Costa Janaína Calu, Saad Ghada E, Hellwig Franciele, Maia Maria Fatima S, Barros Aluísio J D
International Center for Equity in Health, Universidade Federal de Pelotas, Pelotas, Brazil.
Faculty of Health Sciences, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon.
Front Sociol. 2023 Sep 14;8:1231790. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1231790. eCollection 2023.
Quantifying women's empowerment has become the focus of attention of many international organizations and scholars. We aimed to describe quantitative indicators of women's empowerment that are based on individual-level data.
In this scoping review, we searched PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Science Direct, Google, and Google Scholar for publications describing the operationalization of measures of women's empowerment.
We identified 36 studies published since 2004, half of them since 2019, and most from low- and middle-income countries. Twelve studies were based on data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and used 56 different variables from the questionnaires (ranging from one to 25 per study) to measure the overall empowerment of women 15-49 years. One study focused on rural women, two included married and unmarried women, and one analyzed the couple's responses. Factor analysis and principal component analysis were the most common approaches used. Among the 24 studies based on other surveys, ten analyzed overall empowerment, while the others addressed sexual and reproductive health (4 studies), agriculture (3) and livestock (1), water and sanitation (2), nutrition (2), agency (1), and psychological empowerment (1). These measures were mainly based on data from single countries and factor analysis was the most frequently analytical method used. We observed a diversity of indicator definitions and domains and a lack of consensus in terms of what the proposed indicators measure.
The proposed women's empowerment indicators represent an advance in the field of gender and development monitoring. However, the empowerment definitions used vary widely in concept and in the domains/dimensions considered, which, in turn influence or are influenced by the adopted methodologies. It remains a challenge to find a balance between the need for a measure suitable for comparisons across populations and over time and the incorporation of country-specific elements.
衡量妇女赋权已成为许多国际组织和学者关注的焦点。我们旨在描述基于个体层面数据的妇女赋权量化指标。
在这项范围综述中，我们检索了PubMed、Scopus、Web of Science、Science Direct、谷歌和谷歌学术，以查找描述妇女赋权衡量指标操作化的出版物。
我们确定了自2004年以来发表的36项研究，其中一半是自2019年以来发表的，大多数来自低收入和中等收入国家。12项研究基于人口与健康调查的数据，并使用问卷中的56个不同变量（每项研究1至25个不等）来衡量15至49岁妇女的总体赋权情况。1项研究关注农村妇女，2项纳入了已婚和未婚妇女，1项分析了夫妻双方的回答。因子分析和主成分分析是最常用的方法。在基于其他调查的24项研究中，10项分析了总体赋权情况，其他研究涉及性与生殖健康（4项）、农业（3项）和畜牧业（1项）、水与卫生设施（2项）、营养（2项）、能动性（1项）和心理赋权（1项）。这些衡量指标主要基于单个国家的数据，因子分析是最常使用的分析方法。我们观察到指标定义和领域的多样性，以及在拟议指标所衡量的内容方面缺乏共识。
拟议的妇女赋权指标代表了性别与发展监测领域的一项进步。然而，所使用的赋权定义在概念以及所考虑的领域/维度方面差异很大，这反过来又影响所采用的方法或受其影响。在需要一种适用于不同人群和不同时期比较的衡量标准与纳入特定国家要素之间找到平衡仍然是一项挑战。
