Take, for instance, the Gates Foundation’s poultry farming projects. Bill Gates has insisted that because chickens are small animals kept close to the home, they are particularly suited to “empowering” women. But researchers haven’t found that giving out chickens leads to any long-term economic gains — much less emancipation or equality for half the population.

To keep the money coming, the development industry has learned to create metrics that suggest improvements and success. U.S.A.I.D. statistics on Afghanistan, for instance, usually focus on the number of girls “enrolled” in schools, even if they rarely attend class or graduate. The groups promoting chicken farming measure the short-term impact of the chickens and the momentary increase in household income, not the long-term, substantive changes to women’s lives.

In such cases, there is a skirting of the truth that without political change, the structures that discriminate against women can’t be dismantled and any advances they do make will be unsustainable. Numbers never lie, but they do omit.

Sometimes development organizations actually render women invisible in the service of their narratives. One of my co-authors heard from a worker with an anti-human trafficking group in Cambodia about a Western donor organization filming a fund-raising video. When a woman was produced she was rejected because she didn’t fit the image of a young, helpless survivor that donors wanted.

When non-Western women already have strong political identities, their removal is sometimes required even if it involves pushing them back into the very roles from which empowerment was meant to deliver them. In Sri Lanka, a former soldier for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam told one of my co-authors that she and other ex-fighters were offered classes in cake decorating, hairstyling and sewing. A government official confessed that despite years of training programs, she had never seen any of the women earn a living from these skills.

It’s time for a change to the “empowerment” conversation. Development organizations’ programs must be evaluated on the basis of whether they enable women to increase their potential for political mobilization, such that they can create sustainable gender equality.

On the global stage, a return to this original model of empowerment requires a moratorium on reducing non-Western women to the circumstances of their victimhood — the rape survivor, the war widow, the child bride. The idea that development goals and agendas should be apolitical must be discarded.

The concept of women’s empowerment needs an immediate and urgent rescue from the clutches of the would-be saviors in the development industry. At the heart of women’s empowerment lies the demand for a more robust global sisterhood, one in which no women are relegated to passivity and silence, their choices limited to sewing machines and chickens.