Report Guides Future of Women’s Empowerment, Development Research
By Shelby Crosier
Around the world, women play a vital role in the economy, the family, and the social fabric of communities. Women’s empowerment is considered essential for social and economic development, but a lack of research linking these concepts inhibits governments and organizations from investing in women’s empowerment activities to improve women’s lives and achieve other health and development goals.
Kathryn Yount, PhD, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Global Health at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health, was appointed to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee charged with improving the knowledge base on these topics. The committee released a report in November 2024, which:
- Details a new conceptual framework to describe the relationship between women’s empowerment, population dynamics (like rates of fertility, mortality, and migration), and socioeconomic development.
- Gives recommendations for future research and data collection.
The Big Picture
After developing their new framework, the committee gave recommendations on three different research and data collection topics, which can be summarized as:
- Improving Measurement: When researchers collect data about women’s empowerment, they should use measures that capture its multiple dimensions and should consider the wider context, such as the broader social norms and formal institutions that may hinder or accelerate women’s empowerment.
- Enhancing Study Designs: When designing studies, researchers should prioritize experimental designs such as randomized controlled trials to establish causality, as well as implementation science studies about specific interventions. They should also collect longitudinal data to understand changes in empowerment across a woman’s life and qualitative data to center the perspectives of the communities being studied.
- Collaboration and Harmonization: Researchers across programs should prioritize developing and implementing standard measures for empowerment so data can be compared across contexts and over time.
The committee’s specific recommendations can be found in the report.
What The Experts Are Saying
“This report identifies women’s empowerment as a critical social determinant of health in which donors and governments should invest to drive sustained improvements for the health of women, their children, their families, and their communities,” says Yount.
