Overview
Evidence shows that empowering women fuels economies and spurs the robust shared growth that is needed to end extreme poverty. Yet, one of the most pressing issues that we face is the persisting and mutually enforcing gender inequalities in economic, political and social life. Household surveys continue to be the primary source of data used to track the extent and impact of gender differences in human endowments such as education, health and economic opportunities, such as labor and family enterprises. Increasingly, they are also used to understand intra-household resource allocation, such as economic decision making and spending patterns.
Designing the appropriate questions and providing the best guidance on respondent selection for particular topics is critical to collecting high quality data on gender, and it is why the LSMS has conducted methodological research on several topics related to improving gender-focused and individual-disaggregated data collection.
Gender is a cross-cutting topic, and much of the gender-related work our team has done is summarized in other Survey Methods workstreams, including agriculture, human capital, consumption and welfare, labor, jobs, firms, and informality. The projects and research initiatives highlighted below focus on gender and are related to respondent selection, time use, women¡¯s empowerment and asset ownership and control.
?Work Areas
1. Improving Intra-Household, Self-Reported and Individual-Disaggregated Survey Data
The?Living Standards Measurement Study ¨C Plus (LSMS+)?initiative (2016 ¨C 2022) enhanced the availability and quality of intra-household,?self-reported,?individual-disaggregated survey data?related to assets and employment. Six low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), Cambodia, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nepal, Tanzania and Sudan, were part of this project.
LSMS+ collected data on key dimensions of?men¡¯s and women¡¯s?economic opportunities?and welfare that has been used to conduct policy-oriented and?methodological research?on asset ownership and wealth, work and employment and time use.
As our research demonstrates, minor changes can lead to marked differences, and work done by our team in Malawi illustrates it. We found that privately interviewing adults on asset ownership, instead of interviewing a single, most knowledgeable household member, as is commonly done in surveys, can lead to significant differences in how asset ownership, work, and employment is measured among men and women.
2. Unpaid Domestic and Care Work
Gender disparities in domestic and care work have been a well-recognized, longstanding impediment to the empowerment of women and girls, adversely impacting their transition to labor market across the globe. 24-hour recall-based time use diaries and 7-day recall-based stylized time use questions remain the most used tools for estimation of gender disparities in unpaid domestic and care work and evaluation of the impacts of interventions that aim to lessen the unpaid domestic and care work burden on women.
Recent research based on real-time time use data collection in Malawi through smartphone-based pictorial time use diaries, however, has raised concerns regarding cognitive errors in recalling time use, particularly in contexts with lower levels of literacy and numeracy, with direct impacts on our understanding of women¡¯s time allocation to unpaid domestic and care work.
3. Measures for Advancing Gender Equality (MAGNET)
The LSMS team is collaborating with the?World Bank¡¯s Africa Gender Innovation Lab?(GIL), the??(IFPRI), the??(IRC), and researchers at?, Makerere University, the Asian Development Bank, The Brookings Institution, Tufts University, and University of Alicante on the , which aims to:
¡¤ Broaden and deepen the measurement of women¡¯s agency, based on the development of new tools and rigorous testing and comparison of both new and existing methods for measuring agency
¡¤ Promote the adoption of these measures at scale. By increasing the availability of innovative and meaningful measures of agency for a broad range of settings, this work strives to improve our collective understanding of what women¡¯s agency is, how it manifests and how it can best be measured across contexts.?
The complete set of MAGNET¡¯s briefs, papers and events can be found .
4. Measuring Women¡¯s Economic Empowerment
The Women¡¯s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) is another initiative the LSMS team is involved with, in collaboration with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Emory University, Oxford University, and partners in Bangladesh, Guatemala, Malawi and Nepal.
The WEMNS is a streamlined tool for measuring women¡¯s empowerment, intended for use in large-scale, multitopic surveys in both rural and urban areas, which is relevant across a wide range of livelihood strategies. It has 12 indicators mapped to one of four domains: Intrinsic agency, instrumental agency, collective agency and agency-enabling resources.
WEMNS is calculated using a counting-based methodology: respondents are first identified as empowered on individual indicators, according to established cutoff values and identified as empowered overall based on the number of indicators in which they are empowered.
The complete set of WEMNS¡¯s briefs, papers and events can be found .
Resources
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Events
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