Measuring women's empowerment: a need for context and caution – Authors' reply
Authors: Aluisio J D Barros, Fernanda Ewerling, Cesar G Victora, Anouka van Eerdewijk, Marcelo Tyszler, John W Lynch
Journal: The Lancet Global Health (2017)

Women's empowerment is a complex concept, with no consensus on its definition or on the domains that compose the construct.1Bishop D Bowman K Still learning: a critical reflection on three years of measuring women's empowerment in Oxfam.Gender Dev. 2014; 22: 253-269Crossref Scopus (19) Google Scholar 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. With all its limitations, the SWPER index2Ewerling F Lynch JW Victora CG van Eerdewijk 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 (112) Google Scholar advances the field with the potential for its use in widely available national health surveys to monitor progress in SDG5 (which calls for the empowerment of all women and girls) in the African continent. As Anita Raj mentioned in the linked Comment,3Raj A Gender empowerment index: a choice of progress or perfection.Lancet Glob Health. 2017; 5: e849-e850Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (15) Google Scholar SWPER can help advance the study of gender empowerment, unless one chooses to argue for perfection over progress. Most of the limitations mentioned in the letters by Kathryn Yount and colleagues and Robin Richardson were already raised and discussed in our paper.2Ewerling F Lynch JW Victora CG van Eerdewijk 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 (112) Google Scholar Low-income and middle-income countries present particularly large gender inequalities compared with high-income countries. In this context, and specifically in Africa, it is not uncommon for the only source of reliable data to be national surveys, notably the Demographic and Health Surveys. These surveys are extremely rich in data content—considering the time and resource constraints related to data collection—and their comparability across countries and over time is a particular strength. The development of the SWPER index was based on available data, which was limited by the items included in the surveys. The advantage of this approach is the immediate availability of the results for a large number of countries and moments. The big disadvantage is that not all dimensions of the construct might be assessed. However, this disadvantage does not invalidate the measurable dimensions, which are also important. The SWPER index indeed includes context-dependent items, but most of the items are related to gender-specific aspects, such as justifications of wife beating and participation in decision making. The correspondents overemphasise the first set of items, ignoring that most are actually gender-specific. The resulting index had its validity assessed through its association with the Gender Development Index, a largely used indicator of gender gap, and with outcomes expected to correlate with empowerment. Other aspects of validity and reliability cannot be assessed since we either do not have a concurrent assessment of empowerment in the surveys, or we have repetitions of the questionnaires. Further work on the index is still needed, but this does not imply that it is not valid or not informative. We agree that the SWPER has limitations, and we did openly discuss them in the paper. But some information on women's empowerment is better than no information at all. And the development of the index and the discussion about its limitations will enable us and others to argue for more and better information on the topic to be included in surveys. 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 cautionSustainable 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),1 improves measurement of SDG5. Full-Text PDF Open Access