Offering a powerful critique of contemporary visions of women’s empowerment, this book traces the shift from its radical feminist roots to a market-driven model of inclusion.

Focusing on Southeast Asia, where women’s labour has long underpinned economic growth, it examines how empowerment projects intersect with the privatization of development and the rise of gender expertise. Once a collective agenda to support women in exerting greater control over their lives, empowerment is now framed as integrating women into markets. Backed by donors, corporations and development institutions, this model has only persisted and expanded, despite extensive scholarship highlighting its limits.

Through extensive analysis of interventions, funders and the micropolitics of aid and corporate actors, the book demonstrates how gender programming can simultaneously disempower and create space for resistance.