MAGNET researchers Cheryl Doss, Heather Moylan and Aletheia Donald presented a set of validated survey tools for measuring women's agency to the UN Inter-Secretariat Working Group on Household Surveys (ISWGHS), convened under the UN Statistics Division, on 19 May 2026. Household surveys typically capture women's agency through sex-disaggregated statistics or a narrow set of decision-making questions, leaving preferences, internalized norms, control over assets and sense of agency largely unmeasured. The presentation set out how the MAGNET initiative developed 24 survey tools to broaden what is measured and deepen how it is measured—identifying best practices across enumerator choice, question order, response options, and the unpacking of 'jointness'—piloted across 19 countries and 75 data collection rounds in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Central and Western Asia and South Asia.
The session ran across three focus areas—preferences and internalized norms, decision-making, and sense of agency—covering enumerator effects, a module on preferences over joint versus individual asset ownership, an Asset Control and Benefits Scale, a Generalized Livelihoods Self-Efficacy Scale adapted for rural and lower-income settings, a Time Agency module that distinguishes flexibility from time use, and an Affect Misattribution Procedure for capturing implicit gender-occupation norms.
Shelton Kanyanda, Commissioner of Statistics at Malawi's National Statistical Office, offered reflections on the experience of integrating MAGNET tools into national household surveys.
Materials
International Food Policy Research Institute