Measuring Female Autonomy in Egypt

Petra Nahmias, Department for International Development, U.K.

This paper analyzes the variables used to measure female empowerment using factor and multilevel analysis with data coming from Egyptian Demographic and Health surveys at different points in tome. The findings highlight the difficulty in measuring female empowerment in a meaningful way, with questions around both the reliability and the validity of the data, with particular issues raised around the temporal comparability of such measures. Although I specifically looked at Demographic and Health surveys in Egypt, the findings suggest that similar problems could be found in other surveys and settings.