Women’s empowerment in East Africa: Development of a cross-country comparable measure
利用埃塞俄比亚、肯尼亚等五国人口与健康调查数据，通过因子分析验证女性赋权的三维结构模型，并建立跨国家不变的标准化测量指标，适用于东非及更广地区的比较监测。
Women’s empowerment is an indicator of social change and a priority of the Sustainable Development Goals. Debate continues on what domains constitute women’s empowerment and how to measure empowerment across countries. Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are the most widely available source of data on women’s empowerment. However, measurement invariance often is assumed, but not tested. We used DHS data from Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda to test factor structure and measurement invariance of women’s empowerment among married women ages 15–49. Factor analysis confirmed a three-latent-domain model of women’s empowerment in each country capturing women’s human/social assets, gender attitudes related to wife abuse, and women’s participation in household decisions. Multi-country confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) identified an invariant three-factor model of women’s empowerment and a subset of country-specific items. Our results offer a standardized, invariant measure of women’s empowerment that can be applied to monitor women’s empowerment cross-nationally in East Africa, and possibly beyond.