Heterogeneity in women’s public and private agency across sub-Saharan Africa

Background: The fifth United Nations sustainable development goal calls for gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. However, progress toward this goal remains difficult to assess, as empowerment is multidimensional, context-specific, and challenging to quantify. Objective: This study develops a framework to examine how women’s empowerment manifests across intersecting domains and sociocultural contexts in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Methods: Using the Demographic and Health Survey, with data from 303,717 women in 34 SSA countries, we employ latent class analysis to identify distinct empowerment typologies by leveraging 23 survey indicators of agency across multiple dimensions and contexts. We then evaluate how well a smaller set of commonly applied survey items and country-level indicators of empowerment accurately predict the identified typologies. Results: Women who report taking part in household decisions also report a lower acceptance of intimate partner violence, but rejecting such violence does not always align with decision-making power. Education and employment are not consistently associated with greater domestic agency, and many women face healthcare barriers regardless of socioeconomic status. Commonly applied survey items of empowerment are able to predict only women in the less empowered typologies. Conclusions: These findings highlight the complex expression of women’s empowerment and illustrate how it unfolds unevenly across public and private domains, as well as across diverse sociocultural contexts. Contribution: This study provides a framework to improve the monitoring of gender equity and emphasizes the need for a holistic approach in development research while highlighting the challenge of defining what constitutes an empowered woman alongside rapid socioeconomic change.