Conceptualisation and Measurement of Women's Empowerment Revisited

This paper advances a new approach to conceptualise, define and systematically measure women's empowerment. A review of literature identified that empowerment is multidimensional, and that women empowered in one dimension are not necessarily empowered in the other. It was also established that women need both resources and a sense of agency to independently achieve their livelihood outcomes. Therefore, it was concluded that both agency and resources are the best indicators of women's level of empowerment. In view of the multidimensional nature of women's empowerment, this study proposed the use of principal component analysis (PCA) on women's level of agency and resources to generate factor scores (i.e., indicators of each woman's level of empowerment) at each dimension of empowerment (i.e., indicated by each PC) as the better approach to quantitatively measure women's empowerment. Data to test this approach was taken from rural women in Msinga Local Municipality of South Africa. Application of PCA, showed the dominant dimensions in which women in the study area were empowered while the PC factor loadings quantitatively measured the level of empowerment along each dimension. It was concluded that women's empowerment is best conceptualised as increases in women's capabilities and hence, application of PCA to the indicators of women's indicators of resources and agency is the most suitable approach to capture their empowerment levels across different dimensions.