Understanding and measuring women's psychosocial agency: a methodological framework

She will present the methodological framework to understand and measure women's agency, the PACER Scale (Psychosocial Agency; Cognitive, Emotional and Relational), together with the Subjective Process of Agency.

The framework results from the research project Women's Economic and Psychological Empowerment-EMPOWER.

Grau Sarabia will argue that gender data is crucial for tracking progress in promoting equality, yet reliable collection methods remain challenging. Despite initiatives over the last decade, measuring women's agency is still understudied and commonly used measures may not fully capture the diverse nature of women's agency. 

To fill these gaps, the EMPOWER project has developed a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative methodology to measure agency, filling a crucial gap in the field. The methodological framework presented provides international organizations and NGOs with clear indicators to measure their impact on women's development and empowerment initiatives, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of their interventions.

The PACER framework brings together feminist economics, gender and development, and social psychology to develop a comprehensive empirical framework to conceptualise and measure agency and transformative process in the frame of programs that enable women's economic justice and rights and beyond.