Grappling with the challenges of measuring women's economic empowerment in intrahousehold settings

Laszlo, Sonia; Grantham, Kate; Oskay, Ecem; Zhang, Tingting

doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.104959

Cited by 61 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 91 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…There is an array of research on how to measure women's empowerment and agency. Donald et al (2020) and Laszlo et al (2020) provide excellent overviews of this literature.…”

Section: Measurement Of Women's Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A different strand of the literature assesses current practices for measuring women's agency. Donald et al (2020) and Laszlo et al (2020) highlight conceptual challenges and provide frameworks to guide measurement. Peterman et al (2021) investigate how robust results are to different ways of constructing agency indicators from commonly-used survey questions.…”

Section: Measurement Of Women's Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Using machine learning and qualitative interviews to design a ﬁve-question women's agency index

Jayachandran¹,

Biradavolu²,

Cooper

2021

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We propose a new method to design a short survey measure of a complex concept such as women's agency. The approach combines mixed-methods data collection and machine learning. We select the best survey questions based on how strongly correlated they are with a "gold standard" measure of the concept derived from qualitative interviews. In our application, we measure agency for 209 women in Haryana, India, first, through a semi-structured interview and, second, through a large set of close-ended questions. We use qualitative coding methods to score each woman's agency based on the interview, which we treat as her true agency. To identify the close-ended questions most predictive of the "truth," we apply statistical algorithms that build on LASSO and random forest but constrain how many variables are selected for the model (five in our case). The resulting five-question index is as strongly correlated with the coded qualitative interview as is an index that uses all of the candidate questions. This approach of selecting survey questions based on their statistical correspondence to coded qualitative interviews could be used to design short survey modules for many other latent constructs.

show abstract

“…There is an array of research on how to measure women's empowerment and agency. Donald et al (2020) and Laszlo et al (2020) provide excellent overviews of this literature.…”

Section: Measurement Of Women's Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Measurement Of Women's Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Using machine learning and qualitative interviews to design a ﬁve-question women's agency index

Jayachandran¹,

Biradavolu²,

Cooper

2021

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Indeed, to increase a woman's economic empowerment. Women need access to resources and exercise choice, and these need to translate into achievements [20].…”

Section: The Impact Of the Social Workers' Role On The Empowerment Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Social Workers in Empowering Socioeconomic Women in the Time of Covid-19 Pandemic

Rahma¹,

Sucipto²,

Widyaswari³

2021

Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Covid-19 pandemic had changed all the social life and economic. Empowerment is one of the efforts to strengthen the ability and skill, which refers to the condition or results attained by a social change, through the enhancement of physical, mental, social, and economic ability to fulfill the basic needs. This research aims to identify Social Workers (SW) in empowering socioeconomically versatile women. This research used a descriptive qualitative approach, and the subjects of the research are social workers and clients of economically versatile women in Putat Jaya Urban Village, Surabaya. The location of the research is Putat Jaya Urban Village Sawahan District Surabaya City in which it was used to be the biggest Red-Light District in Southeast Asia, the Dolly Red-Light District. Data collection methods used were interviews, observation, and literary research. These research results are social workers as (1) facilitators; (2) motivators; and (3) companions. Empowerment conducted by SW resulted in the ability to do something useful and had never been done before, improving the power and existence, the feeling of more secure and comfortable by the client, and problem-solving alternatives. Meanwhile, the impact of the role of SW is the ability to work independently, the ability to run their businesses by using their skills; having the high motivation to improve their talents and sparing their time to express their hobbies; having easy access to public service, especially the programs held by the government.

show abstract

“…These measures vary in the domains and indicators of empowerment, and construction and focus. For instance, while some measures focus on women in rural agrarian settings [17,18], others focus on women in sub-Saharan Africa [19] or more narrowly, on women in east Africa [14] hence, there is no consensus on how empowerment should be operationalised and measured [20]. This makes the applicability and comparability of empowerment measures across different settings difficult.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What empowerment indicators are important for food consumption for women? Evidence from 5 sub-Sahara African countries

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper draws on data from five sub-Sahara African countries; Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique consisting of 10,041 married women who were cohabitating with a male spouse. The study aim was to investigate the relationship between women’s empowerment and women’s dietary diversity and consumption of different food items. Women’s empowerment was measured using the indicators in the five domains of Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture index (WEAI) and women’s dietary diversity and food consumption was examined using the women’s dietary diversity score (WDDS) measure. OLS and LPM regressions were used and analyses were confirmed using marginal effects from Poisson and logistic regressions. Results suggest that three out of the 10 WEAI indicators of empowerment showed different magnitude and direction in significant associations with improved WDDS and varied associations were found in three out of the five countries examined. In addition, the three significant empowerment indicators were associated with the consumption of different food groups in three out of the five countries examined suggesting that diverse food groups account for the association between the WEAI and WDDS. Improved autonomy, and input in production were associated with improved likelihoods of consumption of dairy products, and fruits and vegetables including vitamin A-rich produce. Empowerment in public speaking was associated with improved consumption of other fruits and vegetables including vitamin A-rich produce. The varied nature of empowerment indicators towards improving women’s dietary diversity and food consumption suggests that different empowerment strategies might confer different benefits towards the consumption of different food groups. Further, findings imply that interventions that seek to empower women should tailor their strategies on existing contextual factors that impact on women

show abstract

Grappling with the challenges of measuring women's economic empowerment in intrahousehold settings

Cited by 61 publications

References 91 publications

Using machine learning and qualitative interviews to design a ﬁve-question women's agency index

Using machine learning and qualitative interviews to design a ﬁve-question women's agency index

The Role of Social Workers in Empowering Socioeconomic Women in the Time of Covid-19 Pandemic

What empowerment indicators are important for food consumption for women? Evidence from 5 sub-Sahara African countries

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About