Measuring women's empowerment: a need for context and caution
Authors: Kathryn M Yount, Amber Peterman, Yuk F Cheong
Journal: The Lancet Global Health (2017)

Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG5) urges governments to monitor progress towards gender equality and empowering women and girls. Improved measurement is needed to meet this mandate, which requires that women's empowerment be well defined, adequately measured by use of representative and focused samples, and statistically comparable across countries, years, and social groups. Accordingly, it is unclear whether the survey-based women's empowerment (SWPER) index, reported in The Lancet Global Health by Fernanda Ewerling and colleagues (September, 2017),1Ewerling F Lynch JW Victoria CG van Eedewijk A Tyszler M Barros AJD The SWPER index for women's empowerment in Africa: development and validation of an index based on survey data.Lancet Glob Health. 2017; 5: e916-e923Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (115) Google Scholar improves measurement of SDG5. First, Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data drive Ewerling and colleagues' choice of items (indicators). Consequently, the SWPER does not clearly reflect the authors' initial holistic definition of empowerment, entailing the capacity to make purposive choices, the ability to consider oneself able and entitled to make decisions, and the ability to have a critical consciousness of women's rights and of gendered power relations. Some SWPER items measure health outcomes themselves, instead of the preconditions for empowerment, because the index omits important components of empowerment, including choice and agency around political and economic participation or leadership. Moreover, the DHS typically excludes many vulnerable groups, and SWPER is validated only for partnered women of reproductive ages. Ewerling and colleagues state that there is a need for a cross-cultural standard indicator to guarantee that the most vulnerable groups are not left behind, and this point still needs to be addressed. On these grounds, the SWPER does not clearly advance current best practices.2Richardson RA Measuring women's empowerment: a critical review of current practices and recommendations for researchers.Social Indic Res. 2017; : 1-19Google Scholar, 3Fox L Carolina R In the mind, the household or the market? Concepts and measurement of women's economic empowerment, World Bank Working Paper 8079.http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/436011496234827185/pdf/WPS8079.pdfDate: 2017Google Scholar, 4Yount KM VanderEnde KE Dodell S Cheong YF Measurement of women's agency in Egypt: a national validation study.Soc Indic Res. 2017; 128: 1171-1192Crossref Scopus (55) Google Scholar, 5Cheong YF Yount KM Crandall AA Longitudinal measurement invariance of the women's agency scale.Bull Sociol Methodol. 2017; 134: 24-36Crossref Scopus (30) Google Scholar Second, Ewerling and colleagues claim that SWPER enables within-country and between-county comparisons, as well as analysis of time trends. They imply that their assessment of comparability was based mostly on subjective assessment of cross-country similarities in pattern loadings. Ewerling and colleagues neither report comparisons across social groups or survey years within countries, nor present rigorous evidence for measurement invariance—ie, a well-fitting confirmatory factor structure, or a model fit that permits assessment across countries, social groups, 4Yount KM VanderEnde KE Dodell S Cheong YF Measurement of women's agency in Egypt: a national validation study.Soc Indic Res. 2017; 128: 1171-1192Crossref Scopus (55) Google Scholar and over time.5Cheong YF Yount KM Crandall AA Longitudinal measurement invariance of the women's agency scale.Bull Sociol Methodol. 2017; 134: 24-36Crossref Scopus (30) Google Scholar Ewerling and colleagues also present some items with low loadings across all domains of empowerment, suggesting poor fit (including those for age, education difference of spouses, and employment status in the previous 12 months), suggesting that they do not contribute substantially to any domain of empowerment. Finally, the authors do not provide Cronbach's α statistics for individual components. A full psychometric assessment still seems to be needed to permit the meaningful within-country, across-country, and longitudinal comparisons that the authors claim SWPER allows.4Yount KM VanderEnde KE Dodell S Cheong YF Measurement of women's agency in Egypt: a national validation study.Soc Indic Res. 2017; 128: 1171-1192Crossref Scopus (55) Google Scholar, 5Cheong YF Yount KM Crandall AA Longitudinal measurement invariance of the women's agency scale.Bull Sociol Methodol. 2017; 134: 24-36Crossref Scopus (30) Google Scholar We thank Ewerling and colleagues for proposing a method to monitor SDG5. However, we caution against using the SWPER before further rigorous validation, including a measurement invariance assessment and reliability tests. We urge researchers to seize this moment to refine concepts, to measure them adequately by use of representative and focused samples, and rigorously assess comparability, so governments have state-of-the-art methods and data to monitor SDG5. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not the policies or views of affiliated institutions. We declare no competing interests. The SWPER index for women's empowerment in Africa: development and validation of an index based on survey dataThe index, named Survey-based Women's emPowERment index (SWPER), has potential to widen the research on women's empowerment and to give a better estimate of its effect on health interventions and outcomes. It allows within-country and between-country comparison, as well as time trend analysis, which no other survey-based index provides. Full-Text PDF Open AccessMeasuring women's empowerment: a need for context and cautionFernanda Ewerling and colleagues,1 in developing an index for measuring women's empowerment, provide a novel contribution to a complicated issue. The empowerment literature is fraught with controversy over both conceptual and measurement issues. Nevertheless, there is general agreement that economic and social context play a crucial role in how empowerment should be measured.2–4 Unfortunately, the index developed by Ewerling and colleagues overlooks these important dimensions. Ignoring context can lead to biased measurement. Full-Text PDF Open AccessMeasuring women's empowerment: a need for context and caution – Authors' replyWomen's empowerment is a complex concept, with no consensus on its definition or on the domains that compose the construct.1 Thus, it is expected that any attempt to measure empowerment will have limitations and will not satisfy all parties interested in the topic. However, we know that an attribute that is not measurable or measured tends to be overlooked. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) raised the need for a measure of women's empowerment so that it can be monitored and compared between contexts and stakeholders made accountable. Full-Text PDF Open Access