Measuring women's empowerment: participation and rights in civil, political, social, economic, and cultural domains

Abstract

The Beijing Platform for Action represented a conceptual shift from a focus on “the status of women” and “gender inequality” to the objectives of “gender equality” and “women's empowerment”. Among other things, it called for gender‐disaggregated data for planning and evaluation. In this paper we define women's empowerment as a multi‐dimensional process of achieving basic capabilities, legal rights, and participation in key social, economic, political, and cultural domains, and we offer a set of indicators for its measurement. Although “cultural participation and rights” is difficult to measure, we argue that gender indicators should include the important area of women's access to and participation in cultural institutions and decision‐making.