Measures of women’s empowerment based on individual-level data: a literature review with a focus on the methodological approaches

Janaina Calu Costa^{1, 2*} Ghada E. Saad³ Franciele Hellwig^{1, 2} Maria Fatima S. Maia^{1, 2} Aluisio J. Barros^{1, 2}

• ¹Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil
• ²International Center for Equity in Health, Brazil
• ³Faculty of Health Sciences, American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Background: Quantifying women’s empowerment has become the focus of attention of many international organizations and scholars. We aimed to describe quantitative indicators of women’s empowerment that are based on individual-level data.
Methods: In this scoping review, we searched PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Science Direct, Google, and Google Scholar for publications describing the operationalization of measures of women’s empowerment.
Results: We identified 36 studies published since 2004, half of them since 2019, and most from low- and middle-income countries. Twelve studies were based on data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and used 56 different variables from the questionnaires (ranging from one to 25 per study) to measure the overall empowerment of women 15-49 years. One study focused on rural women, two included married and unmarried women, and one analyzed the couple’s responses. Factor analysis and principal component analysis were the most common approaches used. Among the 24 studies based on other surveys, ten analyzed overall empowerment, while the others addressed sexual and reproductive health (4 studies), agriculture (3) and livestock (1), water and sanitation (2), nutrition (2), agency (1), and psychological empowerment (1). These measures were mainly based on data from single countries and factor analysis was the most frequently analytical method used. We observed a diversity of indicator definitions and domains and a lack of consensus in terms of what the proposed indicators measure.
Conclusion: The proposed women’s empowerment indicators represent an advance in the field of gender and development monitoring. However, the empowerment definitions used vary widely in concept and in the domains/ dimensions considered, which, in turn, influence or are influenced by the adopted methodologies. It remains a challenge to find a balance between the need for a measure suitable for comparisons across populations and over time and the incorporation of country-specific elements.