Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality to Promote Education: A Review

Women empowerment means empowering women socially, economically and politically so that they can break away from male domination and claim equality with them. Its aim at increasing women's power in terms of their self reliance and internal strength to determine choices in life includes both controls over resources and over ideology. Women empowerment means not only greater external control but also growing inner capability as greater self confidence and inner transformation of one's consciousness that enable one to overcome external barriers to access resources and changing the traditional ideology for social, economic and political development of women. Empowerment is therefore clearly concerned with power and particularly with the power relations and the distribution of power between individuals and groups (Kahlon, 2004, S. Batliwala, 1994: 17).

Empowerment is a multidimensional process, which should enable the individuals or a group of individuals to realize their full identity and power in all spheres of life. Despite the progress made by the Indian women, the life of average Indian women from birth through infancy, childhood, adolescence, marriage, motherhood is a long journey of battle against discrimination are deprivation that is due to socio-culture structure of the society that decides women's all round development. Hence the economic empowerment of women is essential for achievement gender equality in all spheres. The purpose of this paper is to identify the key links between education and women empowerment. Knowing the fact that education provides the critical foundation from which further empowerment flows, the main objectives of this study is to review the status of women in India in present scenario. This paper also evaluates the growth of sex-wise enrolment by stages in the different period.