There is general consensus among the international population community that the commitment achieved at the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994) to womens empowerment, along with the related goals of improving womens reproductive health and securing theirreproductive rights, represented a paradigm shift in the discourse about population and development, even though there are differences in view whether this is a positive change or not. But while the rhetoric about womens empowerment is pervasive, the concept remains ill-defined, and its relationshipto demographic processes has not been well articulated, either theoretically or empirically. This book brings together leading researchers and policy advocates to explore whether the concept of womens empowerment is indeed useful for an understanding of key demographic processes. Its contributorsidentify new directions for demographic research from the analysis of available data that measure womens empowerment, and point to the implications for population-related policies.Demographic research has focused relatively little to date on gender, let alone the question of power. Yet critiques of available data argue that traditional womens-status indicators, such as education and employment, are often not sensitive enough to capture the nuances of gender power relationsand the ways in which they govern womens and mens reproductive behaviour. This book moves forward to the complex task of conceptualizing, measuring, and analysing womens empowerment. In laying this groundwork, it provides critically important insights into the causes and consequences of populationchange, including migration. The book combines conceptual and empirical research with policy directions and considers the relevance of economic, social, and cultural contexts for the health and well-being of women, adolescents, and children. The countries under study are of both the North and theSouth. This book represents state-of-the-art knowledge on the two-way linkages between womens empowerment and demographic processes.

"What is women's empowerment, and how and why does it matter for women's health? Despite the rise of a human rights-based approach to women's health and increasing awareness of the synergies between women's health and empowerment, a lack of consensus remains as to how to measure empowerment and successfully intervene in ways that improve health. Women's Empowerment and Global Health provides thirteen detailed, multidisciplinary case studies from across the globe and through the course of a woman's life to show how science and advocacy can be creatively merged to enhance the agency and status of women. Accompanying short videos provide background about programs on the ground in India, the United States, Mexico, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Women's Empowerment and Global Health explores the promises and limits of programmatic, scientific, and rights-based work in real-world settings and provides the next generation of researchers and practitioners, as well as students in global and public health, sociology, anthropology, women's studies, law, business, and medicine, with cutting edge and inspirational examples of programs that point the way toward achieving women's equality and fulfilling the right to health."--Provided by publisher.

"This report examines the distribution and correlates of two different dimensions of the empowerment of currently married women age 15-49 in 23 developing countries"-- P. xv.

"The 2012 report recognized that expanding women's agency - their ability to make decisions and take advantage of opportunities is key to improving their lives as well as the world. This report represents a major advance in global knowledge on this critical front. The vast data and thousands of surveys distilled in this report cast important light on the nature of constraints women and girls continue to face globally. This report identifies promising opportunities and entry points for lasting transformation, such as interventions that reach across sectors and include life-skills training, sexual and reproductive health education, conditional cash transfers, and mentoring. It finds that addressing what the World Health Organization has identified as an epidemic of violence against women means sharply scaling up engagement with men and boys. The report also underlines the vital role information and communication technologies can play in amplifying women's voices, expanding their economic and learning opportunities, and broadening their views and aspirations. The World Bank Group's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity demand no less than the full and equal participation of women and men, girls and boys, around the world." -- Publisher's description.

In September 2014, the Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education and the Forum on Public-Private Partnerships for Global Health and Safety of the Institute of Medicine convened a workshop on empowering women and strengthening health systems and services through investing in nursing and midwifery enterprise. Experts in women's empowerment, development, health systems' capacity building, social enterprise and finance, and nursing and midwifery explored the intersections between and among these domains. Innovative and promising models for more sustainable health care delivery that embed women's empowerment in their missions were examined. Participants also discussed uptake and scale; adaptation, translation, and replication; financing; and collaboration and partnership. Empowering Women and Strengthening Health Systems and Services Through Investing in Nursing and Midwifery Enterprise summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop. This report highlights examples and explores broad frameworks for existing and potential intersections of different sectors that could lead to better health and well-being of women around the world, and how lessons learned from these examples might be applied in the United States.

In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation of a project-level WEAI (or pro-WEAI) that agricultural development projects can use to identify key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address identified deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment. The 12 pro-WEAI indicators are mapped to three domains: intrinsic agency (power within), instrumental agency (power to), and collective agency (power with). A gender parity index compares the empowerment scores of men and women in the same household. The authors describe the development of pro-WEAI, including: (1) pro-WEAI’s distinctiveness from other versions of the WEAI; (2) the process of piloting pro-WEAI in 13 agricultural development projects during the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, phase 2 (GAAP2); (3) analysis of quantitative data from the GAAP2 projects, including intrahousehold patterns of empowerment; and (4) a summary of the findings from the qualitative work exploring concepts of women’s empowerment in the project sites. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned from pro-WEAI and possibilities for further development of empowerment metrics.