If there is one word that has been popular in the discourse on diversity in recent years, it is “empowerment”. Resistant to translations into languages other than the English in which it was coined, the notion centered on “power” nevertheless echoes older ideas with philosophical and/or militant roots around the world, such as liberation, emancipation, mobilization, and participation.
To fully understand what empowerment means and what issues and dynamics the surprisingly rich and complex term generates, let’s take a closer look at its genealogy, definitions, mutations and criticisms.
From Power to Empowerment: Racial and Gender Issues at the Origins of the Notion
To be recognized as an active community
In her book The Empowerment Tradition in American Social [RS1] Work (1994), the social work historian Barbara Levy Simon traces the idea of empowerment back to the 1890s and the birth of “first wave”feminism, and, with the mass immigration that followed the end of the Civil War, the beginnings of what would become the Black Power movement.
Populations excluded from citizenship developed an emancipatory position that made two clear claims to the rest of society: 1/ We are a community and as such, we represent a power that can be mobilized, and 2/ We will use that power to access our rights.
Don't set me free, I'll do it myself
The foundations of empowerment were all there. By sheer numbers, and through belonging to a community that shared an unsatisfactory fate, those who were excluded broke their isolation. Through collective action, guided by leaders of their own choosing, they were determined to take control of their lives rather than wait for those in power to hand them whatever freedoms were deemed acceptable to grant, on their own timetable and by their own methods.
This vision can be summed up in a famous slogan from the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s: “Don’t set me free, I'll do it myself!”
The “liberated conscience”: back to basics with the philosophy of emancipation
Breaking out of voluntary servitude
But how can you free yourself when your chains are on the inside? From self-fulfilling prophecies to mechanisms of internalization of the stigmata, through all the nuances of “voluntary servitude” (or what La Boétie calls the “choice” to be obedient to iniquitous rules and other forms of tyrannical domination) as well as shackled hand and foot by others.
Transform yourself, transform the world
Paulo Freire
This question is about the life’s work of the Brazilian didactician Paulo Freire, author of the famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968-1974). Advocating the development of “liberated consciousness”, he makes education a militant and participatory act, well before its time. “No one educates others, no one educates himself, men educate themselves together through the intermediary of the world,” he writes, then further on, “The goal of the educator is not only to teach something to the other person, but to seek with him the means to transform the world in which he lives.”
Empowerment, then, is the strength people draw from themselves and their community, and it allows to them change far more than their own circumstances.
Escape the presumption of unthinking, unthought, unthinkable
Jacques Rancière
Concerned with equality as well as freedom, the philosopher Jacques Rancière explores this idea in his thesis on working-class culture, published in 1981. He analyzes at length how the oppressed are pushed back into material life, “locked” in the “unthought and the unthinkable” of their situation.
This vision is coherent with criticism of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, which assumes that we can only achieve self-esteem and personal fulfillment if we have previously satisfied all our physiological needs (hunger, thirst, rest, etc.) and all our needs for safety. No one will deny that it is easier to devote time and energy to developing fulfilling social relationships and thinking about the world when you don’t have to worry about being hungry or in danger.
Still, Rancière says, it is a mistake to think that you must be privileged to think for yourself, or to think about yourself. Elites, and more broadly any group in a position of dominance, conscious or not, have a habit of claiming a near-monopoly on how society and the people in it are seen. That includes the theories of emancipation built for disadvantaged, oppressed or dominated groups.
In other words, as long as the privileged are the ones defining the situation of those with less, mapping out their path to liberation and drawing the lines of difference, no real or lasting progress toward equality is possible. There is only one alternative: listen to people without power, and take what they say seriously.
Empowerment in development doctrines: when “making it possible” replaces “doing it for them”
Empowerment for all vulnerable and underprivileged people
Starting with the anti-racist and feminist movements, extended to the field of social relations, the notion of empowerment took on new meaning in the 1990s. At the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, the word was on everyone's lips.
It was brought to this UN meeting by women's rights organizations that deal with the issues of economic poverty, insecurity, and the lack of women in peace processes, but it was reappropriated over the following years by organizations (NGOs and the World Bank, IMF, WTO) on a mission to fight against North/South inequalities.
Empowerment is becoming the preferred path to economic development. Local communities are being energized by receiving the educational, infrastructural and financial means for their own development, without finding themselves under crushing debt. The rise of the microcredit and other similar initiatives are concrete examples of this intention not to do things instead of the target populations, but to support them by putting in place conditions tailored to the context, to encourage the communities to take control of their own destiny.
Empowerment requires a level playing field
While this vision of development aid receives the popular vote, if only because it seems to break with charitable approaches, it has also been severely criticized. Some see it as a way for the so-called rich countries to shift their focus from large-scale development aid to visible but limited actions, while ignoring their possible responsibilities for the economic struggles in other regions of the world.
Microfinance in particular was regularly singled out from the mid-2000s onwards, when many usurious excesses led to human tragedies. However, the economist Esther Duflo cautions about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. She believes that the “empowerment” approach behind the microcredit system is the right one, as long as it is not considered the only possibility. For empowerment to be effective, it must be part of a social protection framework and practised on a level playing field. It is impossible to develop alone, without being able to change the world to suit your own interests...
From economic development to personal development: Be yourself to take action
An ecological vision of being yourself
Empowerment has left the field of self-power around the world through the door of economic development, which has somewhat reduced it to a sort of utilitarian pragmatism. But now it has returned through the window of personal development. The beginning of the twenty-first century is indeed seeing an uptick in the ideal of being yourself, no longer from an individualistic perspective but one that could be described as ecological. It is about being more real, more aware of yourself, more in tune with yourself, freer fromsocial injunctions to maintain better relationships with your ecosystem.
“Being yourself”, the new contours of women's emancipation... But what about men?
In doing so, empowerment reconnects with its roots in the fight for equality between women and men. Because it is through the angle of “being able to be yourself” that we intend to remove the obstacles to women taking on responsibilities. The discourse, taking for granted the equal potential of the sexes, is one of rejection of narrow assignments, internalized guilt, and women’s self-censorship. By encouraging them to accept themselves as they are, complex, multiple, and diverse, the idea is to free up their energy so that women can demonstrate their ability to contribute to the world and therefore to change it.
The model gives convincing results, as evidenced for example by the vitality of corporate diversity networks, which rapidly increase the visibility of many women in organizations and show increased participation in the affairs of the collective, well beyond the issue of gender diversity.
The seductive power of this approach can also be seen in a new impetus of mobilization among men who, in turn, are drawn by the desire to be their more authentic selves, and expressing their frustration with a form of masculinity that limits the expression of their individual singularity.
Does the disempowerment of some mean the empowerment of others ?
The glass ceiling cracks with the rise of women, but does not break
However, the issue of equality between women and men does not seem to be resolvable only by encouraging women’s empowerment. Indeed, even though the glass ceiling may be cracked as women are daring to express their ambition more than they did in the past, it is still far from breaking.
Because women's complexes (imposter syndrome, the good student, Cinderella, etc.) and self-censorship are not the only reasons for the difficulties still observed as they strive to take their rightful place at decision-making tables where issues are raised that concern and change the world.
The inertia of traditional models of judging legitimacy, competence and performance is rendering a share of women's efforts to demonstrate and gain recognition for their value ineffective. It’s a considerable waste of energy, and it prompts a broader reflection on how women’s rise to power and the growing maturity of organizations intersect. As women claim their right to power, workplaces must in turn become more inclusive, so that this ambition can be welcomed as naturally, even unremarkably as possible, and given room to take shape.
The ambiguities of men's disempowerment: between masculinist anxiety and a path toward shared responsibility
With this in mind, and at the heart of new thinking on empowerment, a concept has emerged in recent years: disempowerment. It punctures the enthusiastic notion of diversity as something that benefits everyone without anyone having to give anything up. The term covers two things at once.
The first is the fear of losing status experienced by some men who feel challenged by women’s empowerment. American essayist Hanna Rosin points to the frustration this can breed, and the aggression which may follow, which is borne out in the rhetoric of masculinist movements.
The second is new demand from certain equality movements, a few of them rooted in men’s groups such as ZeroMacho. They invite men to stop accumulating and expanding their powers so that room can open up for women.
Perceived as Malthusianist and sacrificial by some, and clear and immediately effective by others, this vision of power sharing to advocate for both yourself and for society has the merit of refocusing reflection, discussion and action onto equality, the principle of a problem that affects everyone.
