Measuring Women’s Empowerment in the Global South: Know the GAP gender lectures

Measuring Women’s Empowerment in the Global South

While the political support for gender equality has grown enormously around the globe in the past decades, we continue to wrestle with measuring the extent of progress and barriers to progress. Despite extensive research on gender-based inequalities in measurable indicators such as educational attainment, employment rates, and health status, a focus on these objective measures is sometimes shrouded in debates about the importance of these markers for women themselves. Focusing on women’s empowerment allows us to sidestep the debates around the intrinsic value of objective markers and focus on choices that individual women make in their own best interests. Over the past two decades, the term women’s empowerment, often used synonymously with gender empowerment, has become ubiquitous in international development discourse and even features as a prominent global commitment in Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG-5), which seeks to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. This presentation will discuss some of the key concepts underlying the definition of women’s empowerment and challenges involved in measuring empowerment.

More about the speaker

Sonalde Desai (Distinguished University Professor Emerita, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland and Professor and Centre Director, NCAER-National Data Innovation Center, New Delhi) is a demographer whose work deals primarily with social transformation and its impact on the lives of individuals with a focus on education, employment, gender, and maternal and child health. 

She leads the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) of over 40,000 households, one of the few national panel surveys in India providing a rich and free public resource for studying the transformation of the Indian society in the 21st Century between 2004 and 2023. Desai has published extensively in Indian and international journals and served on the editorial boards of several major journals. She is a frequent contributor to Indian English-language newspapers.

Desai received a Ph.D. from Stanford University and post-doctoral training at the University of Chicago and RAND Corporation. Desai was elected President of Population Association of America for 2022 and has been named a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She also serves on several Indian government committees on statistics.

Know the GAP gender lectures

The building blocks of Gender Studies: foundational concepts to navigate a complex field of study

Since 2019, the WTI Gender Team has been organizing the Know the GAP gender lecture series. This series has been a source of fundamental insights on gender studies and contributed to the general debate on these issues.

The interest in this complex and variegated area is continuously increasing, and the perspectives from which it is studied are numerous and all interconnected. From sociology to law, from political science to linguistics, from international relations to literature and philosophy, gender studies epistemologically inform virtually any other field of research.

At the same time, gender studies call for action, thus providing a concrete contribution to the evolution of political systems and societies towards more equality and inclusivity.

The present lecture series aims to provide some instruments to understand such a complexity stemming from increasing awareness of and research on gender issues, as well as manifold action at the international and domestic levels. To do so, this year’s series focuses on the key words of gender studies, in order to give some fundamental points of reference and build an updated glossary of this area of study.

Such a timely endeavour is carried out thanks to the participation of prominent guest speakers in gender studies, whose expertise mirrors the variety of perspectives from which this area can be approached. Every lecture deals with a specific key word. The latter have been selected after an analysis of academic literature and international soft law in the area of gender studies and are meant to constitute foundational concepts and issues regarding this field. Some of the key words constitute basic theoretical notions of gender studies: key concepts such as “feminism and eco-feminism”, “empowerment”, “intersectionality”, “gender migration”, “gender equality” and “sorority” will be addressed. Other key words refer to the concrete manifestations and applications of those concepts in societal and political systems as well as their embedment in legal orders. Accordingly, “gender mainstreaming”, “non-discrimination”, “CEDAW”, “gender quotas”, “participation in public life”, “gender and conflict”, “reproductive rights” will be dealt with in the series.

Together, they all give justice to the complexity of the field, while at the same time providing the tools to navigate through it.

The lectures are meant to be an essential resource for students who are approaching this field, but also for academics and civil society members willing to contribute to a collective effort in building an updated and at the same time accessible glossary of gender studies. In this sense, the lectures are purposedly organized to leave enough time for discussion. After a presentation of the subject, in the second part of the lecture the room will be open for comments and questions from the audience.

The gender lecture series is organized by Prof. Elisa Fornalé who is leading the SNSF-funded research project ‘Gender Equality in the Mirror (GEM): Clothing the Invisibility of Women’s Participation at International Level’ housed at the World Trade Institute, University of Bern.

Participation is open to the public and free of charge.

Register here

For further information please email Dr. Nicolò Alessi