Advances in Women’s Empowerment: An Overview

Today, the concept of women’s empowerment has been embedded in the official discourse against poverty and development promotion. Its inclusion in the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Agenda made it mandatory as an objective for national governments and civil society organizations. While in the 1990s, feminists deconstructed, analyzed, and questioned the concept; empowerment has now been accepted and assimilated as a desirable and attainable goal by assigning public and private resources. In the academic sector, evaluating and analyzing women’s empowerment has become a common practice. By only looking into the Scopus journals database, the search produces more than 2,600 results. While in the 1990s, there were about 10 articles per year, in 2019, 378 articles were published. Also, the fact that a vast majority analyze cases from developing countries and regions confirms that the objective of empowerment has been focused on women living in poverty in Latin America, Asia, or Africa. Nevertheless, the results are not encouraging. Women continue to be discriminated against, and even more when factors such as ethnicity or poverty are also present.