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ABSTRACT
While central notions around agency are well established in academic literature, progress on the empirical front has faced major challenges around developing tractable measures and data availability. This has limited our understanding about patterns of agency and empowerment of women across countries. Measuring key dimensions of women's agency and empowerment is complex, but feasible and important. This paper systematically explores what can be learned from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data for fifty-eight countries, representing almost 80 percent of the female population of developing countries. It is the first such empirical investigation. The findings quantify some important correlations. Completing secondary education and beyond has consistently large positive associations, underlining the importance of going beyond primary schooling. There appear to be positive links with poverty reduction and economic growth, but clearly this alone is not enough. Context specificity and multidimensionality mean that the interpretation of results is not always straightforward.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Julieth Santamaria for her work on the data analysis.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Lucia Hanmer is Lead Economist in Gender and Development at the World Bank Group. She served previously as Senior Economic Adviser for the Economic Empowerment Section at UN Women and Senior Economic Adviser at the UK's Department for International Development, after serving as Country Representative for the World Bank in Guyana. She was a researcher at the UK's Overseas Development Institute and taught economics at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Much of her work has been in Sub-Saharan Africa. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge.
Jeni Klugman is a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government's Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard University, where she is teaching a course on gender inequality and development. She was Gender Director at the World Bank until July 2014 and previously served as Director and Lead Author of three global Human Development Reports published by UNDP. She sits on several boards and panels, including those related to the World Economic Forum and the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. She holds a PhD in Economics from the Australian National University and postgraduate degrees in both Law and Development Economics from the University of Oxford.