By engaging in feminist scholarship and educating women the economy will grow and become more dimensional thus increasing prosperity for prosperity in nations economies around the globe.

Empowerment has also been linked to results-based instrumentalist research agendas that seek to show how empowerment delivers specific development outcomes. An example of such a (TBF) research agenda is the “Third Billion Index” developed in 2010 by Strategy& (formerly Booz & Co., which is part of the global PwC group). This index ranks countries in terms of “how effectively they are empowering women as economic agents in the marketplace”. Women's economic participation is then correlated to countries' general economic growth and well-being, mainly in the areas of health, early childhood development, security and freedom. In a recent report—for which Cherie Blair wrote an introduction—it is noted that women's empowerment is no longer only the business of governments and NGOs, but also the responsibility of the private sector, which is coming to realize that “women's full participation in the world of work is not merely a social good but an economic necessity”. The private sector has a role to play in, among other areas, supporting female entrepreneurs and financing women-owned business. The Third Billion Index draws some of its inspiration from the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Gender Gap Index. The purpose of the index is to identify the gap between men and women in the areas of (1) economic participation and opportunity, (2) educational attainment, (3) health and survival and (4) political empowerment. These gaps are then mapped onto the WEF's Global Competitiveness Report and various measurements of GDP. Although its focus is wider than women's economic participation, the WEF (which is a private, business-led international organization) similarly claims that there is a “strong correlation between a country's gender gap and its national competitiveness”. This means that those countries with the smallest gender gaps, namely in the areas of political and economic participation, health and education, are also the most competitive countries globally. According to the WEF, “[a] country's competitiveness depends on its human talent—the skills, education and productivity of its workforce. Because women account for one-half of a country's potential talent base, a nation's competitiveness in the long term depends significantly on whether and how it educates and utilizes its women”. Drawing on the first theoretical premise established above, it is a rather bitter irony that while these indexes do recognize the importance of a healthy and educated workforce for the functioning of economies, they fail to acknowledge the work that is involved in these forms of biological and social reproduction. Rather, reproductive labour as a whole is obscured, as the index fails to account for household and domestic-related phenomena, including unpaid work. According to Chant and Brickell, the same can be said for the Third Billion Index, the OECD's Social Institutions and Gender Index and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s Gender Inequality Index While unpaid reproductive labour is systematically ignored, women—or more specifically, women's bodily capacities—are produced as “marketizable and exploitable commodities”.