Women’s empowerment has been a subject of interest because of its relevance to development and demography, particularly in West Africa. Women’s empowerment is typically conceptualized as an individual attribute of women, associated with socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. However, we hypothesize a geography of women’s empowerment in the West African region, where empowerment processes are culturally situated and embedded in place. Such a geography would be observable via spatial associations over the region. This study uses Demographic and Health Survey data from 14 West African states over the past decade and an innovative multi-stage approach combining advanced statistical methods and spatial assessment to analyze indicators of women’s empowerment and its spatial variability across the West African region. First we use a multivariate classification method to identify patterns in responses to empowerment questions and derive an empowerment classification scheme. Next we use these classifications to render a map of West Africa depicting the spatial variation of women’s empowerment in the region. Ultimately, we fit multinomial structured geo-additive regression models to the data to analyze spatial variation in women’s empowerment while controlling for certain socioeconomic-demographic characteristics. Our results demonstrate that women’s responses to empowerment survey questions indeed vary geographically, even when controlling for individual socioeconomic-demographic attributes. This finding suggests that women’s empowerment may relate to aspects of culture embedded in place in addition to the ways it relates to socioeconomic and demographic characteristics.

妇女赋权因其与发展和人口统计的相关性而成为人们关注的话题，特别是在西非。妇女赋权通常被概念化为妇女的个人属性，与社会经济和人口特征相关。然而，我们假设了西非地区妇女赋权的地理分布，该地区的赋权进程具有文化背景并根植于当地。这样的地理可以通过该地区的空间关联来观察。本研究利用过去十年来西非 14 个国家的人口和健康调查数据，以及结合先进统计方法和空间评估的创新多阶段方法来分​​析西非地区妇女赋权指标及其空间变异性。首先，我们使用多元分类方法来识别对赋权问题的回答模式，并得出赋权分类方案。接下来，我们使用这些分类来绘制西非地图，描绘该地区妇女赋权的空间变化。最终，我们将多项结构化地理可加回归模型与数据进行拟合，以分析妇女赋权的空间变化，同时控制某些社会经济人口特征。我们的结果表明，即使在控制个人社会经济人口特征的情况下，妇女对赋权调查问题的回答确实因地理位置而异。这一发现表明，妇女赋权除了与社会经济和人口特征相关之外，还可能与当地文化的各个方面有关。