While astounding progress has been made on critical global development issues such as poverty, health, and educational attainment, the fact is that rights and equalities—including gender equality—have actually declined in recent years, even in rich, democratic countries. Without a renewed focus on rights and equalities, any measured improvement towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will mask significant inequities in the distribution of the benefits of global economic and social development.

Based on a decade of work in the field of women’s empowerment, and specifically in conducting impact studies for women’s empowerment programs, in 2018 the Ipsos Sustainable Development Team published a women’s empowerment conceptual framework. This framework was conceived along with an accompanying set of indicators and metrics that could be applied to develop profiles describing the empowerment of women in different contexts and to track progress in this area over time. The motivation for publishing this framework centered around the notion that existing models for conceptualizing women’s empowerment were incomplete or underwhelming.