Measuring rural women’s empowerment: Issues & Challenges

Measuring rural women’s empowerment: Issues & Challenges

Issues Paper for the 2015 UNWOMEN - CeSPI - DGCS/MAECI Seminar. Milan, May 2015

Technical Seminar on Measuring rural women’s empowerment

Key Issues and Challenges

29 May 2015

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Marco Zupi, CeSPI

DRAFT, 5 May 2015



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Marco Zupi, CeSPI

1. Statistical and measurement challenges in the area of development and poverty

The results of policy actions on poverty reduction have been mixed during the last 15 years. Poverty has been

dramatically reduced mainly in East and South Asia, but it has practically remained unvaried in other regions and

has in fact deepened in some of them, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is producing more inequality in

world development.

While hundreds of millions of people are moving up out of extreme poverty, there are hundreds of millions more

who still live in poverty and want to escape it. Around 3 billion people live on less than $2.50 per day both in

rural and urban areas, 2.6 billion people lack sanitation. There are many stories, numbers and statistics to say that

poverty means precarious existence, abuse and exploitation, violence, preventable illness and hunger, no access to

decent living conditions, sanitation, food security, education and finance, no granted rights everyone is or should

be entitled.

Facts and statistics on world poverty are abundant, but data availability and reliability in terms of consistency of

the collected data, precision of measurement and information directly related to the phenomenon under

investigation is a huge problem. Data of this sort do not provide either a complete characterization of the

conditions of the poor or a comprehensive description of the economic, social and political dimensions of

development. Not only do these numbers and indices - whether measured by income levels, literacy rates, infant

mortality rates, or other gauges of personal welfare - fail to capture the concrete meaning of both poverty and

development, but they have also been questioned by many who perceive them as misleading, inaccurate and false

measures.

Measurement problems are universal, but there are particular problems in developing countries. Shanta

Devarajan, chief economist of the World Bank's Middle East and North Africa Region, talked about “Africa’s

statistical tragedy” (2013) when he reflected on the quality and availability of quantitative evidence in the

aftermath of Ghana's revision of GDP estimate in 2010, something that happened again in Nigeria and Kenya in

2014. These problems have been highlighted as fundamental in Sub-Saharan Africa and associated to the lack of

capacity and financial resources across many statistical offices expected to handle emerging challenges such as

providing data to monitor the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Morten Jerven, 2015). The Sustainable

Development Solutions Network (SDSN) has estimated (2015) the scale of resources required for statistical

capacity development in the context of the proposed SDGs and in advance of the Financing for Development

(FFD) Conference in July 2015, being focused on core statistical products including surveys, census, civil

registration and vital statistics systems, education management information systems, and selected economic and

environmental statistics, inclusive of geospatial data. On a broader level, a key message of the European Report

on Development (2015) is that the post-2015 agenda success will be determined by the way policies and finance



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are used and combined to implement a transformative agenda; this also applies to investment on statistics and

data collection.

Therefore, a new agenda for and approach to data for development are required where local demand, incentives

and applicability are at the centre. To implement what is rhetorically defined as a data revolution will require

more data targeted for specific purposes to be collected to address data gaps (increasing the quantity of data,

combining census and administrative data, large-scale sample surveys on regular basis, and qualitative studies)

and an improvement of data quality and of the processes for collecting them (through capacity support to

national statistics).

The main output of the recent High Level Conference on the Data Revolution in Addis Ababa, convened by the

UN Economic Commission for Africa, African Development Bank, UN Development Program, and the African

Union, tasked with creating a roadmap for the data revolution in Africa, was the African Data Consensus

(UNECA, 2015). This Consensus lays out the challenges of reaching a data revolution in Africa and recommends

actions that African country leaders and the data community should take to overcome them, in terms of a key

purpose: “a shift in the way that data is harnessed to impact on development decision-making, with a particular

emphasis on building a culture of usage.” This framing, like the UN’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a

Data revolution for Sustainable Development report (2014), emphasizes that a successful data revolution will

help development actors use data to make better decisions about development.

But the reality is that statistical indicators and measures are just imperfect attempts to translate into operative

terms definitions and correlated conceptualizations, and both measures and definitions contribute to confusion

(R. Lister, 2015).

For any given period, data systems available to measure the existing development situation and improvements

emanate from the existing body of theories and models, that is from development conceptualization, and

influence, in turn, development policies and strategies' objectives (E. Thorbecke, 2000).

Hence the first important point to make is to define what is crucial to development and poverty reduction and

eradication, to conceptualize it and then to find the proper way to measure it through statistics, by investing on

data collection and analysis at local level.

2. Defining and conceptualizing women’s empowerment

Development means change in terms of the enlargement of the range of people's choices, resilience of complex

adaptive (eco and social) systems; as a result to fight poverty means to eliminate material deprivations and to

expand opportunities and capabilities, to promote freedom in terms of human rights for everyone. Certainly

these goals mean empowerment, that is transfer of control, competences and responsibility over decision-making

and resources to people; in other words, a combination of immediate improvements in poor people's material

living standards and a psychological-social as well as political dimension (J. Degnbol-Martinussen and P.

Engberg-Pedersen, 2003), that is a combination of personal, relational and collective dimensions.



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If conceiving development as a transformative process, women are powerful agents of change. Investing in

women is a moral imperative and a goal in itself if one wants to apply a rights-based approach, as well as an

excellent people-centred policy for poverty reduction and eradication. This is because of the so called 'Girl Effect'

(B. Teutsch, 2015): educating girls postpones marriage and childbearing, redresses the imbalance of power in the

households and communities' decision making processes, enabling them to land higher-paying jobs and being

active agents of development for themselves, their families, communities, and society as a whole. A virtuous cycle

replaces a poverty trap. But investment in women is also an excellent development policy because changes in

relationships of power and control between women and men depend on greater self-reliance, self-confidence and

the capacity for collective action among women and awareness on the part of all men. That means strategies that

move from a generic 'Women In Development' (WID) approach and the correlated idea of an undifferentiated

population of women as passive victims, to a more pro-active 'Gender And Development' (GAD) perspective,

based on the combination of gender mainstreaming strategies across policies and priorities of goals at national

and international level from above and women's empowerment practices, which incorporates social, political,

institutional, economic and cultural relations (B. Mikkelsen, 2005). In this respect, a conceptual improvement

has been represented by the gender concept, representing the social, institutional and cultural construct and

interpretation rather than the biological one of the sexes differences and discrimination (Ferber and Nelson,

1993). On the basis of this conceptualization, development necessarily means women empowerment.

The term women’s empowerment was first defined by the UN after the 4th World Conference on Women in

Beijing in 1995. Twenty years later, the term women’s empowerment is conceived either as giving women

choices and the ability to control every aspect of their life (UNDP, UNFPA), or as not only about choices but

also about what choices are being offered (SIDA). Most definitions view women’s empowerment as a process,

others view it as a goal (L. Phan, 2015), while others consider it as a synonymous of women’s agency and gender

equality.

Gender is not a biological reality, as it rather reports on relationships between and among women and men, and

girls and boys, and indeed the required transformative approach to development must be based on the need to

produce societal changes in the long run. Consequently, it should be tackled as a multi-dimensional concern,

which considers the promotion of women’s empowerment in its five components related to rights, capacities and

opportunities: (i) women's sense of self-worth; (ii) their right to have and to determine choices; (iii) their right to

have access to opportunities and resources; (iv) their right to have the power to control their own lives, both

within and outside their home; and (v) their ability to influence the direction of social change to create a more

just social and economic order and institutional arrangements, nationally and internationally (S. Ibrahim, S.

Alkire, 2007).

In such empowerment framework, the concept of agency is gaining increasing importance as a strategic tool for

transforming the existing norms and standards for gender equality into actual and effective policies, and to

combine top-down and bottom-up processes. Agency can be defined as women’s ability to choose and to act in

favour of perceived important topics, with the aim to modify reality in order to achieve a greater wellbeing. Such

a concept is directly focused on women’s active participation and empowerment, stressing their function as key

development agents, able to make choices and control their own lives, not yet well mainstreamed in the current

development framework, but potentially able to play a pro-active role in promoting development itself, by



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operating as a source of innovation. The concept of women’s agency can explain how it is possible for women,

even in male-dominated and unequal societies, to carry out negotiation processes and find solutions and

adjustments in order to better meet their needs and concerns, and it includes the possibility to expand choices

and capabilities of women as stakeholders for a fair and equitable development.

The Bejing Platform for Action (PfA) adopted in 1995 clearly recognized gender equality as the main goal for

achieving sustainable development and defined it as equal rights, opportunities and obligations of women and

men. Gender equality means the possibility to influence, participate in and benefit from development processes.

Gender mainstreaming, based on women's empowerment framework, which can be operationalized through the

concept of agency, represents the strategies for addressing gender equality. Therefore, women's empowerment,

women's agency, gender mainstreaming and gender equality are different but intertwined concepts, and based on

what they imply, it is not sufficient that poor women receive better opportunities, greater access to resources and

more involvement in political decision-making processes; the overarching goal is to achieve equality between

genders in all areas of life in society.

The post-2015 agenda on SDGs is moving a step forward, by clarifying that the economic, social and

environmental dimensions of development are intertwined. Poverty reduction and eradication as well as climate

change mitigation and ecosystem conservation are nested issues, rather than additional components. This should

be the ethos behind SDGs. And if women empowerment must become a fundamental cross-cutting pillar of

post-2015 development agenda, then the mutual interactions between economic, social, environmental and

political dimensions must be conceived and encouraged on a permanent basis.

3. The strategic importance of rural women’s empowerment

Gender planning recognises that in most societies women have a threefold role: women undertake reproductive,

productive, and community managing (that is decision-making) activities. All over the world, rural women meet

the largest amount of the food needs of the most disadvantaged population sectors, working especially in the field

of subsistence farming and horticulture, and being the main responsible for activities related to food procession,

conservation and trade. Thereby, they play a key role in ensuring their families’ and communities’ food security,

but at the same time they are facing even today many forms of exclusion and discrimination. They bear the

burden of guaranteeing sustainable livelihood to their families, but they often have little agency in key decisions.

When dealing with rural development-related issue, the role of gender in agriculture and in particular women’s

essential contributions to development is gaining growing attention, stressing the consequent need to close the

gender gap in access to agricultural resources, education, extension, financial services, and labour markets; to

invest in labour-saving and productivity-enhancing technologies and infrastructure to free women’s time for

more productive activities; and to facilitate women’s participation in flexible, efficient, and fair rural labour

markets.

The evidence of the close interconnections between two core issues in the ongoing debate on sustainable rural

development - namely women’s empowerment and food security - claims for an innovative approach that goes



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far beyond the idea of gender equality only as a basic human right and a fundamental prerequisite to human

development, in favour of the assumption of women’s empowerment as an unavoidable development enabler.

Both human rights and human development approaches are built on the evidence of imbalances that can be read

as a missing realization of the basic human right of freedom from discrimination: so inequality emerges as a

central issue when looking at human development and its measures. Consequently, the human development

approach has focused on the provision of actions that aim at an improvement of social outputs displaying

significant gendered inequalities that reflect women’s discrimination.

The MDGs focused on these symptoms and manifestations (outputs) of women’s exclusion (e.g. lack of income,

education or health), rather than on their structural causes (e.g. lack of access to resources, lack of agency and

representation), at the same time transmitting the idea of women as vulnerable groups needing special actions

and assistance. Such an approach has led to measures aimed at addressing short-term needs, overshadowing the

real contribution of women to sustainable development, in spite of new conceptualizations and multiple

evidences claiming that ensuring women’s rights and recognizing their role is essential to remove the main

constraints to development in the whole community and in a broader sense, and not only with reference to

gender issues.

In fact, evidence shows that women’s increased control of household resources can improve outcomes for the

next generation, and that empowering women as economic, social, and political actors is a critical step to ensure

the sustainable development of all societies (R. Meinzen-Dick, A. Quisumbing, 2012). The international debate

on the post-2015 development agenda is expected to stress the urgent need to rethink the concept of security and

its dimensions, embracing a gender-based perspective that link women’s empowerment to food security and

nutrition, thus recognizing the need to act on a number of vulnerabilities in order to achieve food security and

sustainable development in rural areas, proposing transformative goals that address the structural drivers of

gender inequality and the discriminatory social norms and institutions that perpetuate these inequalities (B.

Pomeranzi, 2014).

In particular, the focus on women’s empowerment and agency in rural development is a crucial action to

improve women’s condition in life and work and, thanks to their participation, facilitate the achievement of the

more general goals of sustainable development.

In 1996, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) established at its World Food

Summit the most widely agreed definition of food security, that goes beyond the adequate global level

production to include a deeper understanding that refers to four pillars (i. availability, ii. access, iii. utilization,

and iv. stability). Each of these pillars of food security has important gender dimensions. The main pillar related

to food availability centres on issues of gender inequity in access to resources for production, while the gendered

declination of access lays on the fact that, despite their overwhelming responsibility in food provision, women are

less likely than men to have equal access to food in their households, with women and girls disproportionally

suffering due to inadequate nutritional status. Food utilization refers to the ability of individuals to meet their

specific nutritional and dietary needs, also considering that calorie intake alone is not enough to ensure adequate

diets and nutrition, and women play the primary role in translating available food into nutritional security for

children and other family members. Such a dimension encompasses the provision of health care, water and



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sanitation services that consider gendered needs, with particular reference to breast-feeding, maternal health and

water provision.

Finally, referring to food stability, it’s important to consider that natural disaster, price crises and conflicts

increase gender-based violence and a disempowerment connected to nutrition outcomes, with women and girls

that are more likely than men to lose their capacity to provide seeds, livestock, and food for their families unless

emergency relief operations adopt gender sensitive approaches (C. Sachs, 2013).

In the elaboration of gender sensitive policies for rural development it is also fundamental to stress the

importance to recognize their links with, among others, climate change related issues, as structural inequalities

deepen the impact on women and girls, and biodiversity, because women, and in particular indigenous women,

are the most active stewards of biodiversity and depend on it for their livelihoods. This recognition implies the

claim for gender-sensitive indicators in biodiversity, food security and nutrition.

The goal of rural women's empowerment is mainly a goal of political, economic and social transformation, but it

is also an eco-system asset: smallholder farmers must be recognized for their eco-service provision (for example,

by exploiting the potential to absorb global carbon through agro-forestry, while improving the eco- and social-

sustainable productivity of smallholder farms), and in the developing world the majority of these smallholder

farmers are women.

Gender mainstreaming is not about adding women, but about rethinking development narrative, strategies and

goals in gender terms. In order to achieve such a result, there are two key action to pursue: (i) the involvement of

all relevant institutional actors at national and international level, in order to foster an effective and efficient

action and resources’ planning; and (ii) the improvement of measurement and processing of innovative

methodologies for testing the effectiveness of gender mainstreaming and promote the systematization of

monitoring and impact evaluation methods.

4. The challenge of proper measurement and indices

The Beijing PfA identified a specific strategic objective aiming to “generate and disseminate gender-disaggregated

data and information for planning and evaluation”. The importance of the collection, analysis and dissemination

of sex-disaggregated data and gender-sensitive variables is starting to be widely recognized by governments at

both the national and sub-national levels, by international statistical institutes and units, and other key policy

advisory bodies. However, so far many countries do not properly measure gender equality indicators, not only

because their capacity for data collection and financial resources is limited, but also because they do not prioritise

these issues (S. Tayyib et al., 2012).

Gender statistics are particularly important in the agricultural and rural sector. Nevertheless, it is important to

take into account the complexity in obtaining local data (F. Centrone, A. Calvo, 2014), and this is the main

reason why, despite the increasing attention to gender statistics, there is still limited focus on gender indicators in

agricultural, food and nutrition statistics. With regard to rural areas, gender breakdown is still prominent in

social and health statistics, while most agricultural indicators are gender-blind (S. Tayyib et al., 2012). However,



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a series of indices has been elaborated focusing on the broader theme and measurement of women’s

empowerment, which could be used to capture interesting information even in rural contexts.

In the framework of the current debate on the post-2015 development agenda, it is important to stress that the

fulfilment of a strong and explicit focus on gender necessarily requires a twin-track approach, with gender

equality as a specific goal mainstreamed in targets and indicators across other goals, acting to address the

structural inequalities which persist for women and girls and to foster the necessary political will, resources and

national ownership to create sustainable and effective action on gender equality.

In theory, the requirements for this kind of measures are simple (G. Dijkstra, 2006): (i) a proper measurement

should cover a limited number of indicators, but (ii) these indicators together should cover as many dimensions

of women's empowerment as possible; (iii) data should be available for many countries and at sub-national level;

(iv) it should be simple to calculate and to understand; (v) it should allow comparisons between countries and

territories but also over time.

In practice, together with the still on-going debates on conceptualizing women's empowerment, different indices

have been proposed to measure women’s empowerment.

The Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) were developed

by the UNDP in 1995 and replaced by the Gender Inequality Index (GII) in 2010 as a new indicator of

women's disadvantages in comparison to men in health, empowerment and the labour market, still lacking of

information on women's participation in local government, participation and income from informal sectors, asset

ownership, gender-based violence and participation in community decision making.

In 2006, the World Economic Forum introduced the Global Gender Gap Index (GGI) to measure the gaps in

terms of outcomes variables rather than input variables, being defined to measure gender equality rather than

women's empowerment, but being however focused on five dimensions of women’s empowerment: (i) economic

participation, (ii) economic opportunity, (iii) political empowerment, (iv) education attainment, and (v) health

and well-being, with the net prevalence of the economic dimensions implying a rich economies' bias and a

process of 'Othering' poor economies and those in poverty, established and maintained as different.

In 2013 the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) was developed for the International Food

Policy Research Institute (S. Alkire et al., 2013) including two sub-indices: (i) the percentage of women who are

empowered in five domains of empowerment in agriculture (the so called 5DE: i. the decisions about agricultural

production, ii. access to and decision-making power about productive resources, iii. control of use of income, iv.

leadership in the community, v. time allocation) and (ii) the Gender Parity Index (GPI) focused on the

percentage of women who are empowered or whose empowered score meets or exceeds that of the men in their

households.

Then many other possible measurements and frameworks have been proposed in the last decade, even if not

necessarily implemented empirically. Kabeer (2005) defined female education, women's participation in paid

employment and political representation as key components of women's empowerment; Beteta (2006) proposed

the Gender Empowerment Enabling Environment (GEEE) combining (i) responses to the World Value Survey,

(ii) the number of women's organizations in a country and (iii) the country’s legal framework (i. ratification and

signature on the Convention Eliminating all forms of Discrimination Against Women - CEDAW -, ii. respect



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for women’s rights, iii. the tolerance of government for discrimination against women). Phan (2015) has

proposed a measurement of women’s empowerment using micro-data from the Demographic and Health

Surveys to capture the level of empowerment of individual women depending on their current status on four

aspects: (i) labour-force participation, (ii) household decision-making, (iii) contraceptives use and (iv) education.

These and other indices are related to measure women's empowerment at country level or at individual and

family level, mainly focused on economic dimensions. In any case, they are always facing the practical obstacle of

severely limited data availability. Whenever possible they are operationalized by using Demographic and Health

Survey (DHS), that is large sample sizes and nationally representative surveys established by the US Agency for

International Development (USAID) and the World Bank, data and qualitative interviews to be made available

on regular basis, or administrative information at aggregate national level as well as demographic census data and

aggregate accounts data provided by national institutes of Statistics and Systems of National Accounts; but the

main limitation is always data coverage at both cross-sectional (i.e. disaggregated at local level) and time series

level to make comparisons possible.

Provided a conceptualization of women's empowerment, its indicators of the relevant dimensions and their

measurement should follow. This is not an easy task: we may say that the value of the empowerment concept lies

precisely in its ‘fuzziness’ and therefore a precise measurement is very difficult and even impossible. In the same

way as development, the focus of empowerment measurement could be on: (i) the material and social resources

(pre-conditions), (ii) the agency (process), and/or (iii) the achievements in terms of ability to make

transformative choices catalysing change (outcomes). Alternatively, other methodological implications are that

the measurement could be focused on three different categories of composite indicators: (i) direct evidence of

empowerment, (ii) source of empowerment, or (iii) setting indicators (N. Kabeer, 2002).

Beyond the general meaning of ‘being able to decide and act’, women's empowerment is an ambiguous word,

taking many shapes, meaning different things to different people at different times. This has caused

misunderstandings and at times false consensus. In methodological terms, the need to use and integrate different

data collection methods to produce key indicators should encourage going beyond the quantitative-qualitative

data divide, searching a combination and triangulation of measures of objective facts and subjective perceptions

and construct of social reality and meaning, through the use of mixed methods; and special emphasis has to be

given to household surveys, participant observation, case and ethnographic studies.



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Figure 1. Alternative data collection methods

Source: based on R. Lok Dessallien (1996).

In brief, the main challenges in measuring women’s empowerment is the need to design a complex matrix

combining a set of different dimensions (i. economic, ii. socio-cultural, iii. family/interpersonal, iv. legal, v.

political, vi. religious, vii. physical, viii. psychological) and different levels (i. individual, ii. household, iii.

community, iv. region, v. nation, vi. international and vii. global), taking into account the severe limitation in

terms of data availability.

In particular, the lack of gender-disaggregated data for community, sub-national state and region level (that is

other than at aggregate national or individual and household levels), as well as the difficulty to make cross-

national comparisons of place-based and context-specific phenomena such as women's empowerment, and the

difficulty to measure it in terms of process (implying the measurement of changes of behaviours in fertility or

household decision-making overtime) and agency (implying women’s own consciousness transformation, their

own interpretations of what they perceive as changes in their own knowledge and perspectives, which can only be

measured through ethnographic studies or surveys at local level) are very serious problems (M. Desai, 2010).



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5. The measurement of social institutions, its implications and limitations

Development embraces relational, cultural and symbolic dimensions as well as material conditions. These aspects

are, of course, inter-related: gender relations work and have impact on women’s life within the household and in

civil society as well; the problem is then how women are incorporated into development processes, with

economic, political, social and cultural structures and processes mutually reinforcing and increasing inequalities.

Therefore, the totality of women’s and men’s lives must be considered, and key factors are institutions, broadly

defined as systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions (G. Hodgson, 2006).

Social institutions as families, educational institutions, governments, police and military organisations,

enforceable legislation, norms and rules, custom and practices organisations are typically constitutive elements of

societies and cultures. Despite diversity and location specificity (that is crucial for political actions), there is a

striking commonality of experience across countries, cultures, rural and urban areas, and age and gender divides:

good relations and empowerment within the family, the community and other social institutions as expressed by

the social capital and relational goods approaches are vital to development, by recognizing that most human

interactions and activities are structured in terms of explicit or implicit rules that are socially established.

Consequently, if the purpose is measurement of rural women's empowerment, considerable attention should be

devoted to the selection of indicators on social institutions, by focusing at the intermediate level of

empowerment, on the rules and relationships which prevail in the personal, social, economic and political spheres

of life, rather than at the immediate individual level of resources, agency and achievements. To be empowered is

to be able to transform the social institutions that shape the fabric of everyday life, not just accept the world as it

is (L. McIntyre et al., 2013).

From 2004 to 2014, the Women Social Rights Index (WOSOC) of the CIRI Human Rights Data Project has

proposed a solution for adding a human rights perspective and measures to gauge whether a number of

internationally recognized social rights for women are included in law and whether government enforces them.

By trying to assess the institutional basis of gender inequality as captured by legal frameworks, this index

introduced the centrality of institutions for a relevant analysis of gender inequalities and the consequent

transformative changes needed.

The OECD Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), introduced in 2007, focuses on gender and

institutions: a crucial aspect in the attempt to deal with gender inequalities from a transformative perspective. In

this sense, the SIGI measures social institutions as reflected by societal practices and legal norms perpetuating

inequalities between women and men, so paying attention to the root causes of women inequality based on the

assessment of institutions building on the gendered paradigm resulting in different attributions of roles and

capabilities (C. Harper et al., 2014).

Thus, instead of measuring gender inequalities in outputs related to education, health, economic or political

participation (all core human development indicators), the SIGI measures important inputs – social institutions

– to which the inequalities can be ascribed, and that are conceived as long-lasting codes of conduct, norms,

traditions, informal and formal laws (B. Branisa et al., 2009).



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The SIGI is composed of five sub-indices which make disaggregated information available. Each of the five sub-

indices measures a different dimension of social institutions related to gender inequality: (i) Family Code, (ii)

Civil liberties, (iii) Physical integrity, (iv) Son Preference, and (v) Ownership rights. As the SIGI indicators

primarily measure social institutions that raise problems in the developing world, the SIGI covers only non-

OECD countries (B. Branisa et al., 2009b), which can be considered a limitation in terms of the 'Othering'

process of differentiation between ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’.

The SIGI is an un-weighted average of these five sub-indices, by assuming that deprivation increases more than

proportionally when inequality increases allowing only for partial compensation among its components, that is,

high inequality in one dimension can only be partially compensated with low inequality on another dimension.

Based on variables of the OECD Gender, Institutions and Development Database, this index allows for

comparisons between 102 non-OECD countries, thus representing a useful contribution to help policy-makers

to detect in what countries and in which dimensions of social institutions related to gender inequality the main

problems need to be tackled.

Starting from the analysis of SIGI, it is possible to point out some critical issues to be considered when measuring

the empowerment of rural women and its connection with the presence of transformative changes, that is,

societal and institutional evolution.

The SIGI is not applicable for measurement of gender inequalities in OECD countries: even if there are social

institutions related to gender inequalities in these countries, simply they are not captured by the variables used

for the SIGI. However, the universality focus of the post-2015 development agenda under construction stresses

the need for a universal goal that implies a universal measurement framework, to be then adapted to different

situations and specificities at country and at local level. Moreover, this partial applicability raises some

methodological questions as it does not imply the full realization of gender equality in OECD countries, which

are anyway characterised by the almost full recognition and attainment of gender equality in the regulatory and

legislative framework. Such an evidence can suggest that measuring some of SIGI norm-related variables (for

example the regulatory framework for women’s access to property, inheritance, to regulate polygamy and

marriage) should be insufficient also in non-OECD countries, where it is often possible to observe a significant

gap between social and legal norms, or if other concurring factors in determining institutional transformations, in

addition to legislative evolution, are not taken into due consideration.

Regarding more punctual considerations on the index creation and in particular on the different sub-indices and

variables, it is useful to note that the list is far from exhaustive, as it selects just a few institutions on which to

focus the attention. For the assessed variables, the double reference to social acceptance and normative framework

as a substitute in case of data absence could favour a broader collection of data from various countries, but at the

same time it could negatively affect the overall exercise by diverting the attention from societal practices in favour

of a major focus on legal norms. The question is here represented by the evidence that societal practices change

more slowly than regulation, and even if this change could be favoured by a legislation shift, it is anyway strictly

correlated to other different variables that encompass and exceed normative evolution.

Finally, the twelve variables were chosen between those available in the OECD Gender, Institutions and

Development Database. Such a methodological approach raises questions about their suitability in capturing



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women's empowerment and gender inequalities related to institutions in the five dimensions composing the

overall index; it also implies to take into serious consideration the question of a conceptual construction starting

from the available data rather than from the identification of an underlying theory of change, that can explain the

correlation between variations in the measured dimensions and changes in societal practices and legal norms, and

thus determining the variables' choice.

In short, SIGI is a very good starting point to measure the interaction between social institutions and women's

empowerment, but it should not end there.

6. Some considerations for continuing debate on proper measurement

A quick recall of the central issues outlined in the previous sections suggests that there are many key challenges to

measuring the empowerment of rural women.

Firstly, the starting point of a proper measurement is that one must not lose sight of the conceptual level in the

understandable preoccupation with measurement of trends and impact. Statistical indicators and measures are

just imperfect attempts to operationalize definitions and correlated conceptualizations, and both measures and

definitions contribute to confusion. Women's empowerment, women's agency, gender mainstreaming and

gender equality are different but intermingled concepts. Therefore definition, conceptualization and

measurement must be clearly, closely and sequentially related; the ambiguous and elusive content of

empowerment must be demystified and clearly assessed.

Secondly, measurement problems are universal, but there are particular problems in developing countries. In

particular data availability and reliability, the precision of measurement and the information directly related to

the phenomenon under investigation are a huge problem in many countries affected by the lack of capacity and

financial resources across many statistical offices expected to provide data to monitor the SDGs. Data of this sort

do not provide either a complete characterization of the conditions of women's empowerment, or a

comprehensive description of the correlated economic, social and political dimensions.

Thirdly, since women's empowerment means both attainment and a process, and since it is wider and more

complex than can be inferred from an indicator alone, any type of indicator of the empowerment dimensions of

women and their measurement should be complemented by other measurements. A trade-off between the

synthesis generated by the composite aggregation of indicators and the loss of information about the underlying

data processes is inescapable, and the use of a small number of indicators combined into a single synthetic

indicator can result highly misleading. One should consider that being selective is a legitimate and right choice,

focusing empowerment measurement on the material and social resources (pre-conditions), the agency (process),

or the achievements in terms of ability to make transformative choices catalysing change (outcomes), as well as on

the intermediate level of social institutions, that is in the rules and relationships which prevail in the personal,

social, economic and political spheres of life, rather than at the immediate individual level. Both individual and

social dimensions are relevant and complementary. But any choice that has been made in terms of selection must

be spelt out explicitly and in detail.



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Fourthly, the indicators that we use are not timeless measures given by nature: they are social constructs that

should represent what is considered important. The development of new indicators is the logical consequence of

cultural and policy change, a direct expression of development priorities determined by changes in the political

economy. Even so a proper measurement is expected to cover a limited number of indicators, these indicators

together should cover as many dimensions of women's empowerment as possible, data should be available for

many countries and at sub-national level to make comparisons between countries and territories but also over

time possible; but a proper measurement should be simple to calculate and to understand, as indicators enter the

public domain in policy evaluations, political debates. More and better investment is required in human and

financial resources for the production of more and better statistics, but also more political will is crucial. More

diverse, integrated, timely and trustworthy information can help formulate and direct future policies that would

ensure the sustainability of development. Data collection is expensive; data must be simple to understand and

accessible, accountable and open to all communities, because information sharing is useful in driving innovation

and participation, being itself an element in empowerment, considering how small the group of people is who

design indicators and statistical data systems, and how little debate has traditionally taken place in the process of

designing the new indicators all over the world.

Fifthly, the need to use and integrate different data collection methods to produce key indicators should

encourage going beyond the micro-macro as well as the quantitative-qualitative data divide, searching

triangulation through combinations of methods and sources to improve the quality of measures, a mix of

objective facts and subjective perceptions and construct of social reality and meaning, through the use of mixed

methods; and special emphasis has to be put on household surveys, participant observation, case and

ethnographic studies. A data revolution will require more data targeted for specific purposes to be collected to

address data gaps (increasing the quantity of data, combining census and administrative data, large-scale sample

surveys on regular basis, and qualitative studies) and an improvement of data quality and the processes for

collecting it (through capacity support to national statistics).

Sixthly, all countries and actors need to come together in innovative joint action programs on statistics and data

collection, exploiting the opportunities offered by new technologies and facing the same challenges. The full

collaboration of all is essential because monitoring and impact evaluation on women's empowerment must be

implemented at individual, household, community, region, nation, international and global level. In particular,

the lack of gender-disaggregated data at community, sub-national, state and region level, as well as the difficulty

of cross-national comparisons of place-based and context specific phenomena such as women's empowerment

need to be tackled first and foremost by means of adequate investment in both the short- and long-term. The

progress made in terms of women's empowerment measurement within the priority statistics at local level must

be matched by effective and responsible public policies.

Seventhly, in the developing world the majority of smallholder farmers are women, so that the focus on women’s

empowerment and agency in rural development is a crucial action to improve women’s condition in life and

work and, thanks to their participation, facilitate the achievement of the more general goals for sustainable

development. The goal of rural women's empowerment is mainly a goal of political, economic and social

transformation, but it is also an eco-system asset: smallholder farmers must be recognized for their eco-service

provision. The same need for a better measurement of the empowerment of women in the short and in the long



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term exists in the rural context, where there are even greater problems with information and data availability and

reliability. This makes it even more difficult to combine a set of different (economic, socio-cultural,

family/interpersonal, legal, political, religious, physical and psychological) dimensions and different levels (from

the individual to the global one).

Therefore, it is important to take into account the complexity in obtaining local data, and this is the main reason

why, despite the increasing attention to gender statistics, there is still limited focus on gender indicators in

agricultural, food and nutrition statistics. With regard to rural areas, gender breakdown is still prominent in

social and health statistics, while most agricultural indicators are gender-blind.

Eighthly, the international debate on the post-2015 development agenda is expected to stress the urgent need to

rethink the concept of security and its dimensions, embracing a gender-based perspective linking women’s

empowerment to food security and nutrition, thus recognizing the need to act on a number of vulnerabilities in

order to achieve food security and sustainable development in rural areas, proposing transformative goals that

address the structural drivers of gender inequality and the discriminatory social norms and institutions that

perpetuate these inequalities. The fulfilment of a strong and explicit focus on gender necessarily requires a twin-

track approach, with gender equality as a specific goal mainstreamed in targets and indicators across other goals,

acting to address the structural inequalities which persist for women and girls, and to foster the necessary political

will, resources and national ownership to create sustainable and effective action on gender equality.

Ninthly, lessons learnt on strengths and weaknesses of the experiences at national and international level in

measuring the empowerment of women by using many alternative measurements and frameworks implemented

or simply proposed in the last decade should serve as valuable source of inspiration and key recommendations on

how practically to improve measurement of rural women’s empowerment.

Tenthly, and finally, the SIGI and its sub-indices are useful tools to compare the societal situation of women in

non-OECD countries as they allow the identification of dimensions of social institutions that deserve attention

by policy makers and need to be scrutinized in detail. In this sense, the SIGI measures the social institutions

reflected by societal practices and legal norms perpetuating inequalities between women and men, so paying

attention to the root causes of women inequality based on the assessment of institutions building on the

gendered paradigm resulting in different attributions of roles and capabilities. SIGI is a very good starting point

to measure the interaction between social institutions and women's empowerment, but it is not the end of the

story.

And a key question needs to be addressed to continue the story, a question for discussion at the seminar in

Milan: how to practically improve the measurement of rural women’s empowerment in the short and in the long

term at national level?



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Measuring rural women’s empowerment: Issues & Challenges

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