Measuring Women's Empowerment: March 12th

Panelists:
Anne Marie Goetz: Clinical Professor (USA)
Winrose Alyaguthi Mwangi: Groots, Kenya
Alison Holder: Director of Equal Measure 2030

Moderator
Sandra Pepera

How do we really know if women are being empowered? How do we measure women's empowerment?

One of the stand-out moments from this discussion was Alyaguthi-Mwangi spoke to the fact that most data is collected by "higher ups." Then, that data is manipulated and used to create policy. She called for the local community-guided collection of data; the community could tell you what is happening for women much more accurately than a data-collector from the government. Her hope is that locally-driven data will reflect the actual situations for women, which will lead to more helpful policy and decision-making at the government level.

Dr. Goetz also spoke to the fact that the empowerment of women needs to be measure in more ways than one; data shows simple data and does not help us to understand the roles and lives of women in diverse ways. Women can and should be empowerment through different facets, and those types of empowerments should be recorded. For instance, Goetz suggests collecting data on the following questions to start: "How powerful are [women] at home? How many men do unpaid labor? How do you feel climate change affects women in your community? Etc."

Overall, I learned that data on women needs to be collected in order to better help women, but that the data collected is oversimplified or does not represent the voices of the actual women.