Grappling with the challenges of measuring women's economic empowerment in intrahousehold settings

Defining and measuring women's economic empowerment (WEE) has been at the centre of the current debates among international development scholars and practitioners. The lack of clear consensus on both may limit widespread efforts to design and evaluate programs and policies aimed at improving women's well-being. Building on intra-household allocation models and on Sen (1989) and Kabeer (1999), this paper proposes a conceptual framework of intrahousehold decision-making which can accommodate many classes of WEE measures. It proposes a typology of WEE measures which combines proximity of concept to measurability. Findings from a review of the scholarly literature between 2005 and 2020 are then presented to demonstrate the diversity of published approaches that exist to measure WEE. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.