Improving women's agency, namely their ability to define goals and act on them, is crucial for advancing gender … equality and the empowerment of women. Yet, existing frameworks for women's agency measurement -- both disorganized and partial … -- provide a fragmented understanding of the constraints women face in exercising their agency, restricting the design of quality …

This paper examines women's power relative to that of their husbands in 23 Sub-Saharan African countries to determine … how it affects women's health, reproductive outcomes, children's health, and children's education. The analysis uses a … novel measure of women's empowerment that is closely linked to classical theories of power, built from spouses' often …

literature: lower-caste women are more likely to participate in the labor market, have greater decision-making autonomy within …

-period OLG model that accounts for women's time allocation between market work, child rearing, human capital accumulation, and … terms of women's time allocation and bargaining power, may have a substantial impact on long-run growth in Brazil …

This paper investigates a women's self-help group program with more than 1.5 million participants in one of the poorest …

undertakes a talk-centered analysis of the gram sabha with a focus on examining the oral participation of women in general and … women affiliated with microcredit self-help groups who have access to an associational life. The qualitative analysis of 255 … gram sabha transcripts from four South Indian states finds that women associated with microcredit self-help groups employ a …

A review of rigorous evaluations of interventions that seek to empower women economically shows that the same class of … sufficient to grow women-owned subsistence-level firms. However, it can work if it is delivered in-kind to more successful women … microentrepreneurs, and it should boost the performance of women's larger-sized SMEs. Very poor women need a more intensive package of …

The paper explores whether one of the largest programs in the world for women's empowerment and rural livelihoods, the …), invest in education, and increase total expenditures (for the poorest and poor). Women who participated in the program had … more freedom to go places and were less afraid to disagree with their husbands; the women participated more in village …

ability of a spouse to deny permission for the other to work outside the home, and raising women's minimum age of marriage …. Thus both access to resources and the removal of restrictions on employment served to strengthen women's bargaining … of the reform's impact. The analysis finds that women were relatively more likely to work in occupations that require …

support groups, literacy camps, adult education classes, and vocational training for rural women in several states of India … disentangle the program's mechanisms, separately considering its effect on women who work, and those who do not work but whose … to women in untreated districts. It finds consistent estimates for average treatment and intent to treat effects …