For the past two years, I’ve been part of an incredible interdisciplinary team—spanning economics, sociology, demography, and public health—working on a National Academies (NASEM) consensus study on women’s empowerment and socioeconomic development. The new report builds on NASEM’s influential 1986 publication, Population Growth and Economic Development, which examined the relationship between fertility and development but paid limited attention to women’s empowerment.
While the new report also addresses fertility and population dynamics, it shifts the focus to how women’s empowerment can affect global social and economic progress more broadly. It provides eleven recommendations, grouped into three key areas.
1. Improve the measurement of women’s empowerment
Expanding data collection on women’s empowerment is crucial to capture often-overlooked areas like occupational segregation, couple dynamics, perceptions of rights, control over time, and social support networks. Investing in large-scale longitudinal studies can help better track changes over time and reveal the long-term impact of empowerment on development. Research should also focus on developing better measures of women’s agency, focusing on multidimensional and multilevel ways to capture goal setting, preferences, decision-making as well as collective efficacy and action. Lastly, adopting a life-course perspective is essential for understanding how women’s empowerment evolves through key life stages, including job changes or parenting milestones.
2. Enhance study designs
Advancing research on women’s empowerment requires rigorous study designs to establish causal relationships and capture the dynamic interactions between empowerment, population dynamics, and socioeconomic development. Approaches such as randomized controlled trials, natural experiments, and longitudinal studies should be prioritized to explore causal links and long-term impacts, while incorporating qualitative research is crucial for contextualizing findings and informing the design of interventions. Additionally, studies should pay increased attention to the sustainability of outcomes and potential unintended effects. Better tracking of implementation costs as well as implementation quality is recommended to guide the scaling of effective interventions, with a focus on understanding their feasibility, acceptability, and cultural relevance across diverse settings.
3. Foster collaboration across disciplines
Because women’s empowerment is deeply embedded in cultural and institutional structures, generating insights that apply across diverse contexts is challenging. To address this, consistent and comparable data collection is crucial. Establishing an international, multidisciplinary advisory group could help coordinate efforts, set research priorities, and standardize measurement approaches. This group could also develop best practices for creating and validating empowerment measures, explore ways to harmonize indicators for cross-cultural comparisons and guide the development of experimental studies to address remaining knowledge gaps. Greater alignment between government, program, and researcher data collection efforts would also help improve research efficiency and effectiveness.
A new conceptual framework
The report presents a new conceptual framework illustrating how policies and programs influence socioeconomic development and population dynamics by shaping women’s agency (Figure 1). While building on existing frameworks, it emphasizes the central role that women's agency plays at the societal, community, interpersonal, and intrapersonal level. Additionally, it highlights population dynamics as a potential mechanism through which empowerment can drive socioeconomic development.
Figure 1: A new conceptual framework
Please click the image to view.
Identifying levers for change
Finally, the report reviews empirical evidence to identify programs and policies that can serve as ‘levers for change’ to increase women’s agency in the empowerment process, as depicted in the conceptual framework. These include:
- individual-and-household-level levers (e.g., cash transfers and job training)
- community-level levers (e.g., self-help groups and youth programs)
- societal-level levers (e.g., laws and policies regarding inheritance and gender-equal opportunity).
Together, the recommendations, conceptual framework, and levers for change offer guidance to various types of stakeholders to help promote women’s empowerment and drive global social and economic progress. Whether you are a practitioner, researcher or funder, I hope you find our work useful. You can access an interactive overview of the report here and watch a presentation of the report here.
Disclaimer
CGD blog posts reflect the views of the authors, drawing on prior research and experience in their areas of expertise. CGD is a nonpartisan, independent organization and does not take institutional positions.
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