8.9: Stop Asking Women to Be Empowered

What Would It Mean to Change the System?

Development organizations have spent decades using one word with almost magical frequency: empowerment.

The empowered girl stays in school. The empowered woman starts a business. The empowered mother improves family health. The empowered entrepreneur gains financial independence. The empowered community becomes more resilient. In many contexts, these programs matter enormously because education, access to credit, property ownership, digital tools, and political participation can expand real choices. The problem begins when empowerment quietly shifts responsibility for solving structural inequality onto the people living inside it.

A woman may receive financial-literacy training and still live in a society where she has limited access to formal credit, little control over household assets, no affordable childcare, and weak legal protections against workplace discrimination. A girl may receive a scholarship but still spend hours each day performing unpaid domestic labor that her brother is not expected to do. A woman may be encouraged to become an entrepreneur in a labor market where secure employment is scarce, maternity protections are weak, and healthcare costs remain prohibitive. None of those individual interventions is necessarily useless. But none should be mistaken for a transformed system.

This distinction matters because development policy has a tendency to celebrate resilience without asking why so much resilience is required in the first place.

There is something admirable about a person who finds a way around an unfair obstacle. There is something less admirable about building public policy around the assumption that people should simply become better at climbing over unfair obstacles.

Structural inequality often survives precisely because it is dispersed across many institutions at once. A woman may technically have equal employment rights while lacking reliable transportation to reach work, childcare that makes full-time employment possible, access to a bank account independent of relatives, protection from workplace harassment, or the confidence that courts and police will enforce existing law. No single barrier explains the inequality. Together, however, they shape the range of choices actually available to her.

This is why formal equality and substantive equality are not the same thing. Formal equality asks whether the law treats people the same. Substantive equality asks whether people have the resources, institutional support, and practical freedom necessary to benefit from those rights.

The distinction becomes clearer when we compare individual solutions with institutional ones. A leadership workshop might help a woman run for office, but electoral reforms can change who political parties nominate in the first place. A self-defense class may help someone respond to danger, but effective public transportation, workplace protections, housing access, legal aid, and enforcement against gender-based violence can reduce the conditions that produce that danger. A coding program might help women enter the technology sector, but equitable promotion practices, parental leave, anti-harassment enforcement, and childcare policy determine whether women remain and advance once they get there.

In other words, individual agency and structural change should not be treated as competitors. People need tools to navigate the institutions that exist, but societies also have to decide whether those institutions are acceptable.

That is where the chapter's earlier themes reconnect.

Unpaid care work affects employment because time is a resource. Property rights affect climate resilience because assets shape who can recover from shocks. Education affects political power because credentials influence who can enter professions and public institutions. Reproductive autonomy affects economic security because decisions about pregnancy and family structure shape employment, health, and income. Digital safety affects participation because people who are routinely harassed out of public spaces do not enjoy equal access to political voice.

Seen this way, “women's issues” dissolve into questions about the distribution of money, time, security, mobility, authority, and voice.

And perhaps that gives us a better definition of empowerment.

Empowerment should not mean teaching people to become exceptionally skilled at surviving unequal systems. It should mean increasing their capacity to make meaningful choices while also changing the institutions that unnecessarily constrain those choices.

That requires more than inspirational language. It requires budgets, enforcement, public infrastructure, healthcare, labor protections, social movements, political representation, institutional accountability, and cultural change. It also requires men to participate in changing gender relations rather than treating gender equality as a project women are supposed to complete on behalf of everyone else.

The work is less tidy than the slogan.

It is also more consequential.

Women have been surviving unequal systems for a very long time. Survival is impressive. It should not be the policy goal.