Women’s empowerment: What exactly does it mean?

“Empowerment” has come to be regarded by many mainstream development agencies as a destination that can be reached through the development equivalent of a motorway: fast-track programmes which can be rolled out over any terrain. A new kind of feelgood talk about women is gaining ground: one that puts women at the forefront of achieving peace, prosperity and democracy. Empower women, the story goes, and they will become the motor of development.
Development’s emphasis on women’s empowerment has been welcomed by some as a return from the fog of “gender equality” and the blind alley of “gender mainstreaming” to a sharper, clearer concern about the injustice, discrimination and lack of opportunities that women the world over experience. But the straight talk about power that was once part of feminist discourses of empowerment has given way as development agencies have taken up the term. Today’s softer, more conciliatory, calls for women’s empowerment have none of the rough edges of older demands for justice and equality.
The answer to women’s persistent disadvantage, we learn from the proponents of the new empowerment narrative, is to enable them to gain “power”, exercise “agency” and make “choices”. There’s a familiar-sounding ring to this narrative; it seems to resonate with the kinds of things feminists have been talking about for decades.
Taking a closer look, what appears at first sight to hold some semblance of responsiveness to feminist demands reveals itself as a simulacrum. “Empowerment-lite” looks like the real thing. It sounds like the real thing - borrowing words from the feminist lexicon, although often in combinations that deprive them of their bite. And it seems to be doing just what feminists have been doing and demanding for decades: from organising women into groups to providing training, resources and rules that get more women into work and into politics. But is it really doing anything to address the underlying structural inequalities and pervasive discrimination that roused feminists into action in the first place?
Much depends on how the term “empowerment” is interpreted. In some parts of the world, “empowerment” has come to be synonymous with projects that give women small loans and enlist them in small-scale business activities such as producing handicrafts for sale. Claims to be “empowering women” through engaging them in the market conflate power with money, and imbue the acquisition of money with almost magical powers - as if once women had their own money, they could wave a wand and wish away overnight the social norms, institutions and relationships that are part of their lives.
In the midst of all this, women’s own strategies to negotiate the constraints of their everyday lives are rendered virtually invisible: poor women are, almost by definition, lacking in power and in need of development’s interventions. These interventions may not only bypass the sources of women’s power, they may also undermine it. Women may make safer borrowers, but whether small loans enhance their “agency” and “choices” depends as much on what comes along with the package.
What might we learn by reversing the gaze and refocusing attention on women’s own experiences, and on what they’ve learnt from their own travels along diverse pathways of empowerment?
Feminists have long argued that empowerment is not something that can be done to or for women. The feminist slogan “the personal is the political” roots the process of empowerment in an expansion of women’s consciousness. Feminists have long recognised that it is when women recognise their ‘power within’ and act together with other women to exercise ‘power with’, that they gain ‘power to’ act as agents. Feminist experience has shown that this is a process that may take a diversity of pathways, but for which there are rarely the kind of short-cuts envisaged by the proponents of empowerment-lite.
This calls for seeing empowerment less as a destination than, as Naila Kabeer puts it, a “journey without maps”. Each “journey without maps” is also one of discovery, one on which horizons shift as the terrain changes. To understand how women experience empowerment calls for cutting away the tangle of assumptions and stereotypes that have filled the field of gender and development . Tracing these journeys, as they take place in different contexts at different times, can help to provide new insights into what it takes to bring about the kind of change that can advance social and gender justice. Starting from women’s lived experience brings into critical scrutiny the taken-for-granted chain of causalities proposed by advocates of empowerment-lite. And it helps to bring power back into the frame.
To work for women’s empowerment, the empowering effects of work need to be better understood - and better contextualised, given the enormous differences between the countries that are the targets for development’s one-size-fits-all interventions.
The vision for women’s political participation in empowerment-lite is entirely consistent with its counterpart, democracy-lite. What is on offer are templates and tools for institutional design that do little to redress the power issues that lie at the very heart of the matter - such as in the cultures and conduct of politics itself. Opening up the debate on women’s political participation calls for us to begin questioning whether demanding greater representation of women within flawed and dysfunctional political orders is what will do the trick.Making political institutions more responsive and accountable is about more than getting more women into politics. That is simply a first step to address a basic inequity. What’s needed is a better understanding of what works to amplify the influence of advocates for justice and equality within the political arena.
Talk about putting more women into work and getting more women into politics has become relatively uncontroversial, at least in the domain of secular development policy. But when it comes to sexualities, there is no such ready consensus. There are those for whom sexuality is a private matter, those for whom the only sexuality issues that matter are sexually transmitted infections and sexual violation, and those who advocate women’s empowerment at the same time as denying women the rights to exercise choices over their own sexual and reproductive lives. How difficult it remains to articulate a perspective on gender and sexuality that refuses to treat all women as victims, to be protected from male predation. What does it take to shift understandings of female sexuality in ways that recognise - and indeed celebrate - the positive and the pleasurable?
These are questions that lack any simple or singular answers. But they’re questions that badly need to be asked. What we should explore is an entirely different approach: one that is framed by lived experience rather than stereotypes, one that can countenance contradictions and celebrate plural visions and versions of empowerment that fit with the contexts in which they are voiced, and one that can reframe empowerment in ways that restore its power as a concept to serve the struggle for a more just and equal world.