De-Confining Women! Mental Models Pertaining to Empowerment.

Gender inequalities in rural India are deeply engraved in the socio-cultural norms and manifest as social learnings, restricting women and girls' access to economic, educational, and political assets and resources. For any empowerment initiatives to address the deep-rooted beliefs, it is essential to understand how women experience this process and identify factors that women perceive as crucial for their growth and development. These empirical factors can complement the theoretical underpinnings on the concepts of empowerment, structuralism, and agency, providing an improved conceptual framework. Through a qualitative method inspired by grounded theory principles, the current study complied in-depth interviews on eight women who were participants of an empowerment initiative to understand their mental models before and after the intervention through retrospective testimonies. This methodology aims to reveal women's mental representation regarding empowerment and identify key contributing factors. The results showed that women gained confidence from a state of deep fear that kept them silent and isolated. Women now attempt to speak and share opinions with families, government officers, and the community. The new exposure gained through the empowerment intervention opened women's horizons and led to achievements, appreciation, and recognition contributing to women's increased happiness. The paper's main theoretical contribution relies on the subject-object relationship, a paradigm embedded in Indian culture, that invites us to approach this phenomenon through complex adaptive system theories to evaluate complexity and agency levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]