Resistance and Backlash

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. Understanding individuals’ participation in decision-making within their households involves understanding what occurs, or they fear it might occur, when they try to participate in these decisions. For example, they might face some type of economic or physical punishment. These potential negative consequences may be particularly acute for women. This tool, Resistance and Backlash, aims to capture whether respondents face consequences, positive or negative, because of their participation in decisions inside the household, as well as what they think would happen if they participated in those decisions that they are not currently participating in. Understanding such consequences can be used to inform interventions that aim to increase women’s decision-making power within the household, as well as theories of changes within broader initiatives to increase women’s agency. 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 that you may want to collect alongside this measure include marital status, age, women’s engagement in any income-generating activities, and additional measures on agency or influence in decision-making (e.g., MAGNET’s persuasion or preferences over decision-making tools). This data study includes following files. 1. A survey document (including implementation guidelines)