Women Empowerment as Multidimensional Capability Enhancement: An Application of Structural Equation Modeling

This paper tries to offer a comprehensive measure for empowerment where empowerment is viewed as capability enhancement. A critique of the idea of considering autonomy as the sole indicator of empowerment has been presented, and an attempt has been made to supplement autonomy with other dimensions like health and knowledge in shaping empowerment. This paper tries to offer a quantitative measure for empowerment constituted of capability scores on all these three dimensions. A particular form of structural equation modeling called Multiple Indicator Multiple Cause model has been used to estimate capabilities, and the empowerment index (EI) has been constructed as a weighted average of the scores of Health, Knowledge, and Autonomy. The method has been applied on some primary survey data collected from adult women of two districts of West Bengal, and the results demonstrated the fact that high autonomy along with high attainment in other capabilities definitely improves the EI, but considerable empowerment attainment may be observed even with low autonomy but with higher achievements in other capabilities and vice versa .