Measuring Women’s Agency

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• households
• survey methodology
• measurement error
• agency
• empowerment

JEL Codes:

• C8
• J16
• I32

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper is a product of the World Bank's Gender Innovation Lab, Africa Region. The authors would like to thank Cheryl Doss, Anna Kasimatis, Patti Kristjanson, and Greg Seymour, as well as participants of the 2016 ABCDE and CSAE conferences, for valuable comments on an earlier draft. Paula Gonzalez provided invaluable research assistance. We are grateful to UN Women and the World Bank Group’s Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality for financial support. This paper is part of a larger project on methodological experimentation to improve the measurement of time use, women’s agency, and ownership and control of assets: three key constructs in women’s empowerment, known both for their centrality in the current policy debate on gender equality and for the challenges posed by their measurement. This research aims to achieve three goals: (1) shed light on the relative quality of the existing methods of measuring these constructs; (2) design and test new ideas to measure these constructs; and (3) generate evidence on which measurement method is most appropriate given the policy and research question at hand.

Notes

1 These include, for example, Solava Ibrahim and Sabina Alkire (2007: 386, emphasis ours; based on Anju Malhotra [2003]): “agency is the ability to act on behalf of what you value and have reason to value”; World Bank (2014: xv, emphasis ours): “agency is the capacity to make decisions about one’s own life and act on them to achieve a desired outcome, free of violence, retribution, or fear”; Sofia Trommlerová, Stephan Klasen, and Ortrud Leßmann (2015: 1, emphasis ours): “agency is having the freedom to act in line with one’s own values and to pursue one’s goals.”

2 Kabeer (1999: 437) defines empowerment as “the expansion in people’s ability to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied to them.”

3 In Uganda, between 7–14 percent said they found the questions difficult, and 29–60 percent said they thought others would find the questions difficult.

4 The Cronbach alpha measures how closely related a set of scale items are and is considered to be a measure of scale reliability.

5 While the WEAI does not directly elicit preferences, it does ask respondents whether they could make their own personal decisions regarding each activity if they wanted to.

6 For example, “Some people feel they have completely free choice and control over their lives, while other people feel that what they do has no real effect on what happens to them. Using the following scale where 1 means you have no freedom of choice and control at all and 10 means you have a great deal of freedom of choice and control, please indicate how much freedom of choice and control you feel you have over the way your life turns out.”

7 The WEAI also includes questions on decisions to sell, give away, mortage, and purchae items to determine control over productive capital – these are covered in Doss et al. (2017).

8 Klein idenfies the local concepts of dusu (internal motivation) and ka da I yèrè la (self-belief) as central to women’s understanding of their individual and collective agency.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aletheia Donald

Aletheia Donald is an economist at the Gender Innovation Lab, within the World Bank’s Africa Chief Economist Office. Her current research focuses on identifying and addressing gender-based constraints through the analysis of development project impacts and improving the measurement of their outcomes. Before joining the World Bank, Aletheia was a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Evidence for Policy Design and Head of Research for the NGO Empower Dalit Women of Nepal. She holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Yale University.

Gayatri Koolwal

Gayatri Koolwal is a research economist and consults with the World Bank and other international organizations on topics related to development, labor, and household survey design. Her recent work focuses on aspects of economic mobility, including informality and employment dynamics, as well as methods for improving data on women's economic roles. She also recently founded Development | Science, a research and policy collaborative with a focus on human capital development. Gayatri holds a PhD from Cornell University.

Jeannie Annan

Jeannie Annan is the Senior Director of Research and Evaluation for the International Rescue Committee. Her work aims to improve humanitarian policy and programs through rigorous research, focusing on sexual and gender-based violence against women, children, and youth in armed conflict, and psychosocial programs for victims of wartime and sexual violence. Dr. Annan is also Senior Research Associate at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

Kathryn Falb

Kathryn Falb, ScD is a Senior Researcher at the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian aid organization. Dr. Falb focuses on evaluating programming to better understand, prevent, and respond to violence against women and girls in humanitarian emergencies. Dr. Falb is trained as a social epidemiologist and holds a ScD from the Harvard School of Public Health and an MHS from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Markus Goldstein

Markus Goldstein is a development economist with experience working in Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, and South Asia. He is currently a Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist for Africa at the World Bank, where he leads the Gender Innovation Lab. His current research centers on issues of gender and economic activity, focusing on agriculture and small-scale enterprises. He is involved in a number of impact evaluations on these topics across Africa. Markus has taught at the London School of Economics, the University of Ghana, and Georgetown University. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.