Does women's empowerment protect women from violence? A test of political and economic empowerment on female homicide rates and victim ratios in comparative international perspective, 1990–2021

Using indicators of women’s empowerment from the Varieties of Democracy data and female homicide rates from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project on mortality due to injuries sustained from interpersonal violence, this study finds that higher levels of women’s political empowerment are associated with higher female homicide rates. The substantive impacts of these effects, however, are slight. Disaggregating the empowerment index into women's economic empowerment, measured as access to state business and jobs, however, predicts lower violence, and the results are robust to endogeneity concerns. The findings, taken together, suggest that political empowerment of women may exist in many cases as window dressing, whereas economic empowerment potentially signifies more meaningful progressive transformation. The basic results are robust to alternative models and measurement, estimation strategy, and a host of diagnostic tests. While the political empowerment of women is intrinsically valuable, ensuring the actual physical safety of women requires more sharply focused, targeted policy attention. Clearly, without physical security, women’s dignity and agency to act, regardless of the quality of rights, will remain circumscribed.