Preferences Over Decision-Making

The Measures for Advancing Gender Equality (MAGNET) initiative aims to broaden and deepen the measurement of women’s agency, based on the development of new tools and rigorous testing and comparison of both new and existing methods for measuring agency, and promoting the adoption of these measures at scale. By increasing the availability of innovative meaningful measures of agency for a broad range of contexts, we hope our work will lead to an improved understanding of what women’s agency is, how it manifests and how it can best be measured across contexts given the research question at hand. Improving women’s decision-making power is crucial for advancing gender equality and is most commonly measured by asking respondents who usually makes decisions over a standard set of domains (e.g., major household purchases, children’s education, health, how earned money is used, etc.). However, interpreting being a decision maker as a proxy of empowerment is only valid if the respondent desires to be involved in the decision. It is not hard to imagine situations in which not being a decision maker reflects an individual acting on their own desires. Understanding preferences and mechanisms behind desired non-involvement provides critical information to inform global initiatives designed to promote women’s decision-making power and agency. This tool, Preferences over Decision-making, aims to capture whether respondents want to be involved in the decisions they are part of and those they are not part of, as well as the reasons for which they might not want to be involved. This tool is suited for nationally representative individual- or household-level surveys, and for targeted thematic or impact evaluation surveys designed to understand women’s agency and decision-making. Other variables you may want to collect alongside this module include marital status and age. This data study includes following files. 1. A survey document (including implementation guidelines)

推进性别平等测算倡议（Measures for Advancing Gender Equality，缩写为MAGNET）旨在拓宽并深化女性能动性（women’s agency）的测算体系：通过开发新型测算工具，对新旧能动性测算方法开展严格测试与对比，并推动该类测算方法的规模化应用。
通过为多元场景提供创新且兼具实质意义的能动性测算工具，我们期望本研究能够增进学界对女性能动性的内涵、表现形式，以及结合具体研究问题在不同场景下最优测算路径的理解。
提升女性决策权是推进性别平等的核心抓手，当前主流测算方式为询问受访者在一系列标准领域（如大额家庭采购、子女教育、健康管理、收入支配等）中通常由谁做出决策。然而，只有当受访者自身希望参与决策时，将「决策者身份」作为赋权代理指标的解读才成立。不难设想，部分个体不参与决策恰恰是出于自身的自主意愿。厘清主动不参与决策背后的意愿与作用机制，可为旨在提升女性决策权与能动性的全球行动提供关键决策依据。
本次推出的「决策参与偏好」（Preferences over Decision-making）工具，旨在调研受访者是否希望参与自身已参与和未参与的决策，以及其不愿参与决策的潜在原因。该工具适用于具有全国代表性的个人或家庭层面调查，也可用于针对女性能动性与决策权研究的专项主题调查或影响评估调查。
本模块可配套收集的其他变量包括婚姻状况与年龄。
本数据集包含以下文件：1. 调查问卷文档（含实施指南）