BACKGROUND
Although women’s empowerment is one of the key concepts in development, it has proven challenging to measure it. Empirical studies have tended to focus on a cause-and-effect analysis of empowerment and using composite measures to compare different national contexts. More recent works suggest new conceptual and methodological approaches to women’s empowerment that better reflect contextual factors, intersectionality, and life course perspectives.

OBJECTIVE
We conduct cross-national comparative research on women’s empowerment using a new approach: by examining how women’s household decision-making power, education, and work – major components of empowerment – relate to each other across 28 low- and middle-income countries. Through this, we explore what the different relationships might imply for women’s empowerment in different contexts and circumstances.

METHODS
We utilize latent class analysis, a person-centered approach, to identify an unobserved class membership structure that classifies women into typologies to account for the different contexts and multidimensionality of women’s empowerment within and between countries.

RESULTS
We find substantial within-country differences in household decision-making power and how this aligns with women’s education and work. Across countries, we find work and education are not always positively associated with each other or with decision-making power, which suggests a need to contextualize the associations within the different dimensions of women’s empowerment.



中文翻译：

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使家庭决策与工作和教育保持一致：女性赋权的比较分析（作者：Sojin Yu、Feinian Chen、Sonalde Desai）

背景
尽管妇女赋权是发展中的关键概念之一，但事实证明衡量它具有挑战性。实证研究往往侧重于赋权的因果分析，并使用综合措施比较不同的国家背景。最近的作品提出了赋予女性权力的新概念和方法论方法，可以更好地反映背景因素、交叉性和生命历程观点。

客观的
我们使用一种新方法对女性赋权进行跨国比较研究：通过研究女性的家庭决策权、教育和工作——赋权的主要组成部分——如何在 28 个中低收入国家相互关联。通过这一点，我们探讨了在不同的背景和情况下，不同的关系对女性赋权可能意味着什么。

方法
我们利用潜在类别分析（一种以人为本的方法）来确定一种未观察到的类别成员结构，该结构将女性分类为不同的类型，以说明国家内部和国家之间妇女赋权的不同背景和多维性。

结果
我们发现国内在家庭决策权以及这与女性教育和工作的一致性方面存在巨大差异。在各个国家/地区，我们发现工作和教育并不总是彼此或与决策权呈正相关，这表明需要在妇女赋权的不同维度内将这些关联置于背景中。