In an ongoing effort to understand gender roles and promote gender equality, scholars around the world are dedicating themselves to analyzing women’s empowerment as a central piece of development monitoring. Given the increasing interest in this topic, ICEH researchers conducted a literature review aimed to describe the quantitative measures of women’s empowerment, focusing on the methodological approaches used to build the indicators.

The results of this work are based on 36 publications and show that the measures are often based on cross-sectional data, such as Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) or other tailored surveys, and there is great heterogeneity in the operational definitions of empowerment and the domains used in the construction of indicators (decision-making, social independence, attitude to violence, access to healthcare, etc.).

Also, one of the main challenges in this field is to find a balance between the need for an adequate measure for comparisons between countries or populations and the incorporation of country-specific elements of women’s empowerment. The authors Indicate the importance of the accumulated knowledge on measuring women’s empowerment but stress the need to reach an agreement on its core constitutive dimensions and a minimum set of questions that can be used in standardized multi-country surveys such as DHS and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, as these definitions can have significant implications for monitoring and promoting gender equality and women's empowerment around the world.

To read the full study and get more information, access the original article published by Frontiers in Sociology