Women's Empowerment, Population Dynamics, and Socioeconomic Development (2025)
Chapter: 8 Conclusions and Recommendations
8
Conclusions and Recommendations
This report synthesized available theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence regarding the relationships of women’s empowerment with population dynamics and socioeconomic development. Given the committee’s charge, we have prioritized evidence that provides insight into the relationships of investments in enabling resources for women (levers for change), impacts of these investments on direct measures of women’s agency, and effects on conceptually grounded measures of population dynamics and socioeconomic development. We recognize the reciprocal nature of these relationships and have acknowledged them throughout.
Our review of existing frameworks of women’s empowerment revealed general agreement on key dimensions, especially those related to the importance of resources, the centrality of women’s agency in the empowerment process, and the importance of an enabling structural and normative context for women’s agency to be fully realized at lower levels of the social ecology. Conceptual gaps in these frameworks were also notable. For example, frameworks tended to focus on resources and agency at the individual and interpersonal levels, with less attention to collective resources and agency at the community and societal levels. Also, the powerful roles of formal institutions and sociocultural norms in maintaining the status quo of women’s disempowerment received less attention, and conceptualizing change processes within a multilevel socioecological framework was generally lacking. To integrate and expand upon this conceptual work, our new conceptual framework underscores the multilevel and multidimensional nature of both resources and agency, as well as the unignorable conditioning
influence of restrictive gender norms along with the formal institutions and the social, cultural, and structural factors that underlie these norms.
We also observed notable gaps in frameworks for understanding how changes in women’s empowerment may, in theory, be related to changes in population dynamics and socioeconomic development, which are also defined as multilevel processes. Specifically, frameworks focused on population dynamics were lacking or focused narrowly on singular aspects, most notably changes in fertility. We found that while frameworks tended to address aspects of empowerment at the individual and collective levels, the roles of structures and organizations were mentioned less often, and multilevel ecological considerations were generally missing. Additionally, most of the frameworks were designed for specific sectors and therefore focused on sector-specific outcomes rather than on socioeconomic development generally. Furthermore, while frameworks tend to suggest that the expansion of enabling resources could shape and foster the empowerment process (from expanded choice to agency to achievements), none were explicit in offering guidance on opportunities to create change (e.g., via enforcement of existing policies and laws, or via creation of new policies).
The new conceptual framework developed by the committee (Figure 3-1) builds on existing frameworks and illustrates the role of population dynamics as a potential mechanism through which empowerment can operate to further socioeconomic development. The new conceptual framework also identifies ways in which resources can support empowerment. Within empowerment, the construct of agency emerged as an important lens through which to view women’s empowerment and women’s ability to act. The new conceptual framework considers multiple levels of agency: the individual, family, community, and societal levels.
Our review of the research on the impact of women’s empowerment—and particularly agency—on a range of population dynamics identified studies that point to causal evidence in the realms of family formation and fertility, associated with interventions such as cash transfers, skills training, and education subsidies. These studies suggest that impacts on family and fertility outcomes flow through women’s agency, but findings were often inconsistent across studies and geographies. Reasons for the inconsistencies include differences in definitions and measurement of women’s empowerment, a paucity of measures focused on mechanisms through which the relationships operate, and lack of longitudinal data. Research in this area is typically focused on individual-level empowerment, with a lack of attention to the structural and gender context, such as the norms that shape women’s and men’s roles within a given culture. In addition, the interventions studied are often limited to single geographies and relatively homogenous cultural contexts. Causal studies on the role of women’s empowerment in mortality and morbidity are limited, and such studies are largely lacking when it comes to migration.
A significant body of work focuses on the relationships between women’s empowerment and healthcare access, utilization, and outcomes—almost entirely in the areas of access to family planning and sexual and reproductive, maternal, and newborn/early child health. Opportunities for healthcare, access to health information and autonomous decision making, and healthy behaviors are all required for achieving well-being and ultimately health and gender equity. Yet access to these conditions is not distributed equally. While the manifestations and magnitude of impact of social influences on health vary across settings and populations, many factors influence vulnerabilities to illness and contribute to higher rates of adverse health and social outcomes for women and girls versus men and boys. These include differential power relationships; control over resources including medical services, technologies, and treatments; lack of access to and receipt of quality health services; clean water, hygiene, and sanitation; an overly narrow focus on women’s reproductive health with little attention to other critical and interrelated dimensions of well-being (e.g., noncommunicable diseases, mental health); gender-based violence, including forced marriage, sex trafficking, and female genital cutting; marginalization, discrimination, disrespect, and abuse occurring at the health system and community levels; and decreased opportunities for social mobility (e.g., education and employment). Women experience a significant share of the global burden of infectious diseases (e.g., HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis), sexually transmitted infections, cervical and breast cancers, unintended pregnancy, trauma, intimate partner violence, injury/homicide/suicide, substance use, pregnancy-related death and disability, malnutrition, and chronic conditions including depression, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and overall morbidity and mortality.
Much of the work on the role of empowerment in the health area relies on cross-sectional data and uses unidimensional or otherwise narrowly defined empowerment indicators, which limits understanding of the complex causal relationships between women’s empowerment and health outcomes. Studies are critically important to further illuminate causal associations between women’s empowerment and health and healthcare access using primary data collections, longitudinal and prospective designs, and quasi-experimental, randomized controlled trial, and mixed-methods policy-evaluation approaches. Research using a broader range of multidimensional measures of both empowerment indicators and outcome measures is also important.
Evidence suggests that shifts in the determinants of women’s bargaining power, such as women’s access to assets or income, lead to investments associated with long-term socioeconomic development, such as children’s education and nutrition. We also found that increases in women’s control over assets can lead to livelihood improvements by increasing women’s
labor force participation and business profits. However, there is insufficient causal evidence on how land registration, and assets more broadly, impact women’s agency specifically. Furthermore, women’s access to childcare tends to be associated with increased labor force participation and large income benefits, but we found no evidence of childcare utilization leading to further improvements in women’s agency.
Other areas of socioeconomic development that research has linked to women’s empowerment include increases in girls’ career aspirations and educational attainment because of laws that reserve political leadership positions for women, and a reduction in intimate partner violence associated with women’s economic empowerment.
In terms of areas in which evidence is lacking, little to no research examines the impact of investments that increase women’s agency on broader levels of social capital. In addition, causal evidence directly relating increased women’s agency to increased climate security and resilience is very thin. Lastly, fertility decline may moderately increase output per capita in high-fertility populations, but external validity is unclear for populations that have already undergone substantial fertility decline.
We found that measured impacts of individual agency on socioeconomic development outcomes result from women’s differential preferences, yet these preferences are seldom measured directly. Some studies show that self-efficacy is the individual agency construct with the most direct empirical evidence. Even less empirical evidence exists for goal setting, awareness of rights, and locus of control, despite their theoretical importance. In terms of interpersonal agency, women’s decision-making ability is by far the most measured construct. However, the specific type of decision making measured is not always in line with potential theoretical pathways. In terms of community-level agency, there is a dearth of causal evidence on how shifting agency at this level (e.g., through changes in broader norms or expansion of women’s networks) impacts socioeconomic development outcomes. Lastly, evidence is particularly lacking on the effects on socioeconomic development outcomes in response to societal-level changes to resources that play a role in women’s agency. Beyond legal changes, policy levers such as collective action and formation of autonomous feminist movements have also not been adequately explored.
Our review of evaluations of specific policies and programs that impact women’s agency identified several areas in which interventions have been found to influence women’s aspirations, self-efficacy, self-confidence, and decision-making control. These areas include (a) financial programs, including cash transfers, microfinance, and job training and placement; (b) women’s collectives to support women’s economic and health status and build collective efficacy; (c) health interventions, including family planning and sexual and reproductive health programs, community health worker
programs for maternal and child health, and peer programs for mental health; (d) youth development interventions, including those focused on early marriage prevention and education promotion, as well as life skills training; and (e) social and legal protections and policies, particularly those related to gender-equal opportunity and safety from gender-based violence. These program and policy approaches align with those that show significant improvements in delayed marriage, increased health and family planning, and positive socioeconomic development outcomes. While studies often show robust impacts of these programs, the evidence cannot be generalized to geographies and cultural contexts that differ from those in which the research was conducted.
Policies and programs for which there appear to be inadequate evidence include the areas of divorce and custody laws, wage equality laws, and family leave policies, possibly because implementation of these policies varies and few studies measure implementation. Additionally, inadequate evidence is available from low- and middle-income countries regarding the role of agency at levels beyond the individual and interpersonal. Evidence on collective efficacy as an outcome is limited, except in the case of women’s self-help groups, likely because these groups themselves operate as collectives. Evidence is also limited on the impact of social movements (e.g., women’s movements) on agency across various levels.
RECOMMENDATIONS
While the roles of some of the concepts and dynamics described in our new conceptual framework are well supported by evidence, other areas would benefit from further research. Our review also revealed a great deal of variation in disciplinary approaches to measuring and analyzing women’s empowerment, population dynamics, and socioeconomic development, emphasizing the importance of harmonizing measures and approaches. Our recommendations for ways to advance the work in this area are summarized below.
Measuring Women’s Empowerment and Associated Concepts
While the committee was not specifically tasked with conducting a systematic review of data-collection and measurement approaches, our review of the existing research on women’s empowerment identified inconsistencies, limitations, and gaps in definitions, as well as the operationalization and measurement of terms to be among the main barriers to better understanding the role of women’s empowerment in population dynamics and socioeconomic development. Data limitations often mean that concepts and relationships that appear to be important based on theoretical pathways
are not well understood, and that findings are not comparable across diverse social contexts, making it difficult to eliminate confounding effects. The committee’s statement of task includes a request to set an agenda for future research and data collection, and many of our recommendations are in this area.
RECOMMENDATION 1: Data collection on women’s empowerment should be expanded to include the range of measures necessary to fully capture elements of women’s empowerment, as well as the dynamics and pathways in the committee’s new conceptual framework that remain poorly understood. Many of these aspects are multidimensional and should be understood as such. These include
- Sociocultural norms and structures as conditioning factors in the sociocontextual environment.
- Structural dynamics and sexism.
- The role of men, including structural gender inequalities, inequitable gender norms, and masculine dominance.
- Barriers to empowerment.
- Effective methods to reduce gender inequality in productivity, earnings, and profits.
- Effective methods to address norms surrounding women’s domestic work.
- Effective methods to eliminate occupational segregation.
- Effective methods to build resilience for women in the face of climate change and other shocks.
- Women’s access to health programs (e.g., social protection, insurance, contraception, prenatal and childbirth care, infant and child healthcare, women’s healthcare).
- Girls’ and women’s education and skill building.
- Girls’ and women’s social networks and supports.
- Couple dynamics.
- Perceptions of rights.
- Time allocation and control over time.
RECOMMENDATION 2: Researchers and government data-collection entities studying women’s empowerment should identify opportunities to collect longitudinal data from large-scale studies to better understand change over time, including the determinants of sustained gains in women’s empowerment and the long-term effects of women’s empowerment on socioeconomic development.
Measuring Women’s Agency
In addition to improving measurement of women’s empowerment, this report also highlighted work that is important for developing better measures of women’s agency and areas in which a better understanding of the role of agency is critical.
RECOMMENDATION 3: Research should prioritize the development of direct multidimensional, construct-specific, and multilevel measures of agency. To the extent that proxy measures are used, researchers should strive for consistency and clarity on how such measures are defined and used, and should be clear that the role of women’s agency is assumed and not directly measured. Particular attention should be paid to defining, operationalizing, and assessing the reliability and validity of the following dimensions of women’s agency in diverse contexts, leveraging the newest research:
- Individual awareness of rights, aspirations and preferences, goal setting and choice, and internal motivation.
- Control and decision making, including economic and reproductive decision making, at the individual and interpersonal levels.
- Collective agency in formal groups and informal networks at the community and societal levels (e.g., shared goals, collective efficacy, collective action toward shared goals).
Studies of agency would benefit from a life-course perspective—in other words, from recognizing that there are trajectories and turning points as people grow and change across life stages and are influenced by their lived experiences. Agency around life transition points and opportunities, such as fertility or wage earning, can be particularly important to support women to achieve their life goals.
RECOMMENDATION 4: Research on agency should include studies of women’s agency across the entire life course and at key life stages and milestones, with consideration of the socioecological and cultural context and intergenerational influences on key life stages, milestones, and inflection points.
Enhancing Study Designs
While this report prioritized the discussion of existing research pointing to the causal influences on women’s agency, and in turn the causal effects of women’s agency on population dynamics and socioeconomic
development, the literature we reviewed included a wide variety of methods, including qualitative research such as community-participatory and community-engaged research. Considerable gaps exist in some areas in which study designs able to establish causality are lacking, or in which further insight on underlying dynamics could be gained through in-depth qualitative exploration.
RECOMMENDATION 5: Research on women’s empowerment and agency should prioritize study designs that:
- Test causal relationships between dimensions of women’s empowerment and population dynamics and socioeconomic development, and that better elucidate the role of relevant concepts as causal factors or outcomes. These designs include randomized controlled trials, quasi-experiments, natural experiments, and longitudinal designs to establish causality; to examine reciprocal, temporal relationships; and to distinguish effects related to the mode of intervention delivery and quality of implementation from the content of the intervention.
- Include qualitative data collection to contextualize theories of change, to inform intervention and research design, and to aid in the interpretation of findings that offer causal evidence.
- Are informed by the perspectives of the women and communities being studied.
- Examine multiple intervention points along the theoretical pathways of interest.
- Provide understanding of life-course trajectories and inflection points.
RECOMMENDATION 6: Research funders should support studies designed to examine the effects of programs and policies intended to enhance women’s empowerment and, thereby, socioeconomic development. Study designs should include sufficient follow-up time to examine sustainability of impacts, as well as measures that permit assessment of unintended adverse effects of interventions, including outcomes (both intended and unintended) that may not be immediate.
RECOMMENDATION 7: To establish external validity, more attention should be devoted to understanding the role of interventions and the specific role of women’s agency as a mechanism for social change—at the institutional and societal levels, as well as across diverse cultural settings. Also, more attention should be paid to understanding the feasibility, acceptability, and sustainability of, as well as engagement with, these interventions.
RECOMMENDATION 8: Studies are needed to better understand the impacts of integrated approaches to women’s empowerment (e.g., cash transfers to women alongside efforts to address restrictive social and gender norms) and integrated women’s healthcare (e.g., service-delivery models that can address women’s sexual and reproductive health as well as psychosocial care needs).
The committee’s review primarily focused on the empirical evidence regarding how women’s empowerment influences population dynamics and socioeconomic development, and not on the cost effectiveness of programs. Very little information is available about the cost implications of various interventions or about the best ways to scale up and integrate promising findings into policies or practice. Looking ahead, it is important to systematically track program-implementation data and for more research to be performed to guide decisions about implementation.
RECOMMENDATION 9: Research funders should support cost analyses and implementation science studies to provide guidance on scaling up efficacious interventions. Such efforts should include systematic tracking of program-implementation data. As evidence from experimental studies continues to grow, comparative effectiveness studies may provide best-practice guidance to government officials and civil society organizations regarding the most cost-effective empowerment approaches in specific country contexts.
Collaboration and Harmonization
The extremely interdisciplinary nature of this field and the challenges associated with generalizing research findings beyond limited geographic and cultural contexts highlight the importance of collaboration to set priorities, coordinate research efforts, and refine measurement approaches to expedite insights into these questions.
RECOMMENDATION 10: Research funders should establish an international, multidisciplinary group to increase coordination and priority setting for the work in this area. The advisory group could include representatives of funding organizations and other experts and stakeholders, and it would be charged with
- Developing and publishing standards and best practices for development and validation of measures for empowerment, so researchers and implementers can better distinguish among the array of measures in use.
- Coordinating work on psychometric assessment of measures of empowerment and related concepts, and evaluating the possibility of (and recommended processes for) harmonizing measures and global indicators of women’s agency and empowerment that would be suitable for comparative use cross-culturally and with various populations.
- Identifying questions and measures that improve measurement of specific empowerment constructs in specific cultures and languages.
- Setting priorities for development of experimental studies to generate causal evidence on relationships that currently are not well understood.
RECOMMENDATION 11: Government, program, and researcher data collections should be better coordinated and aligned. The international group named in Recommendation 10 could facilitate efforts to enhance coordination and alignment across these groups.
