Pakistan performs poorly withrespect to gender equality, women’s empowerment, and other gender-related indicators. Few studies in Pakistan measure the multiple dimensions of empowerment along which women are marginalized or disenfranchised, particularly in the country’s rural areas. Even fewer studies address the gender gaps in empowerment levels of men and women. This paper calculates a Women’s Disempowerment Index to examine women’s control over production, resources, income, household decisions, and time burden. The index is based on a slightly modified methodology than that used for WEAI calculation by Alkire et al. (2012). The analysis is based on a sample of 2,090 households in the rural areas of Pakistan. Data used for the study werecollected in three rounds of the Pakistan Rural Household Panel Survey from 2012–2014 by International Food Policy Research Institute/ Innovative Development Strategies for its Pakistan Strategy Support Program. The results show low empowerment levels of only 17 percent for women in the rural areas of Pakistan. The results also show very low empowerment of women in all indicators and domains except the time burden/workload indicator. We then analyze women’s disempowerment by subsamples based on individual and household characteristics. We also calculate disempowerment levels among men and compare it to disempowerment levels among women. Comparison within the household reveals large disparities in empowerment levels among men and women. In a comparative analysis, men are found to be more empowered in domains of production, income,and autonomy. Both men and women were found to be most disempowered in access to and control over resources. The paper provides a baseline for tracking women’s empowerment over time and identifies areas that need to be strengthened through policy interventions

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) baseline survey results, summarizing both findings from the WEAI survey and the relationships between the WEAI and various outcomes of interest to the US Government’s Feed the Future initiative. These poverty, health, and nutrition outcomes include both factors that might affect empowerment and outcomes that might result from empowerment. The analysis includes thirteen countries from five regions and compares their baseline survey scores. WEAI scores range from a high of 0.98 in Cambodia to a low of 0.66 in Bangladesh.

In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation of a project-level WEAI (or pro-WEAI) that agricultural development projects can use to identify key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address identified deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment. The 12 pro-WEAI indicators are mapped to three domains: intrinsic agency (power within), instrumental agency (power to), and collective agency (power with). A gender parity index compares the empowerment scores of men and women in the same household. The authors describe the development of pro-WEAI, including: (1) pro-WEAI’s distinctiveness from other versions of the WEAI; (2) the process of piloting pro-WEAI in 13 agricultural development projects during the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, phase 2 (GAAP2); (3) analysis of quantitative data from the GAAP2 projects, including intrahousehold patterns of empowerment; and (4) a summary of the findings from the qualitative work exploring concepts of women’s empowerment in the project sites. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned from pro-WEAI and possibilities for further development of empowerment metrics.

This Country Gender Assessment of the Agriculture and Rural Sectors (CGA-ARS) in Pakistan identifies several gaps, challenges, priorities, and opportunities related to gender equality and rural women’s empowerment. It offers an evidence-informed analysis of rural women’s experiences, challenges and opportunities in the context of sociocultural norms and gendered power dynamics in households and society at large. It explores the state’s political will, institutional culture, enabling environment, policy initiatives and allocation of financing to achieve gender equality. It also highlights successes at the national and provincial levels in terms of advancing gender equality.

Improving women’s access to land is high on the agricultural policy agenda of both governmental and non-governmental agencies. Yet, the determinants and rationale of gendered access to land are not well understood. This paper argues that gender relations are more than the outcomes of negotiations within households. It explains the importance of social norms, perceptions, and formal and informal rules shaping access to land for male and female farmers at four levels: (1) the household/family, (2) the community, (3) the state, and (4) the market. The framework is applied to Ghana. Norms on household and family organization and on men’s and women’s responsibilities and capabilities play a key role in gendered allocation of resources. However, these norms and perceptions are dynamic and evolve jointly with the development of markets and changes in values of inputs such as labor and land. Theoretical models that represent the gendered distribution of assets as the result of intrahousehold bargaining should be revised, and extrahousehold factors should be included. From a policy perspective, laws that ensure gender equality in terms of inheritance and a more gender-equitable distribution of property upon divorce can play a key role in improving women’s property rights. Yet, their impact may be limited where customary rights dominate and social norms and rules continue to discriminate according to gender.

"The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) can be a useful tool to measure the empowerment, agency and inclusion of women in the agriculture sector. However, computing the WEAI in its current form involves large data requirements, resulting in lengthy surveys with several questions on various dimensions and indicators within each dimension. This paper proposes a reduced version of the WEAI, or the R-WEAI, and examines two possible approaches to reduce the data requirements while ensuring comparability to the full WEAI."--