Publication: Measuring Women’s Sense of Control and Efficacy
Date
2021-08
ISSN
Published
2021-08
Author(s)
World Bank
Abstract
Increasing women’s sense of control over
their lives is key to reducing gender inequalities and
improving development outcomes. Research suggests women tend
to believe less in their abilities to act effectively
towards their goals and they provide more importance than
men to external factors determining their life events.
Understanding the degree to which women perceive control
over their lives is critical for designing and adapting
policies to change limiting local norms. Social expectations
about women’s unpaid care roles impose severe constraints on
women’s well-being and livelihoods and are, thus, integrally
linked to women’s agency. Yet, this linkage is not well
defined in recent measures of women’s empowerment, which
tend to incorporate time use only in terms of time poverty
or having an excessive workload. This brief summarizes
existing knowledge gaps in the three key measurement areas
and lays out how the measures for advancing gender equality
(MAGNET) initiative plans to tackle them.
Citation
“World Bank. 2021. Measuring Women’s Sense of Control and Efficacy. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/36273 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”