Measuring Empowerment
Empowerment, especially of women and girls, is an important development outcome but difficult to measure. This page provides tips and resources for collecting data on empowerment.
Guidelines
JPAL has prepared an excellent Practical Guide to Measuring Women and Girls' Empowerment in Impact Evaluations. Appendix 1 provides example survey questions related to empowerment and tips on using them, including the following categories:
- Economic indicators
- Social indicators
- Intimate partner and family indicators
- Political and civic indicators
- Psychological indicators
- Education indicators
- Health indicators.
Appendix 2 provides examples of non-survey instruments.
Oxfam has a How-to Guide to Measuring Women's Empowerment, sharing the experiences from their own research. It includes details on their measurement tool, along with example survey modules and Stata do-files.
Oxfam's Real Geek blog provides details of a recent discrete choice experiment to assign implicit weights to the empowerment indicators which reflect the views and the perceptions of the women interviewed in the survey.
IFPRI developed a Women's Empowerment Agricultural Index, which measures the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agriculture sector in an effort to identify ways to overcome those obstacles and constraints. The Instructional Guide provides details on survey methodology, adapting the tool to local contexts, training enumerators, data cleaning, and analysis.
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This article is part of the topic Questionnaire Design
Additional Resources
- DIME Analytics (World Bank), Guidelines on survey design and pilot