Geographies of empowerment: Index analysis and spatial clustering of women’s empowerment across Indian states

Women’s empowerment in India exhibits significant regional inequality, with marked interstate disparities shaped by diverse socio-cultural, economic, and institutional factors. This study constructs a multidimensional Women’s Composite Empowerment Index to provide a comprehensive, state-level assessment of empowerment across 36 states and Union Territories. The index integrates indicators from five key domains using official secondary data sources, standardized through z-score normalization, and aggregated with equal weighting. Principal component analysis validates the balanced contribution of domains. Spatial patterns are visualized through choropleth mapping, and global Moran’s I statistic is applied to detect regional clustering. Results reveal substantial variation, with a few states (notably Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu) achieving markedly higher scores, while contiguous low-performance clusters emerge in the Northeast and island territories. Moderate positive spatial autocorrelation is observed, although not statistically significant at the conventional level. The findings underscore that women’s empowerment outcomes remain highly spatially uneven across India.