Calculating the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) using Stata

Abstract

The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a standardized, survey-based tool that has been widely used to track gender equality and measure empowerment, agency, and women’s inclusion in the agricultural sector (Alkire et al., 2013, World Development 52: 71–91). Since the WEAI’s release in 2012, an abbreviated version of the WEAI (A-WEAI) and a project-level version of the WEAI (pro-WEAI) have been developed (Malapit et al., 2017, The abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI); Malapit et al., 2019, Development of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI)). In this article, we review the shared methodology that underlies all members of the WEAI family of indices and introduce a command, weai, that can be used for index calculation. We describe the command and its options and provide empirical examples using publicly available data from the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2