How ‘Empowerment’ May Miss Its Mark: Gender Equality Policies and How They are Understood in Women’s NGOs

Abstract Women’s NGOs are key players in the struggle to gain gender equality around the world. Motivated by a concern about the lack of progress in achieving gender equality on a global scale, the purpose of the study was to investigate the agendas and conceptualizations of women’s NGOs for gaining gender equality, and to find out to what extent they identified with feminist strategies for social change. This paper is focused on the intersection of how women’s NGOs conceptualise and deliver action towards gender equality and why gender inequality is still a major global social problem. The key mechanism for inquiry in this paper is the interrogation of how the concept of ‘empowerment’ in contemporary gender equality policies and programs, which are largely carried out by women’s NGOs, has emerged as a possible counter force to achieving gender equality. Given that ‘empowerment’ frames contemporary gender equality policy at all levels of governance (local, national and global), the study explored its impact on the progress of achieving gender equality from the women’s NGO perspective. The survey data revealed tensions between the wide range of feminist agendas of the NGOs and the limitations of the current empowerment paradigm. These tensions are between predominantly individualised empowerment processes and the much broader structural and other feminist objectives of how the NGOs understood gender equality as a concept and about how it could be achieved in practice.