The empowerment of women is a critical issue that has gained increasing attention in recent years. Women have long played an essential role in society, but their contributions have often been undervalued and underappreciated. The empowerment of women is vital for achieving gender equality, creating a sustainable future, and building a better world for all. This book, "Empowered Women, Empowered World," is a comprehensive exploration of the challenges and opportunities associated with women's empowerment. It consists of eleven chapters that cover various aspects of women's empowerment, including education, health, leadership, race and gender, entrepreneurship, politics, technology, and global best practices. This book seeks to provide a better understanding of what women's empowerment means, why it is necessary, and how it can be achieved. Each chapter is designed to highlight a specific area where women's empowerment is crucial, providing insights into the challenges and opportunities that women face and offering strategies for promoting gender equality. The book is intended to be a valuable resource for policymakers, activists, researchers, educators, and anyone interested in contributing to the cause of gender equality. It is our hope that this book will inspire readers to take action to empower women, promote gender equality, and create a more just and equitable world.

We find strong empirical evidence that raising aspirations is one route to empowering women. Higher aspirations on the part of husbands predicts more egalitarian gender attitudes for both the husband and his wife. However, higher aspirations on the part of wives may be an even more important predictor of women's empowerment. In particular, higher aspirations on the part of wives predict both more egalitarian gender attitudes (for both the husband and his wife) as well as greater involvement of women in household decision-making, as agreed by both the wife and her husband.

The fifth Sustainable Development Goal—to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”—reflects a growing consensus that these are key objectives of development policy in their own right, while also contributing to improved productivity and increased efficiency, especially in agriculture and food production. To deliver on this commitment to women’s empowerment in development calls for appropriate measures that can be used to diagnose the scope and major sources of disempowerment and to measure progress. The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a survey-based tool codeveloped by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) (Alkire et al. 2013). The index was originally designed as a monitoring and evaluation tool for the U.S. government’s Feed the Future initiative to directly capture women’s empowerment and inclusion levels in the agricultural sector. Since its launch in February 2012, the WEAI has been implemented in the 19 Feed the Future focus countries. As with any new metric, pilot testing in a few selected countries with limited sample sizes is insufficient to demonstrate how the WEAI would perform when rolled out on a wider scale. Concerns expressed by users of the WEAI led to the creation of an abbreviated version—the A-WEAI. This paper begins by presenting a brief overview of the WEAI and its construction. It then proceeds to discuss (1) the background and motivation behind the creation of the A-WEAI; (2) the steps taken to develop the AWEAI— namely, cognitive testing and piloting of different modules, particularly those that were difficult to administer in the field; (3) analysis of the pilot data from Bangladesh and Uganda; (4) domain-specific comparisons of the different pilot versions; and (5) robustness checks and empowerment diagnostics from the A-WEAI as compared with the original WEAI. The paper concludes by summarizing the modifications to the original WEAI and discussing possibilities for further development of empowerment metrics based on the WEAI.

Weather shocks and other shocks affecting the economy of farm households often trigger a cascade of coping mechanisms, from reducing food consumption to selling assets, with potentially lasting consequences on child development. In polygynous households (in which a man is married to several women), the factors that may aggravate or mitigate the impacts of such adverse events are still poorly understood. In particular, little is known about the complex mechanisms through which women’s empowerment may affect the allocation of household resources in the presence of more than one female decision-maker. Where polygyny is associated with discriminatory social norms, co-wives may have limited bargaining power, which may translate into poorer outcomes for their children. While competition between co-wives may generate inefficiencies in the allocation of household resources, cooperation in the domains of agricultural production or domestic labor may lead to economies of scale and facilitate informal risk sharing. The rank of each co-wife may also have a strong influence on the welfare of her own children, relative to other children. Using the Feed the Future Ghana Population Survey data, I investigate the relationship between polygyny and children’s nutrition, and how it may be mediated through women’s bargaining power. Using the age of each co-wife as a proxy for rank, I also study how the senior-wife status of a mother may influence her children’s nutrition outcomes.

The impact of women’s empowerment on the Sustainable Development Goals is exponential, as their contributions are essential in all domains relevant to our society and economy. As a society, we are facing a moral imperative to redesign, reshape, and recalibrate our global approach towards women’s empowerment. A call to action and alternative pathways that can address some of the major challenges that fuel the global, social, and economic gender gap are required in order to further the empowerment movement. Impact of Women’s Empowerment on SDGs in the Digital Era discusses global issues surrounding the gender gap and how women’s empowerment can contribute to each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and highlights opportunities, challenges, drivers of success, and the importance of ethical leadership in order to successfully create a women’s empowerment legacy for future generations. Covering a range of topics such as financial inclusion and digital identity, this reference work is ideal for policymakers, lawmakers, government officials, researchers, academicians, scholars, researchers, instructors, and students.

Women’s empowerment is dynamic across the life course, affected not only by age but also by women’s social position within the household. In Nepal, high rates of male outmigration have further compounded household dynamics, although the impact on women’s empowerment is not clear. We use qualitative and quantitative data from Nepal to explore the relationship between women’s social location in the household, caste/ethnicity, husband’s migration status, and women’s empowerment. The study first examines the factors affecting overall empowerment as measured by the Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI), followed by more detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of how each factor affects individual domains including asset ownership, access to and decisions on credit, control over use of income, group membership, input in productive decisions, and work load. We find that women’s empowerment is strongly associated with caste/ethnic identity and position in the household, but this dynamic interacts with husband’s migration status. Despite patriarchal norms of high caste groups, high caste women are more empowered than others, reflecting the disempowering effects of poverty and social exclusion for low caste and ethnic groups. Daughters-in-law in joint households are more likely to be empowered when their husbands are residents in the household and disempowered when their husbands are migrants, while wives in nuclear households are more likely to be empowered when their husbands are migrants. While qualitative findings indicate daughters-in-law are disempowered compared to their mothers-in-law, especially in time use, the quantitative results do not show significant differences, suggesting that we need to move toward an understanding of agency over time and intensity of work, rather than simply hours worked. Identifying the factors that contribute to disempowerment of women of different social positions has important implications for the design of interventions and programs that seek to improve women’s empowerment.

There is a growing focus on gender-sensitive approaches and women’s empowerment in the water, sanitation, and hygiene sectors. At the same time, there is a lack of metrics to measure women’s empowerment in the WASH sector. Such metrics are important for understanding the types of programmatic interventions that are most needed for addressing women’s empowerment, as well as for assessing their impacts on women’s empowerment. In this report, we describe the development of a Women’s Empowerment metrics for Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WE-WASH). We collected data from individual women and men in 812 households in Malawi and 826 households in Nepal. Using the data, we develop 14 indicators and establish cutoff thresholds (i.e., whether the individual is empowered) in the areas of intrinsic, instrumental, and collective agency in WASH; instrumental and intrinsic agency in menstrual hygiene management; and the empowerment environment (or resources for empowerment). In each country, we observe differences in empowerment levels between women and men, that favor men on most outcomes. Notably, in both countries, we find that women are much less likely than men to contribute to WASH infrastructure decisions, and most women are spending an undue amount of time contributing to WASH-related labor. In Nepal especially, agency related to menstrual hygiene management is also a substantial area of disempowerment for women.