Measuring Women's Empowerment in Collective Households

Abstract

Measuring women's empowerment within families is challenging. Social scientists often rely on close-ended survey questions on women's participation in household decisions, domestic abuse, and autonomy to measure women's power and agency. Recent advances in family economics have allowed researchers to identify and estimate structural measures of women's power and resource control based on the collective household model. We provide a brief overview of this literature. We then apply machine learning techniques to answer the following questions: How do such measures compare to women's responses to close-ended survey questions? Which survey questions are most predictive of model-based estimates of women's empowerment?