New Index on Women Empowerment

A new index was developed to compare women's freedoms and rights over time and space. The index, developed by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) at the University of Gothenburg, shows that women's power and opportunities have increased dramatically over the last 100 years.

Various UN bodies, such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), have made numerous attempts to map women’s political participation from a global perspective. However, these assessments only show the development in recent years, which makes the data problematic to use in comparative studies.

"All previous indexes have had some weaknesses. Our new index covers a larger number of aspects of the process of women´s political participation and has a greater range in time and space," says Aksel Sundström, Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science.

The new Women’s Political Empowerment Index is based on country ratings of dozens of aspects of women’s power and opportunities from thousands of experts from around the world. The collected data covers practically all countries in the world from the year 1900 to the present.

"What’s unique about the index is that it is so easily accessible. Anybody can download it for free and look at data on whatever aspects of empowerment they want to know more about," says Sundström.

Read more here.



An article about the index was published recently: Aksel Sundström, Pamela Paxton, Yi-ting Wang & Staffan I. Lindberg (2017) ”Women's Political Empowerment: A New Global Index, 1900–2012”, World Development.