Measuring Multidimensional Women’s Empowerment With Data From Partnered Women Across 45 Low- And Middle-Income Countries

We introduce a novel, policy-relevant measure of multidimensional empowerment based on the Alkire-Foster method and using data from partnered women aged 15–49 in 45 low- and middle-income countries: the Multidimensional Women’s Empowerment Index (MWEI). Our measure identifies a woman as empowered if she achieves sufficiency in at least six of its eight indicators, corresponding to four basic life domains in which women can exercise power: health, material environment, social relationships, and physical integrity. We find that in only 21 countries of our sample, the percentage of multidimensionally empowered women exceeds 50%, with countries like Mali reaching just 7.5%. Urban regions show higher MWEI values than rural regions in 37 countries. Insufficiency in physical integrity contributes up to 39% to the lack of empowerment in Papua New Guinea but only 15% in Burkina Faso, illustrating how the composition of disempowerment significantly varies across countries.