EDU301 Culture, Diversity and Participation in Education - Policy Document on Woman Empowerment and Gender Equality - Assignment Help

Introduction

One of the differentiated features of contemporary era is the escalation of gender sensitivity. The concern for gender equality has taken control over human imagination to the extent that it has progressed to the policy implication level (Sharma, 2000). With respect to emergence of gender equality, two perspective have mainly received attention encompassing; women’s development and women’s empowerment (Chant, 2016). 

Although, the concept of women’s empowerment was mainly addressed in the literature of feminism till 1970s, yet it has come into mainstream in 1980s and became popular all around the world (Dantas & Randell, 2015). Many people started believing empowerment of women as a concept of facilitating women to bring transformation in unjust structure of power on either individual or collective basis (Harcourt, 2010). This notion has reduced the scope of women’s empowerment to promotion of individual’s rights. On contrary to this, feminism and women’s empowerment emphasize on structural and unified aspect of empowerment, which promoted power within, power with others and power to modify unequal social and institutional structures (Rowlands, 1997).  This concept addresses that women have right to regulate their lives without being worried about taking other’s consent. Therefore, the focus of women’s empowerment is on collective and structural aspects of inequality prevailing within society. 

As noted in the study of Dantas & Randell (2015) empowerment encompasses six dimensions, including; economic, socio-cultural, interpersonal, legal, political and psychological. There are further sub-dimensions of each major dimension, for instance the economic dimension covers labor force participation, differences in wages and gender segregation among others (García-Moreno et al., 2015). Additionally, three different levels are also identified for measurement of empowerment; household, community and broader areas. 

Further exploration of women’s empowerment has indicated that different fields are being recognized to enhance women’s empowerment. For instance, based on capabilities approach, the level of education has been considered as a core aspect to enhance women’s empowerment (Hudson, 2009). This identification is based on the notion that education can raise awareness and it can also open new opportunities. Further, the education has linkage with development and wellbeing of individuals, which makes it primary goal to raise the level of education across the world. This notion clearly indicates that when women are offered education, then they are more likely to understand their rights and can feel empowered. 

The study of Lindio-McGovern & Wallimann, (2016) has provided evidence of multifaceted scale to measure violence on women by linking with socio-political dimension of women’s empowerment. The consideration has also been given to the perspective of societal inequality and presence of legal guarantees to resolve private and public violence issues against women (Lindio-McGovern & Wallimann, 2016). In this study, analysis of each dimension was carried out by using coded data of 196 countries. The results have shown that 77% of countries had prevalent level of violence and around half of them have limited or no reliance on legal guarantees (Parpart, Rai & Staudt, 2003). Additionally, Oceania and Western Europe have shown slightly high level of social discrimination. 85% of countries, which have shown higher level of social discrimination have also provided evidence of widespread violence (Lindio-McGovern & Wallimann, 2016).