Women Empowerment as a Tool to Attain Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

This study tries to construct a women empowerment index based on different decision-making areas. For this study, 131 married and unmarried working women from a tribal village of West Bengal, India are surveyed through a structured questionnaire having 34 questions segregated into five dimensions. The responses are coded and converted into binary scores to show more empowered scored as 1 and less or not empowered being scored as 0 to construct a combined composite women empowerment index. The analysis reveals that on average the women studied are moderately empowered with married ones winning over the unmarried. Though there is not much impact of education level is found for the married ones in their empowerment level but for the unmarried women, the more the educational qualification, the more are they empowered.