Many empowerment measures used in economic programs wish to claim that they economically empower women. In line with capitalism, these programs take a neo-liberal rational actor perspective where individuals happily acquire income for themselves. In reality, many people in low-income countries live community based lives and live under the same roof with their extended family. Their consciousness is bound together with their household members and shaped by their community. Considering only the individual would be misleading.
Special attention should be paid to capture the community level information along with differences in household setting/composition. The following two examples on decision making illustrate this point.
Example 1
” A woman is asked to describe her husband’s involvement in decision-making. She may not know how to exactly do that if he is temporarily away from home. Participants with migrant husbands may report making decisions alone, but it may be out of necessity rather than choice. So technically this woman may not be empowered but is ranked as such due to her absent husband. Moreover, a woman with an absent spouse usually seeks support from her own reference network or male kin for decision-making. She may not feel capable of making independent decisions, even though she does. Researchers who design and interpret survey questions and responses should consider that the responses, when interpreted at face value, may reveal only part of the larger context of decision-making. Purposefully interviewing women from different household types and regions would allow for better understanding of how women in various circumstances respond to the same questions.”
Example 2
” In addition to group participation, a related and frequently used indicator is leadership and degrees of influence in community groups. This indicator is captured by asking, “To what extent are you (the respondent) involved in making important decisions in the groups you regularly attend?” However, implementers should be warned that different women might have different understandings of what it means to be involved in important decisions. There is an argument to change this subjective measure and investigate formal leadership roles. At the same time, it has been argued that women can influence important decisions while not formally holding a leadership role. Moreover, it is also possible for someone to formally occupy a leadership position without being involved in any decision-making processes.”
This example highlights cultural interpretation of leadership and decision-making and again, reinforces why an endogenous understanding of key terms such as ‘leader’ and ‘decision-making’ are needed. Many surveys only offer three options when it comes to decision making questions: men, women, both. This hardly captures the nuance just discussed. Moreover, in previous work done by Includovate researchers, men tend to select the option ‘both’ when they inform their wife that they are taking a decision; and women say ‘both’ when they raise the issue for their husband to decide. Neither of which reflects a western (nor a capitalist) understanding of joint decision making.
In order to provide a more articulate understanding of women empowerment it may be useful to collect the views of other people surrounding the woman in question—for example, men or other women in the household. To investigate their perceptions, it would be ideal to administer the questionnaire to these other individuals. If budget does not allow this, one possible solution might be to integrate the current questionnaire, given only to the sample women, with an additional and shorter questionnaire given to other relevant household members, to be conducted at the end of the participating woman’s questionnaire.
This blog has emphasised the relevance of relationships for measuring women empowerment and proxies such as decision making. The next blog explores cognitive interviewing as a means of more accurately measuring perceptions.
