CAREER: Dynamics of Women's Political and Economic Empowerment: An Open Database Project

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

Many countries, including the United States, are simultaneously experiencing two contradictory trends: increasing opportunities for women that result from economic growth and increasing barriers that limit women’s voice and agency. Such barriers are growing across work, social, and political settings in both the Global North and Global South, alongside growth in women’s contributions to economic and political innovation. In some instances, however, political, economic, and social systems effectively foster women’s agency and voice toward gender equality. This project explores the conditions under which gender equality becomes more likely and identifies women’s solidarity as playing a key role. The project seeks answers to these and related questions: When do political, economic, and social systems support women’s solidarity? How, if at all, can women’s solidarity facilitate gender equality and universal societal improvements? This CAREER project advances a path-breaking research and educational program that leverages scientific innovation to facilitate inclusive development, social welfare, and gender equality. This project advances the theoretical and analytic bases for understanding the dynamics of women’s empowerment. The project aims to: 1) harness multi-method data generation to document the scope of gendered agency and women’s solidarity across space and time; 2) develop a theoretical of the dynamics of gendered agency and women’s solidarity to explain global variation in gender equality; 3) leverage “as-if random” changes in women’s rights and initiate field experiments to test theories of gendered agency, solidarity, and levels of equality; and 4) implement a multi-faceted educational program to establish an Open Database Project. The database element includes a replicable system of data collection, processing, digital infrastructure construction, and data analysis that is based on four core study cases. With the aim of deploying data science to analyze geospatial patterns of gendered agency in relation to rights, resources, networks, and power, the Open Database Project coincides with an interdisciplinary educational program that involves students from multiple disciplines (e.g., social science, law, gender studies, and computing and data science) in hands-on research. Through theory-driven data collection and analysis the project both supports and produces path-breaking research on gender and agency to enable welfare-enhancing equality in the United States and globally. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.