Bridging the Gender Gap: Governance as a Catalyst for Women's Empowerment in Developing Economies

Author(s) : Sadia Mahwish, Shahbaz Ali Khan, Faraz Ali Khan

Abstract:

The phenomenon commonly referred to as women's empowerment may be analytically conceptualized as the capacity that women possess to exercise autonomous agency in charting their own social, political, and economic trajectories. In modern research, the ability of women to be involved in social, political, and economic activities is significantly limited, an issue that is more severe in the developing economy. Gender inequality has been formalized as the fifth objective of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The current paper provides an analysis of a continuum of mechanisms that aim to empower women. To evaluate the effectiveness of these empowerment strategies, this empirical study uses panel data based on thirty nine (39) developing economies between period of 2004 and 2024. The Gender Inequality Index (GII) used in the current research serves as a proxy of women empowerment and used as a dependent variable. The proxy of governance is the Governance Index (GOVI). The control variables include Gross Domestic Product Per Capita Growth (GDPPCGR), Labor Force, Female (LFF) and Gross Capital Formation (GCF). The Driscoll and Kraay (DK) standard error (based on fixed effects estimation) technique employed for addressing the problem of heteroskedasticity, autocorrelation, and cross-sectional dependency in the models. The findings of study show that governance has a strong impact on women empowerment.