Social Movements as Women’s Political Empowerment: The Case for Measurement

This chapter explores how to quantitatively measure women’s social movements: women who draw on their identities as women and engage in collective action to target national governments and their laws and policies. Drawing on previous qualitative and quantitative studies of politically influential social movements addressing women’s rights across developing countries, the authors examine what aspects of women’s collective action must be addressed to create a meaningful variable. The chapter concludes with a call for new methods to measure women’s movements, which can provide a more meaningful way to quantify the circumstances that lead to mobilization, the intricacies of women’s movements, and the ways women’s collective action leads to women’s political empowerment and gender equality in both the developing world and a global context.