Governance and gender
Measuring gender and women’s empowerment using confirmatory factor analysis
New method to construct measures of women's empowerment
Authors:
J. Williams
Publisher:
Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado, 2005
This paper develops a new method for constructing measures of gender and women’s empowerment with cross-sectional survey data.
The paper first re-conceptualises gender and women’s empowerment for measurement purposes and argues that gender and women’s empowerment are best measured as a system of interrelated dimensions derived from context specific gender norms.
The author uses qualitative research on women’s empowerment to guide the development of a theoretical model of women’s empowerment in rural Bangladesh which is then tested using confirmatory factor analysis of data from the 1996 Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS). The results of the confirmatory factor analysis are then used to construct weighted measures of women’s empowerment that are compared to simple scale measures.
This analysis advances the research on women’s empowerment by testing many of the theoretical assumptions found in demographic research on women’s empowerment, and, most importantly, makes sophisticated measures of gender and women’s empowerment accessible to demographers.
Although the process of specifying and testing theoretical models of gender and women’s empowerment using confirmatory factor analysis is at first difficult, it ultimately provides variables that will improve the specification of many different types of demographic models. Furthermore, repetition of this process in a particular context will refine models and decrease the time investment necessary for generating meaningful measures of gender and women’s empowerment.
Re-conceptualizing gender and women’s empowerment also helps differentiate between the gender and economic dimensions of women’s empowerment. Future research can examine the relationship between the two components of empowerment and inform policy makers about the possible social impacts of increasing women’s economic opportunities or the possible economic impact of encouraging changes in gender norms.
