Exploring Women’s Agency and Empowerment in Developing Countries : Where Do We Stand?

While central notions around agency are well established in academic literature, progress on the empirical front has faced major challenges around developing tractable measures and data availability. This has limited our understanding about patterns of agency and empowerment of women across countrie...

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Main Authors:	Hanmer, Lucia, Klugman, Jeni
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	en_US
Published:	Taylor and Francis 2015
Subjects:	empowerment secondary education gender disparities
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23536

id	okr-10986-23536
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-235362021-04-23T14:04:15Z Exploring Women’s Agency and Empowerment in Developing Countries : Where Do We Stand? Hanmer, Lucia Klugman, Jeni empowerment secondary education gender disparities While central notions around agency are well established in academic literature, progress on the empirical front has faced major challenges around developing tractable measures and data availability. This has limited our understanding about patterns of agency and empowerment of women across countries. Measuring key dimensions of women's agency and empowerment is complex, but feasible and important. This paper systematically explores what can be learned from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data for fifty-eight countries, representing almost 80 percent of the female population of developing countries. It is the first such empirical investigation. The findings quantify some important correlations. Completing secondary education and beyond has consistently large positive associations, underlining the importance of going beyond primary schooling. There appear to be positive links with poverty reduction and economic growth, but clearly this alone is not enough. Context specificity and multidimensionality mean that the interpretation of results is not always straightforward. 2015-12-28T23:27:14Z 2015-12-28T23:27:14Z 2015-10-27 Journal Article Feminist Economics 1354-5701 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23536 en_US CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo World Bank Taylor and Francis Publications & Research :: Journal Article Publications & Research
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
language	en_US
topic	empowerment secondary education gender disparities
spellingShingle	empowerment secondary education gender disparities Hanmer, Lucia Klugman, Jeni Exploring Women’s Agency and Empowerment in Developing Countries : Where Do We Stand?
description	While central notions around agency are well established in academic literature, progress on the empirical front has faced major challenges around developing tractable measures and data availability. This has limited our understanding about patterns of agency and empowerment of women across countries. Measuring key dimensions of women's agency and empowerment is complex, but feasible and important. This paper systematically explores what can be learned from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data for fifty-eight countries, representing almost 80 percent of the female population of developing countries. It is the first such empirical investigation. The findings quantify some important correlations. Completing secondary education and beyond has consistently large positive associations, underlining the importance of going beyond primary schooling. There appear to be positive links with poverty reduction and economic growth, but clearly this alone is not enough. Context specificity and multidimensionality mean that the interpretation of results is not always straightforward.
format	Journal Article
author	Hanmer, Lucia Klugman, Jeni
author_facet	Hanmer, Lucia Klugman, Jeni
author_sort	Hanmer, Lucia
title	Exploring Women’s Agency and Empowerment in Developing Countries : Where Do We Stand?
title_short	Exploring Women’s Agency and Empowerment in Developing Countries : Where Do We Stand?
title_full	Exploring Women’s Agency and Empowerment in Developing Countries : Where Do We Stand?
title_fullStr	Exploring Women’s Agency and Empowerment in Developing Countries : Where Do We Stand?
title_full_unstemmed	Exploring Women’s Agency and Empowerment in Developing Countries : Where Do We Stand?
title_sort	exploring women’s agency and empowerment in developing countries : where do we stand?
publisher	Taylor and Francis
publishDate	2015
url	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23536
_version_	1764454122318200832

Exploring Women’s Agency and Empowerment in Developing Countries : Where Do We Stand?

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