ICEH researchers presented a study on gender inequality at the Women Delivery Conference 2019, held from June 3 to 6 at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, Canada. 

On June 5, from 10:00 to 12:30 pm, Aluisio Barros and Fernanda Ewerling discussed the poster "Mapping women's empowerment in low and middle income countries: inequalities within and between countries". The study applies a survey-based women’s empowerment index - the SWPER. Proposed by the researchers, the SWPER index is a comprehensive, cross-cultural standard tool that advances other empowerment indexes by allowing measurements at the individual level so that subgroups of women can be compared in terms of empowerment. 
The work evaluated data from the latest Demographic and Health Survey for 61 low and middle-income countries since 2000. SWPER encompasses three empowerment domains: attitude toward violence, social independence, and decision-making. The scores are standardized and compared across countries as well as within countries. The results showed that most Sub-Saharan African countries and some countries in South Asia fared worst in terms of women’s empowerment. Aside from that, women living in rural areas presented, on average, lower empowerment levels than the ones living in urban areas in all SWPER domains. 

Findings point out that women’s empowerment is strongly affected by where women live, a perspective that is not possible to explore with the usual empowerment indicators. The analyzes are an example of how SWPER addresses the need for a single, consistent, survey-based indicator of women´s empowerment that aligns with helping to guide policy and advocacy efforts toward Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) related to gender equity, specially SDG 5.