Do estimates of women’s control over income and decisionmaking vary across nationally representative survey programs?

Empowering women is an explicit aim of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 and underpins 12 of the 17 SDGs. It is also a key objective of other pan-national agreements, such as the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme. Tracking global progress toward these goals requires being ab...

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Autores principales: Raghunathan, Kalyani, Mahmoud, Mai, Heckert, Jessica, Ramani, Gayathri V., Seymour, Greg
Formato: Journal Article
Lenguaje:Inglés
Publicado: Springer 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10568/176043
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author Raghunathan, Kalyani
Mahmoud, Mai
Heckert, Jessica
Ramani, Gayathri V.
Seymour, Greg
author_browse Heckert, Jessica
Mahmoud, Mai
Raghunathan, Kalyani
Ramani, Gayathri V.
Seymour, Greg
author_facet Raghunathan, Kalyani
Mahmoud, Mai
Heckert, Jessica
Ramani, Gayathri V.
Seymour, Greg
author_sort Raghunathan, Kalyani
collection Repository of Agricultural Research Outputs (CGSpace)
description Empowering women is an explicit aim of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 and underpins 12 of the 17 SDGs. It is also a key objective of other pan-national agreements, such as the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme. Tracking global progress toward these goals requires being able to measure empowerment in ways that are consistent and comparable—both within and across countries. However, empowerment is a complex concept, hard to quantify, and even harder to standardize across contexts. Two large survey programs—Feed the Future and the Demographic Health Surveys—ask women about two aspects of empowerment, their control over income and input into decisionmaking. Each program uses a different set of questions administered to different sub-populations of women. We use data from 12 countries to show that large within-country inter-survey differences persist even after efforts to harmonize questions and samples. Where available, we compare the FTF and DHS with the Living Standards and Measurement Surveys-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture. We present several hypotheses related to survey structure and survey administration to explain these inter-survey differences. We then either test for or rule out the role of these competing theories in driving differences in levels and in associations with commonly used characteristics. Standardizing survey measures of decision making and control over income and how they are administered is important to track progress toward the SDGs; meanwhile, caution should be exercised in comparing seemingly similar survey items across survey programs.
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publishDate 2025
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spelling CGSpace1760432025-10-26T12:56:46Z Do estimates of women’s control over income and decisionmaking vary across nationally representative survey programs? Raghunathan, Kalyani Mahmoud, Mai Heckert, Jessica Ramani, Gayathri V. Seymour, Greg income decision making surveys women women's empowerment gender Empowering women is an explicit aim of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 and underpins 12 of the 17 SDGs. It is also a key objective of other pan-national agreements, such as the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme. Tracking global progress toward these goals requires being able to measure empowerment in ways that are consistent and comparable—both within and across countries. However, empowerment is a complex concept, hard to quantify, and even harder to standardize across contexts. Two large survey programs—Feed the Future and the Demographic Health Surveys—ask women about two aspects of empowerment, their control over income and input into decisionmaking. Each program uses a different set of questions administered to different sub-populations of women. We use data from 12 countries to show that large within-country inter-survey differences persist even after efforts to harmonize questions and samples. Where available, we compare the FTF and DHS with the Living Standards and Measurement Surveys-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture. We present several hypotheses related to survey structure and survey administration to explain these inter-survey differences. We then either test for or rule out the role of these competing theories in driving differences in levels and in associations with commonly used characteristics. Standardizing survey measures of decision making and control over income and how they are administered is important to track progress toward the SDGs; meanwhile, caution should be exercised in comparing seemingly similar survey items across survey programs. 2025-08 2025-08-07T21:16:55Z 2025-08-07T21:16:55Z Journal Article https://hdl.handle.net/10568/176043 en Open Access Springer Raghunathan, Kalyani; Mahmoud, Mai; Heckert, Jessica; Ramani, Gayathri V.; and Seymour, Greg. 2025. Do estimates of women’s control over income and decisionmaking vary across nationally representative survey programs? Social Indicators Research 179(1): 95–122. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-025-03605-x
spellingShingle income
decision making
surveys
women
women's empowerment
gender
Raghunathan, Kalyani
Mahmoud, Mai
Heckert, Jessica
Ramani, Gayathri V.
Seymour, Greg
Do estimates of women’s control over income and decisionmaking vary across nationally representative survey programs?
title Do estimates of women’s control over income and decisionmaking vary across nationally representative survey programs?
title_full Do estimates of women’s control over income and decisionmaking vary across nationally representative survey programs?
title_fullStr Do estimates of women’s control over income and decisionmaking vary across nationally representative survey programs?
title_full_unstemmed Do estimates of women’s control over income and decisionmaking vary across nationally representative survey programs?
title_short Do estimates of women’s control over income and decisionmaking vary across nationally representative survey programs?
title_sort do estimates of women s control over income and decisionmaking vary across nationally representative survey programs
topic income
decision making
surveys
women
women's empowerment
gender
url https://hdl.handle.net/10568/176043
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AT heckertjessica doestimatesofwomenscontroloverincomeanddecisionmakingvaryacrossnationallyrepresentativesurveyprograms
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