Publication: Measuring Women's Agency
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Date
2020-03
ISSN
1354-5701
Published
2020-03
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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 measuring women’s agency – both disorganized and partial – provide a fragmented understanding of the constraints women face in exercising their agency, thus restricting the design of reliable and valid interventions and evaluation of their impact. This paper proposes a multidisciplinary framework for capturing individual agency, containing three critical dimensions: goal setting, perceived control and ability to initiate action toward goals (“sense of agency”), and acting on goals. For each dimension, the paper reviews existing measurement approaches and what is known about their relative quality. The study concludes by highlighting that future research to improve the measurement of women’s agency should prioritize incorporating different contexts, age groups, and decision-making areas to ensure programming and policies are meaningful to the lives of women.
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Publication Measuring Women's Agency(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-07)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.Publication Taking Power(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10)This paper examines women's power relative to that of their husbands in 23 Sub-Saharan African countries to determine how it affects women's health, reproductive outcomes, children's health, and children's education. 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On the other hand, systematically tracking the same indicators across projects can provide a broader understanding of the relationship between intermediate and final empowerment outcomes, as well as between different empowerment domains, such as assets, mobility, time, attitudes, and aspirations. Moreover, practitioners and policymakers have emphasized the need for a concise set of practical metrics that can be easily shared and used.Publication Two Heads Are Better Than One(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05-16)Low levels of agricultural productivity and investment hinder economic growth in developing countries. This paper presents results from a field experiment in Côte d'Ivoire, which randomized wives’ participation in an agricultural extension training for rubber, a male-dominated export crop that takes six years to start producing latex but requires upfront care. The training included a planning portion, consisting of filling out an action plan for rubber farming over the next two years, and a skills portion. In the without-wife group, households witnessed a 26.4 percent drop in the value of the crop harvested and a 18.4 percent drop in productivity, with labor going to planting rubber seedlings. In the group with wife participation, households had higher levels of investment (planting 20 percent more rubber seedlings) and were able to maintain pre-program levels of agricultural production on older trees and other crops. These households increased their labor hours and agricultural input use, resulting in no drop in overall production or productivity. This outcome did not come through increased skills or incentives. Rather, underlying these results are increases in planned agricultural management by wives, increased retention of the action plan, and a reduction in gendered task division. 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