Gender Inequality: Critical Consciousness Scale

The Measures for Advancing Gender Equality (MAGNET) initiative aims to broaden and deepen the measurement of women’s agency, based on the development of new tools and rigorous testing and comparison of both new and existing methods for measuring agency, and promoting the adoption of these measures at scale. By increasing the availability of innovative meaningful measures of agency for a broad range of contexts, we hope our work will lead to an improved understanding of what women’s agency is, how it manifests and how it can best be measured across contexts given the research question at hand. The policy goal of empowering women may be hindered by women’s lack of perception of the degree of gender inequality, their actual desire for egalitarianism, and what they do to push for change. Critical consciousness is defined as the capacity of oppressed or marginalized people to critically analyze their social and political conditions, endorsement of societal equality, and action to change perceived inequities (Freire, 1973). This tool, Gender Inequality: Critical Consciousness Scale, fills a gap of measuring critical consciousness on gender inequality adapted to the Global South. The scale has three components: critical reflection (degree to which women are aware of the conditions that discriminate them), critical action (what they do to push for change), and critical motivation (desire for egalitarianism). This tool is suited for surveys run by NSOs, other nationally representative individual- or household-level surveys, and for targeted thematic or impact evaluation surveys. We recommend the use of this tool in the design, monitoring, and evaluation of development programs aimed at improving women’s empowerment.

This data study includes following files.

1. A survey document (including implementation guidelines).

2. A statistical annex containing more information about the validation of the tool, as well as statistical guidance for analysis.

3. Two files, CAPI_Choices and CAPI_Survey, along with the accompanying files, can be used to construct a CAPI program ready for survey implementation. Alternatively, users can use an Excel workbook "CAPI_.xlsx" that includes worksheets for survey and choices, along with others, for constructing a CAPI program ready for survey implementation. Tools