The Women's Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (Wemns) Module : Development and Psychometric Assessment of a Preliminary Phone Survey Instrument

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 aims to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls,” and gender-specific aspects are embedded in several other SDGs. However, routine national data collection to produce gender data for SDG monitoring and other purposes is limited. Within the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) project, our objective was to develop, test, and refine a succinct survey instrument for use by national statistical offices and survey practitioners in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to measure women’s and men’s empowerment. We followed a multi-phased approach to identify empowerment constructs for measurement; develop, test, and refine a WEMNS survey module; collect data through two waves of phone surveys with women and men in Bangladesh (N=1807), Malawi (N=1,657), and Nepal (N=2,461); and conduct exploratory, confirmatory, and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. Results indicate that the WEMNS item sets have clear factor structures, which align with theoretical dimensions of empowerment. Tests of measurement invariance indicate that configural invariance is common across the item sets, suggesting that items are capturing common constructs of empowerment. However, few item sets achieve scalar invariance, indicating that the remaining item sets may not measure the underlying empowerment constructs in equivalent ways across gender (women and men), country setting, and/or time (survey wave). Based on the findings, some constructs of women’s empowerment measured here may be suitable for phone survey modalities, but other constructs require further development and testing to be suitable for this modality of data collection. The results have implications for the cross-gender, cross-country, and cross-time comparability of data that are being used to monitor aspects of empowerment embedded in the SDGs. Future phases of WEMNS will assess the measurement properties of a revised module as implemented in face-to-face, rather than phone-based, surveys in the same three country settings