enabling or preventing individuals, households and communities from seizing opportunities to raise their welfare, it is clear that development economics needs to focus on the “power within” and the “power to”, not just “the power over”. Second, it suggests that if an economic empowerment project simply focuses on narrow economic outcomes, such as increased labor force participation or paid earnings, it may not achieve broader empowerment or development goals. Economic empowerment projects should focus on, and _measure changes in_ , broader empowerment outcomes. Third, more research is needed to understand the interactions between changes in broad economic empowerment outcomes (and possibly social, political and psychological empowerment outcomes), and changes in the standard individual and household labor market outcomes of participation, productivity, earnings, assets, and livelihood portfolio. Finally, the role of structural constraints in these economic processes needs to be considered as well, which means they also need to be measured and monitored.

# **5. Measuring women’s economic empowerment**

In project and program evaluations, researchers have used a variety of measures of empowerment and in particular economic empowerment, but, as noted above, by far the most common one used is _influence on, or control over household expenditures_ . For example, three recent systematic reviews of types of development projects: (i) Brody et al. (2015) on women’s SHGs and empowerment; (ii) Banerjee et al.(2015) on graduation projects for ultra poor women, and (iii) Upadhyay et al. (2014) on fertility and empowerment all found that this was the most common measure of empowerment used in these project evaluations. Indeed, few other measures were used or collected.

In some studies, however, other measures have been used. The specific measures vary across evaluations. This may reflect the context-specific theory of change that the project designers have identified and worked with, and that they expect will lead to the desired final outcome of the project. That desired final outcome may not have been empowerment, although in some cases empowerment might have been considered an intermediate objective. However, in some cases, it seems as though measuring changes in empowerment was an afterthought, and that it was not really incorporated in a theory of change. This could be because impact evaluation designs usually do not focus on the effects of different project components, so they are not looking to see which components affect empowerment, but rather whether it was a final outcome. Another confounding factor is that empowerment measures are often aggregated into an index, making the studies difficult to compare.

The variables used in these studies and indices have included:

- women’s and men’s views on gender norms (from the DHS surveys - Blattman et al. 2016)

- women’s retained income from sale of crops or from own wages or business activities (Garikipati 2008)

- self-perception of savings behavior (Ashraf, Karlan, and Yin 2010)

- women’s views about gender roles in the labor market (Bandiera et al. 2014)

- mobility - able to leave the house without permission (Xia et al 2011; Blattman et al 2016)

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