Measuring Women's Agency
Improving women's agency, namely their ability to define goals and act on them, is crucial for advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women. Yet, existing frameworks for women's agency measurement -- both disorganized and partia...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/333481500385677886/Measuring-womens-agency http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27955 |
| Summary: | Improving women's agency, namely
their ability to define goals and act on them, is crucial
for advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women.
Yet, existing frameworks for women's agency measurement
-- both disorganized and partial -- provide a fragmented
understanding of the constraints women face in exercising
their agency, restricting the design of quality
interventions and evaluation of their impact. This paper
proposes a multidisciplinary framework containing the three
critical dimensions of agency: goal-setting, perceived
control and ability ("sense of agency"), and
acting on goals. For each dimension, the paper (i) reviews
existing measurement approaches and what is known about
their relative quality; (ii) presents new empirical evidence
from Sub-Saharan Africa: validating vignettes as a
measurement tool for goal-setting, examining gender and
regional discrepancies in response to sense-of-agency
measures, and investigating what information spousal
disagreement over decision-making roles can provide about
the intra-household process of acting on goals; and (iii)
highlights priorities for future research to improve the
measurement of women’s agency. |
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