Women's Economic Empowerment as a Structural Pathway to SDG 1: A Relational–Institutional Model from Urban India

Poverty is also gendered and structurally entrenched despite the continued economic growth in emerging economies. Women lack economic agency due to wage inequality, asset inequity, financial marginalization, and unpaid care costs. This research formulates and empirically implements a relational-institutional framework that sets the empowerment of women economically as a means to SDG 1 (No Poverty). Based on surveyed data of 350 dual-career households (N = 700) in Vadodara, Gujarat, Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling are used to investigate the relation between entrepreneurship, SHG engagement, financial literacy, and workplace inclusion and reduction of poverty through economic independence and shared decision-making. Economic independence is predicted by financial literacy ( 0.42, p <.01) and entrepreneurship ( 0.31, p <.05) significantly, which in turn is a significant predictor of poverty reduction ( 0.45, p <.01). The model accounts 48 percent of the variance in non-dependence in the economy and 52 percent on reduction of poverty. The results show that gender-responsive institutional reform is necessary in achieving sustainable reduction of poverty and not income growth only.