A 'How to' Guide to Measuring Women's Empowerment

"Empowering women and supporting gender equality is the stated aim of many development projects. Often these projects are asked to monitor and evaluate the extent to which their work is contributing to achieving greater empowerment, but there is little guidance on how to do it."

In order to measure and assess the extent to which Oxfam's projects have contributed to women's empowerment, Oxfam developed a measurement tool based on a composite index, the Women's Empowerment Index, which is designed to measure this complex concept. This resource shares Oxfam GB's experience of developing an approach to measuring women's empowerment over the course of 5 years, for use in its series of Effectiveness Reviews. In addition to describing the framework, the paper provides lists of common indicators, examples of questionnaire design for the most commonly used indicators, and examples of Stata code. The aim for this resource is to be a practical guide, supporting other evaluators and practitioners who seek to quantify the "hard-to-measure" concept of women's empowerment. The hope is for the reader to make use of the measurement tools and adapt them to his or her own needs.

Oxfam recognises women's empowerment as a multidimensional context-specific concept, which is defined as a process whereby women's and girls' lives are transformed from a situation where they have limited power to a situation where their power is enhanced. The composite index measuring empowerment is constructed based on a framework which recognises 3 levels where change can take place: (i) Changes at a personal level refer to changes taking place within the person - changes in how the person sees herself, or how she considers her and other women's role in the society (e.g., their economic role) and their confidence in deciding and taking actions concerning themselves. (ii) Changes at the relational level refer to changes in the relationships and power relations within the woman's surrounding network. This includes for example, changes within the household, the community, markets, and local authorities. (iii) Finally, changes at environmental level take place in the broader context. These can be informal changes, such as social norms, attitudes, and the beliefs of wider society, as well as formal changes in the political and legislative framework.

While the framework remains unchanged, the characteristics and indicators that make up the index change from context to context, aiming to capture the characteristics of an "empowered woman" in the socio-economic context of analysis. The tool has been continually evolving in the last 5 years, continuously incorporating lessons from its application in the field as well as developments in the sector. As such, the guide should be considered a tool-in-progress that will continue to evolve and adapt in order to tackle new evaluation challenges.

After having presented the framework that has been developed to measure women's empowerment, described the characteristics of the index, and provided suggestions as to how it might be applied, the resource (in Section 3) presents the 5 steps involved in defining and constructing the Women's Empowerment Index. These steps include:

1. Define characteristics of empowerment ("Regardless of the structure designed for this process, two guiding principles should be used: inclusivity and awareness of power dynamics").
2. Design questionnaire and define indicators.
3. Construct indicators and apply cut-off points.
4. Define the relative weight for each indicator.
5. Compute the empowerment index.

The resource provides practical examples derived from Oxfam's experience in constructing and applying the index in impact evaluations.

Section 4 discusses future evolution of the measurement tool; what is presented in this paper should be considered as a work in progress that will continue to evolve and adapt in order to meet new evaluation challenges. To date, this tool has been developed and used to measure women's empowerment in impact evaluations of development projects, but Oxfam believes that it can also be used as a tool for project design and monitoring. The appendices provide additional practical tools. Appendix 1 explains how the framework can be interconnected with other existing gender frameworks frequently used within Oxfam. Appendix 2 gives an outline of the workshop structure used to define the characteristics of empowerment. Appendix 3 lists some of the characteristics that have been used to describe women's empowerment in previous evaluations. Appendix 4 provides examples of questionnaires for measuring the most commonly used indicators. Finally, Appendix 5 provides an example of the Stata code used for constructing the indicators and the Women's Empowerment Index.