Publication: Measuring Women’s Sense of Control and Efficacy
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2021-08
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2021-08
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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.
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“World Bank. 2021. Measuring Women’s Sense of Control and Efficacy. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36273 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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