Equity's logo

SWPER Global

Quantitative measures play a crucial role in assessing levels of women's empowerment, which is central in the global health and development contexts. The SWPER (Survey-based Women’s emPowERment index, pronounced simply as super) Global was the first individual-level empowerment indicator to enable comparisons across multiple low- and middle-income countries and over time. It was developed and validated using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and enables detailed analyses of empowerment either as an outcome or a determinant of health.

The SWPER Global was created using 14 questions from the woman’s individual questionnaire and is composed of three well-recognized domains of women's empowerment:

  1. Social independence: composed of access to information, educational attainment, age at marriage and first child, and differences in age and education to the cohabiting partner.
  2. Decision-making: based on questions about who makes the decisions in the household on large purchases, the woman’s health care and visits to family or relatives, plus whether the woman worked in the previous year.
  3. Attitudes to violence: composed of five questions asking the women’s opinion on whether a husband beating the wife is justified in specific situations (such as leaving the house without telling the husband or neglecting the children).

How to calculate the SWPER scores with Stata

Using data from DHS surveys, individual scores can be calculated using a linear combination of the relevant variables, the coefficients of which were obtained through principal component analysis (PCA). The coefficients were adjusted so that the scores are standardized, that is, they have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one for the original set of countries used to develop the index.

  1. Download the SWPER Global do-file from HERE.
  2. Using Stata, open the women’s dataset of your survey or the dataset you plan to use for your analysis that includes all the relevant variables for calculating the indicator. Note that the variables must have the standard DHS names.
  3. Run the SWPER Global do-file. The code will:
    1. Recode missing values from 9, 99, 999 to “.”.
    2. Recode items’ responses
      1. Attitude to violence – woman agrees that beating is justified: yes = -1, no = 1, don’t know = 0
      2. Social independence - frequency of reading newspaper or magazine: never = 0, less than once a week = 1, at least once a week = 2.
      3. Decision-making: the woman decides or joint decision = 1, the husband or other person decides = -1.
    3. Using single hotdeck imputation, impute women’s age at first birth for nulliparous women. For that, women are clustered according to their age at first cohabitation. In many countries the number of women that had the first cohabitation later in life was very small, so we generated a new variable of age at first cohabitation to use in the imputation where the maximum age was set at 33+ years.
    4. Calculate the individual scores based on the individual-level responses to each item and the item’s weight and a domain-specific constant obtained from the set of 62 LMICs.
    5. Standardize the resulting scores using the SWPER Global mean and standard deviation.
    6. Generate categorical SWPER global with 3 groups of empowerment (low, medium and high).

For each domain, the value of zero represents the average empowerment level of the 62 low- and middle-income countries on which the SWPER is based. Positive values indicate that the average level of empowerment in that country is higher than the average of LMICs, and negative values indicate that the level of women’s empowerment is lower than the average of LMICs.

Figure 1 below illustrates one of the many strategies that can be used to investigate the association between empowerment levels as measured by SWPER Global and health outcomes. In this example, the association between the SWPER decision-making domain and the women’s opinion on whether the practice of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C*) should be continued or stopped is presented in equiplots. The positive association indicates that as the level of empowerment increases, the women’s acceptance of FGM/C decreases.

* Note: You can download from the link below the definition of all indicators used at the International Center for Equity in Health, including the FGM/C:

Check out the SWPER methodological articles:

1. The SWPER index for women's empowerment in Africa: development and validation of an index based on survey data. Ewerling, F. et al. The Lancet Global Health, Volume 5, Issue 9, e916 - e923.

2. SWPER Global: A survey-based women’s empowerment index expanded from Africa to all low- and middle-income countries. Ewerling, F. et al. Journal of Global Health, Volume 10, Issue 2, 020434.

Figure 1 – Proportion of married/in union mothers with a favorable opinion on the continuation of FGM/C and at least one daughter aged 0–14 years who had undergone FGM/C by women’s empowerment level on decision-making (https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.685329).