Smriti Rao has written about her new working paper, Indicators of gendered control over agricultural resources: a guide for agricultural policy and research, for the CAPRi blog.
As a feminist economist who researches gender inequality in developing countries, I have spent my career torn between the recognition that quantitative measures can be useful and informative, and disappointment with the loss of nuance and complexity when quantitative measures are the only source of data used.
Writing a paper that recommends a list of quantitative indicators to measure gender gaps in agricultural resources brought out all of these contradictions. Suggesting indicators that are insightful without being reductive, or too resource intensive to construct, can seem like an impossible task. Even if the balance is right, the indicators can be misused by agencies under pressure to generate and use a single number.
Read the full blogpost and the working paper to learn about the process of developing criteria to guide indicator selection, including one example of an indicator Dr. Rao considers especially critical (hint: it has to do with rethinking the concept of the "household head").
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