Please take a moment to read a recent article in the Annual Review of Sociology written by members of our department:  Sonalde Desai, Feinian Chen, Shilpa Reddy and Amy McLaughlin.  The article, "Women's Empowerment in the Global South" traces the intellectual and historic context in which women's status and empowerment in lower- and middle-income countries have been measured, the conceptual and operationalization challenges in shaping research questions, the use of empirical measures and their connection to levels of social analysis, and the identification of emerging directions for future research. With the recognition that empowerment is as much a collective process as it is individual, it argues that a more integrative and multidisciplinary approach to empowerment is needed.

This work has been a part of the Women's Empowerment: Data for Gender Equality (WEDGE) project.