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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.
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.