A BIBLIOMETRIC INVESTIGATION OF THE ROLE OF ECONOMIC SUPPORT IN ADVANCING WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT

The issue of women empowerment has got the main focus in the economic and social development discourse, especially in the financial inclusion, gender equality, and sustainable development. Even though the range of scholarly contributions is growing very fast,the intellectual framework and the development of themes of research in this field are still disjointed. This paper is a thorough bibliometric research study on scholarly works concerning women empowerment that were indexed in Scopus in 2020-2026 regarding economics, business, social sciences, arts and humanities, and multidisciplinary areas. The study evaluates annual scientific production, top authors, influential sources, documents with the highest number of citations, and global networks of collaboration with the help of the structured search strategy and the performance analysis and scientific mapping techniques.The results indicate an increased publication rate in 2020-24, then indicators of thematic consolidation. The predominant intellectual foundations of strategic organizational decision-making are capability-based and resource-agency frameworks identified in citation and co-citation analysis. Co-occurrence of keywords and thematic mapping depict high conceptual clustering on empowerment, microfinance, financial inclusion, gender equality, and sustainable development, and emerging ones lead to health, socioeconomics, and autonomy of decision-making. The country collaboration networks put emphasis to a globally connected network but hierarchically organized research system whereby the United States, India and Australia operate as central nodes. The cumulative growth trend shows structural stabilization and transition to the rapid expansion which is a sign of maturing of the field. This work has a contribution in mapping performance and knowledge architecture of women empowerment research systematically and find directions towards theoretical perfection, interdisciplinary synthesis, and policy-based scholarship.