment

Empowerment

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The most conspicuous feature of the term empowerment is that it contains the word power. To sidestep philosophical debate, it may be broadly defined as control over material assets, intellectual resources and ideology. The process of challenging existing power relations, and of gaining greater control over the sources of power, may be termed as empowerment.

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Empowerment of Women

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Empowerment of women, means many things to Kamala Bhasin.

• It means recognizing women's contribution, women's knowledge.
• It means helping women fight their own fears, and feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.
• It means women enhancing their self-respect and self-dignity.
• It means women controlling their own bodies.
• It means women becoming economically independent and self-reliant.
• It means women controlling resources like land and property.
• It means reducing women's burden of work, especially within the home.
• It means creating and strengthening women's groups and organizations.
• It means promoting qualities of nurturing caring gentleness, not just in.

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Indicators of Women's Empowerment

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The Draft Country Paper-India for the 4^th World Conference on Women, Beijing, 1995 proposed the following qualitative and quantitative indicators for evaluating the women's empowerment.

• Qualitative Indicators of Empowerment
• Quantitative Indicators of Empowerment

Qualitative Indicators of Empowerment

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1. Increase in self esteem, individual and collective confidence.
2. Increase in articulation, knowledge and awareness levels on issues affecting the community at large, and women in particular such as women's health, nutrition, reproductive rights, legal rights, literacy etc., depending on the programme.
3. Increase or decrease in personal leisure time and time for child care.
4. Increase or decrease in work loads of women as result of the new programme.
5. Changes in the roles and responsibilities in the family and in the community.
6. Visible increase or decrease in levels of domestic violence and other forms of violence perpetrated on the women and girl child.
7. Responses to, and changes, in social and other customs that are anti-women e.g. child marriage, dowry, discrimination against widows etc.
8. Visible changes in women's participation levels e.g. are more women attending public meetings, training programmes; are women demanding participation in other events related to their lives?
9. Increase in bargaining/negotiating power of the women as an individual in the home and community as well as in collectives of women.
10. Increased access to and ability to gather information and knowledge not only about the project, but about what affects their lives.
11. Formation of cohesive and articulate women's groups/collectives at the village level, district, block, state levels.
12. Positive changes in social attitudes amongst the community members towards discrimination against women and the girl child.
13. Awareness and recognition of women's economic contribution within and outside the household.
14. Women's decision-making over the kind of work she is doing; is her income and expenditure in her control or is she still subservient to male member's in the family.

Quantitative Indicators of Empowerment

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1. Demographic trends:
   • maternal/mortality rates
   • fertility rates
   • sex ratio
   • life expectancy at birth
   • average age of marriage

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