Women Empowerment and Socio-economic Indicators: An Empirical Study of Domain Analysis

Gender development has long been recognised as a pre-requisite for growth and development across the nations. The Human Development Report (UNDP, 1995) stressed on investing in women's capabilities, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) take gender equality and gender equity as major challenges and set deadlines to achieve the gender justice by 2030 (SDGs Report 2019). The need therefore, would be to raise the status of women to enable them to participate effectively and improve their decision-making power, both at home and outside. An assessment of the status of women would be synonymous to an analysis of the roles that they play. A sample of 379 working women was selected from three districts of Kashmir valley to study the women’s empowerment by aggregating results across five key socio-economic domains namely, agency, income, leadership, resources, and time. Each domain comprises a series of metrics which are called as indicators. Based on these indicators, a survey was conducted to generate an aggregate score. The empirical results showed that across all the five domains of 5DE (five domains of empowerment), women are found to be disempowered in four domains in spite of being employed and being an earning hand for the families. This exposes the weakness of some traditional proxies for women’s empowerment in the state. There is an ample need to focus on these determinants to increase and enhance women's role in our society.