While the use of the phrase “women’s empowerment” has become commonplace in academic, government, and grassroots circles, it has multiple meanings. These multiple meanings lead to confusion, incommensurable results, and competing interpretations across parties regarding what programs and policies empower women. The hidden dissensus over the apparent consensus of empowering women can have consequences that are unintentionally harmful to women and costly for agencies. In the face of an increasing interest and investment into programs of women’s empowerment, the time for interrogating the contested terrain is now. This dissertation uses a variety of methods to study women’s empowerment throughout the development process (conceptualization, implementation, and evaluation) across three studies. In the first study, I use the frame analytical approach to demonstrate the shared understandings and conflicts over women empowerment’s conceptualization in the development discourse. Using 54 books and articles written by women's empowerment advocates from all over the world, and a grounded approach to coding, I demonstrate the 16 unique ways empowerment frames vary in the way they elaborate or amplify certain problems, solutions, and end goals. These unique collective action frames, or “stories,” of empowerment fall into one of three areas of emphasis: equal rights and participation, power, or agency. The findings from this frame analysis can help activists, scholars, and governmental bodies understand the tradeoffs of promoting and excluding certain frames of empowerment and select the one that aligns with their movement’s aims. The second study examines the way empowerment is conceptualized and then implemented in practice by using a case study of three non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working together to implement and evaluate an intervention in rural India that combines two strands of women’s empowerment funding: nutrition and self-help groups (SHGs). Applying a grounded approach guided by frame analysis to 10 semi-structured interviews with NGO staff, and content related to the project’s proposal, intervention materials, and evaluations, I show the way conceptualizations of women’s empowerment led to particular solutions (e.g., interventions) implemented on the ground. In this case, framing maternal (mal)nutrition as the ultimate problem and end goal of the project and conceptualizing empowerment as a means to this end, led to the implementation of women’s empowerment in the form of women’s SHGs. Findings from this case study reveal that factors informing the implementation of women’s empowerment are primarily due to the diagnostic frame (e.g., problem identification and attribution) and funding sources. Lastly, in the third study, I create a feminist quantitative model of women’s empowerment to evaluate women’s empowerment in rural Jharkhand, India. This study addresses the methodical gap left by feminists primarily utilizing qualitative methods and biases towards quantitative analyses in international development. It also addresses the very real and high rates of undernutrition and intimate partner violence (IPV) in India that disproportionately affect women. Using data from India’s National Family Health Survey 2019-21, I apply a feminist methodology to confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. In doing so, I model women’s empowerment as a process of women gaining transformative control over their lives (including their own nutrition) within a system of power inequalities based on caste, age, and forms of patriarchy (including men’s patriarchal values, IPV, and women’s internalized oppression). I find that agency (measured as decision making) is not a valid means to improve women’s strategic needs because it likely reflects burdened agency or patriarchal bargains in the context of rural Jharkhand. Moreover, the direct and indirect effects of men’s gender values and IPV suggest that development programs in India that are focused on improving women’s strategic empowerment should focus more attention towards mitigating IPV by addressing men’s patriarchal values.
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