Introducing the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)

The global commitment to reaching Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls, is only growing stronger. For instance, there has been tremendous growth in the number of metrics assessing women’s empowerment since 2010 (Quisumbing et al., 2023). But none of these metrics are concise enough nor applicable across a sufficiently wide range of contexts to be incorporated into nationally representative and multi-topic surveys, which would allow researchers and policymakers to more easily collect data on women’s empowerment to compare progress towards SDG5. This is poised to change with the release of the new Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) tool, launched September 20-21 at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) headquarters in Rome.