Methods For Measuring Women S Empowerment

Women’s empowerment is of paramount importance for multiple development goals. However, it is much easier to discuss the importance of empowerment than it is to define the methods and tools needed to measure it. This requires research focused on the conceptual understanding of how we should measure women’s empowerment, in a variety of facets, and the creation of tools and methods for doing so.

This volume brings together leading gender and politics scholars to assess how women’s political empowerment can best be conceptualized and measured on a global scale. It argues that women’s political empowerment is a fundamental process of transformation for benchmarking and understanding all political empowerment gains across the globe. Chapters improve our global understanding of women's political empowerment through cross-national comparisons, a synthesis of methodological approaches across varied levels of politics, and attention to the ways gender intersects with myriad factors in shaping women’s political empowerment. This book is an indispensable resource for scholars of politics and gender, as well as being relevant to a global scholarly and policy community.

Women perform 66% of the world's work, produce 50% of the food, but earn 10% of the income and own 1% of the property. To shed light on why this grim statistic still holds true, Women, Business and the Law aims to examine legal differentiations on the basis of gender in 143 of the world's economies. Women, Business and the Law tracks governments' actions to expand economic opportunities for women across six key areas: accessing institutions, using property, getting a job, providing incentives to work, building credit and going to court. The report uncovers legal differentiations for women and married versus unmarried women such as being able to register a business, open a bank account and work at night. These issues are of fundamental importance. When, because of tradition, social taboos or simple prejudice, half of the world's population is prevented from making its contribution to the life of a nation, the economy will suffer. The empirical evidence does suggest that, slowly but surely, governments are making progress in expanding opportunities for women. It is our hope that data presented in Women, Business and the Law will both facilitate research on linkages between legal differentiation and outcomes for women, and promote better informed policy choices on what governments can do to expand opportunities for women.

Over the past several decades, fertility rates have fallen substantially in low- and middle-income countries, and efforts to limit fertility, primarily through the implementation of family planning programs, have become increasingly widespread. Although there is a substantial scholarly literature on the determinants of contraceptive use and other measures to limit fertility and on the resulting differentials in fertility, relatively little is known about the role played by women's empowerment as both a determinant and a consequence of fertility decline. In addition, there continues to be little consensus about the link between fertility decline and broader societal impacts, including economic development. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop, "Family Planning, Women's Empowerment, and Population and Societal Impacts," in September 2020. This event brought together experts and stakeholders to discuss conceptual, methodological, and policy issues regarding the relationships among family planning, women's empowerment, fertility decline, and population and societal impacts. The discussion was intended to inform research and policy focused on the issues of women's roles and empowerment and on longstanding questions surrounding the determinants and consequences of fertility reduction behavior. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop.

"Alsop and Heinsohn present an analytic framework that can be used to measure and monitor empowerment processes and outcomes. The measuring empowerment framework, rooted in both conceptual discourse and measurement practice, illustrates how to gather data on empowerment and structure its analysis. The framework can be used to measure empowerment at both the intervention level and the country level, as a part of poverty or governance monitoring. The authors first provide a definition of empowerment and then explain how the concept can be reduced to measurable components. Empowerment is defined as a person's capacity to make effective choices--that is, the capacity to transform choices into desired actions and outcomes. The extent or degree to which a person is empowered is influenced by personal agency (the capacity to make purposive choice) and opportunity structure (the institutional context in which choice is made). Asset endowments are used as indicators of agency. These assets may be psychological, informational, organizational, material, social, financial, or human. Opportunity structure is measured by the presence and operation of formal and informal institutions, including the laws, regulatory frameworks, and norms governing behavior. Degrees of empowerment are measured by the existence of choice, the use of choice, and the achievement of choice. Following the conceptual discussion and the presentation of the analytic framework, the authors show how the measuring empowerment framework can be applied using examples from four development interventions. Each example discusses how the framework guided analysis and development of empowerment indicators. They also present a draft module for measuring empowerment at the country level. The module can be used alone or be integrated into country-level poverty or governance monitoring systems that seek to add an empowerment dimension to their analysis. This paper--a product of the Poverty Reduction Group, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network--is part of a larger effort in the network to conceptualize, operationalize, and measure empowerment"--Abstract.

In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation of a project-level WEAI (or pro-WEAI) that agricultural development projects can use to identify key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address identified deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment. The 12 pro-WEAI indicators are mapped to three domains: intrinsic agency (power within), instrumental agency (power to), and collective agency (power with). A gender parity index compares the empowerment scores of men and women in the same household. The authors describe the development of pro-WEAI, including: (1) pro-WEAI’s distinctiveness from other versions of the WEAI; (2) the process of piloting pro-WEAI in 13 agricultural development projects during the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, phase 2 (GAAP2); (3) analysis of quantitative data from the GAAP2 projects, including intrahousehold patterns of empowerment; and (4) a summary of the findings from the qualitative work exploring concepts of women’s empowerment in the project sites. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned from pro-WEAI and possibilities for further development of empowerment metrics.

Community empowerment has been frequently studied at subnational levels but it is less clear how to measure it at a national level. Mixed methods approaches would be advantageous using quantitative data from databases plus qualitative information to derive a range of variables and indicators. This report identifies assessment methods that have been used and evidence for integrating qualitative and quantitative data for national assessments. When resources are limited or there is no current practice of measurement of community empowerment the simplest approach is to combine a selection of quantitative variables and indicators available in statistical databases. When resources can be allocated a more systematic approach would supplement such accessible data with some form of rapid qualitative assessment. Ideally a formal national monitoring and evaluation system would be instituted that collects all the relevant quantitative and qualitative data and combines these into a regularly updated assessment.