In Asia and the Pacific, women are crucial in agrifood systems as farmers, retailers, wage workers, entrepreneurs, and consumers. However, they face disparities in wages, assets, and information due to entrenched gender inequalities within and beyond the household, as highlighted in FAO’s 2023 publication on the status of women in agrifood systems. This impedes progress on sustainable development goals.

Gender roles and power dynamics have a powerful impact on the agricultural sector, which in the region is dominated by small family farms. Farm decisions - crop selection, work distribution, technology use, what to sell or consume, participation in value chains – all intertwine with broader household choices on finances, food, work, care responsibilities.

 For transformative solutions, we need to prioritize measuring women’s empowerment in agrifood systems – their ability to make decisions and control their own lives within these systems.

Here are four ways to do that:

Look beyond access to resources: Women lack access to resources like land, technology and employment; their ability to use these resources effectively must be measured. An example includes a woman’s ability to use land she recently purchased jointly with her spouse for making decisions on crop selection and financial management, self-belief in her capacity to manage her farm, and her ability to pool resources and share knowledge with other members of producer cooperatives to negotiate better prices.

Use the available tools: Deep-rooted gender roles and norms can hinder project outcomes but are hard to factor in project duration. Even if there is no deliberate attempt to address these, an understanding of within-household gender dynamics as pathways of impact can improve project design.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, and available tools can be adapted. One such example is the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index and its variations—such as the project-specific version of the index, the version for market inclusion, and the Women’s Empowerment Metrics for National Statistical Systems—which provide a robust framework for assessing and quantifying women’s empowerment.

These tools cover key areas, including intrinsic agency (autonomy in income decisions, self-efficacy, attitudes towards intimate partner violence, respect among household members); instrumental agency (decision making in production, asset ownership, income control, work balance, and mobility); and collective agency (group membership and influence).

Data is collected from both women and men in the household to construct indicators for overall empowerment and gender parity within households. The project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index for market inclusion has been developed for measuring women’s empowerment across value chains, adding dimensions like entrepreneurial mindset and autonomy in work, to assess empowerment for producers, entrepreneurs, and workers.

Measuring women’s empowerment in agrifood systems is crucial for addressing structural gender inequalities and achieving sustainable development goals in Asia and the Pacific.

Learn what works: Impact evaluations provide insights on what drives successful women’s empowerment outcomes in projects. A recent evaluation of nine agrifood projects in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa found that  projects intentionally focused on women’s empowerment, rather than simply including women or addressing their needs in project activities, yielded better outcomes.

Successful projects often targeted multiple dimensions of empowerment, such as improving women’s control over credit (instrumental) and building their confidence in financial management (intrinsic).

Conversely, projects that only emphasized women’s group membership, without addressing workload constraints like childcare provisions, saw diminished impact, as women’s agency over time use declined.

Engaging men and community leaders is vital to support sustainable changes and avoid resistance. Designing projects with impact evaluation objectives ensures outcomes are measured, impacts attributed to projects, and insights gathered for continuous learning and improvement.

Broaden the gaze: Project outcomes are not immune to the broader societal trends affecting gender inequalities. Assessing women’s empowerment helps identify barriers, guide actions, track progress and evaluate impacts to improve future efforts.

Women’s disempowerment is rooted in broader social, legal, and policy contexts that perpetuate inequality in the region, such as unequal power relations within household members, norms that restrict women’s economic activity including ownership of assets, or beliefs that justify violence against women.

Analyzing these structural issues alongside measuring women’s empowerment at the population level reveals how these structural challenges affect women and their subgroups. This then can inform policies for lasting improvements, such as property rights reform, care infrastructure development, safe markets, and public spaces.

Tools like women’s empowerment metrics can be integrated into national surveys and align with Sustainable Development Goal 5 indicators (Achieving gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls). These tools offer a cost-effective way to gather data on the extent and severity of disempowerment as well as the contributing factors.

The Women's Empowerment Metrics for National Statistical Systems assess areas of agency, similar to the project-specific Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index, but also include resources that enable empowerment, such as access to information and communication technology, financial services, and property rights. This is useful for informing large-scale policy decisions and programs and/or evaluating their impacts for future improvements.

Despite the importance, gender equality and women’s empowerment are rarely treated as a high-level policy priority with dedicated resources across the region. To address this, women’s empowerment data can be leveraged to show its connection to other development priorities like poverty reduction, nutrition, and climate action.

For instance, demonstrating how empowering women can address stunting among children or increase uptake of renewable energy in the home makes a stronger case for financing gender equality initiatives.

Measuring women’s empowerment is not just about gathering data; it is about identifying structural barriers that women face within and beyond their homes.  By paying careful attention to what drives and hinders empowerment, policymakers and development practitioners can design better interventions that go beyond inclusion and actively support women in taking control of their lives.

With just over five years until 2030, driving actions to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment is urgent for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.