Women's Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)

The Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) is a streamlined tool for measuring empowerment. It is intended for use in large-scale, multitopic surveys in both rural and urban areas and is relevant across a wide range of livelihood strategies. WEMNS was developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Emory University, Oxford University, and the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study Unit in collaboration with country partners in Bangladesh, Guatemala, Malawi, and Nepal . This work was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development. WEMNS has 12 indicators mapped to one of four domains: Intrinsic agency, instrumental agency, collective agency, and agency-enabling resources. WEMNS is calculated using a counting-based methodology: Respondents are first identified to be either adequate or inadequate in each indicator with respect to a specified threshold, and then they are identified as empowered or disempowered based on the number of indicators in which they achieve adequacy. The exact number of indicators required to be considered “empowered” will be determined once WEMNS has been piloted at scale. Aggregation of indicators in WEMNS is simple: Each of the four domains are equally weighted, and within those domains, each indicator is equally weighted. However, because women’s experience of empowerment—and their critical consciousness related to four of the indicators—is very different from men’s, only eight of the 12 indicators are used to calculate men’s empowerment. An advantage of WEMNS is its decomposability, allowing researchers and policymakers to see to what extent each indicator contributes to disempowerment.