Making empowerment count: The Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)

This presentation introduces the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS), a short, survey-based empowerment measure designed for integration into national statistical systems and aligned with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) monitoring. WEMNS was developed through extensive stakeholder consultations, piloting, and validation across multiple countries, and measures empowerment through indicators covering intrinsic agency, instrumental agency, collective agency, and agency-enabling resources. The session explains the conceptual foundations of the metric, questionnaire design, indicator construction, and the dual-cutoff methodology used to identify and quantify disempowerment, while demonstrating how results can diagnose key drivers of empowerment gaps between women and men. Drawing on pilot results from Bangladesh, Malawi, Nepal, and Guatemala, the presentation highlights the tool’s potential for informing policy and program design and discusses opportunities for scaling WEMNS through national household survey systems and global initiatives such as 50x2030. -Abstract generated by Copilot AI 2.2