Measuring Women's Empowerment: An assessment of the Gender-related Development Index and the Gender Empowerment Measure

This paper describes work underway to enrich the present tools to measure women's empowerment -- particularly the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The authors are developing an African Gender and Development Index (AGDI) on behalf of the Economic Commission for Africa, which is to be launched in 2004. The paper begins with a discussion of gender and power concepts, and then introduces a Women' s Empowerment Matrix as a tool to help link socio-cultural, religious, political, legal, and economic spheres. It then raises some of the difficulties related to the calculation of the GDI and GEM, which the authors are taking into account in the AGDI.