The Construction of a New Twin Set of Indices on Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality

This technical paper proposes two new indices that measure gender equality and women’s empowerment. The first focuses on the status of women relative to men through measuring gender gaps in four dimensions of gender equality (the Global Gender Parity Index or GGPI). The second focuses on women’s empowerment in the same four dimensions as well as the added dimension of freedom from violence (the Women’s Empowerment Index or WEI). The paper begins with a discussion of the conceptual and methodological considerations, then outlines a measurement framework for these ‘twin indices’, before presenting the empirical results and concluding with an evaluation of the measures. For a subsample of countries, we present a quintile-disaggregated WEI (QD-WEI), which illustrates how aggregate figures conceal the diverse realities of women and girls, in particular, those facing intersecting forms of inequalities based on income or wealth. The paper then provides an assessment of these two composite measures in relation to already existing and established ones. Finally, the paper outlines future considerations for the multidimensional measurement of gender equality and women’s empowerment on social norms but also climate and technological justice, before providing some concluding remarks.