Discussing Women's Empowerment - Sida

52 RESOURCES, AGENCY, ACHIEVEMENTS • KABEER
the male head, such a question would have very little resonance. In such
contexts, even in the situations of rising female employment and wages
cited earlier, women do not actively seek the opportunity to set up separate
units from men because such autonomous units are neither socially
acceptable nor individually desired. Instead, they invest considerable time
and effort in maintaining their marriages, in strengthening the ‘co-operative’
dimension of ‘co-operative-conflict’, seeking separation only in exceptional
circumstances.
Conclusion
Indicators of empowerment need merely ‘indicate’ the direction of change
rather than provide an accurate measurement of it. However, there are
various reasons why they may prove inaccurate and even misleading. We
have seen how single measures, disembedded from their context, lend
themselves to a variety of different meanings. We have also noted how notions
of women’s empowerment is a field of struggle between protagonists
who subscribe to very different values about development itself and their
own place within it. Finally, there are problems of measurement associated
with capturing a particular kind of social change. Many of the indicators
discussed here provide one-off ‘snapshot’ accounts, often using
cross-sectional variations to capture change. There is an implicit assumption
underlying many of these measurements that we can somehow
predict the processes of change involved in empowerment whereas
human agency is indeterminate and hence unpredictable. Any change in
the structure of opportunities and constraints in which individuals make
choice can bring into existence a variety of different responses, which can
have quite different impacts and meanings in different contexts.
This suggests that there is no single linear model of change by which
a ‘cause’ can be identified for women’s disempowerment and altered to
create the desired ‘effect’.
To attempt to predict at the outset of an intervention precisely how it
will change women’s lives, without some knowledge of ways of ‘being and
doing’ which are realisable and valued by women in that context, runs into
the danger of prescribing process of empowerment and thereby violating
its essence, which is to enhance women’s capacity for self-determination.
Despite these caveats, however, there are two general practical points
to make on the basis of the discussion in this paper. Many of the resources,
forms of agency and achievements which feature in the empowerment literature
are integral to the broader developmental agenda. The arguments