Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index

The 5DE measures each woman's own empowerment across the five domains, but it says nothing about the man she lives with. The Gender Parity Index compares each woman directly to the primary adult man in her household and flags whether her empowerment is at least equal to his. This captures inequality inside the home — a woman can be relatively empowered in absolute terms yet still far behind the man she lives with — which national gender indices, working only with aggregates, cannot detect.

There are two cutoffs. First, an adequacy cutoff per indicator decides whether a respondent is adequate on, say, control over income. Second, an empowerment cutoff decides how many weighted domains she must be adequate in to count as empowered, conventionally 80 percent, or four of five. The disempowerment figure then combines the headcount of disempowered women with the average intensity of their inadequacy, the same H-times-A structure as multidimensional poverty measures, which makes it decomposable by domain.

The original WEAI was built for population monitoring and uses the five domains with their standard indicators. The pro-WEAI, released in 2019, is designed for project-level evaluation: it reorganizes the indicators around concepts of intrinsic, instrumental, and collective agency, adds qualitative protocols, and is tuned to detect empowerment change attributable to a specific intervention. Both share the Alkire-Foster dual-cutoff logic and the dyadic woman-and-man data structure, but their indicators and intended uses differ.