Measuring women’s decisionmaking: Indicator choice and survey design experiments from cash and food transfer evaluations in Ecuador, Uganda and Yemen

By Amber Peterman, Benjamin Schwab, Shalini Roy, Melissa Hidrobo, Daniel O. Gilligan. World Development, 2015

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite wide use of women’s decisionmaking indicators, both as a direct measure of intrahousehold decisionmaking and as a proxy for women’s empowerment or bargaining power, little has been done to explore what such indicators capture and how effective they measure program impacts on empowerment. We review theoretical and operational evidence from recent literature on women’s decisionmaking and analyze survey experiments undertaken in cash and food transfer programs in Ecuador, Yemen, and Uganda from 2010 to 2012. We find large variations in how women are ranked in terms of decisionmaking depending on how indicators are constructed. In addition, we find that across countries, composite decisionmaking indicators are not consistently associated with other proxy measures of women’s empowerment or household welfare, such as women’s education levels or household food consumption. We also find mixed evidence across countries related to the impact of transfer programs on women’s decisionmaking indicators. We conclude with implications of our findings for future research and use of decisionmaking indicators for program evaluation in developing countries.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8dc89bf5ffa97e35d8afcade85c087e124384c05

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

1. Melissa Hidrobo
2. Amber Peterman
3. L. Heise

In Safety Research

1. Melissa Hidrobo
2. Amber Peterman

Citations in the corpus

• The Effect of Cash, Vouchers, and Food Transfers on Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Northern Ecuador (2016, unknown): “…sample were no longer in a relationship and thus not surveyed, and we find no evidence that treatment leads to higher rates of separation. empowerment have increased, although no impact was found on decision-making indicators collected at endline ( Buller et al. forthcoming, Peterman et al. 2015 .”
• A Mixed-Method Review of Cash Transfers and Intimate Partner Violence in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (2018, background): “At least part of the ambiguity around this linkage can be attributed to the diverse set of indicators used to measure empowerment and the inherent difficulty in drawing conclusions based on few quantitative indicators of intra-household bargaining (Peterman et al. 2015; Seymour and Peterman 2017).”