Women play a key role in smallholder agriculture throughout the Global South, but often face gendered barriers to empowerment within their households and communities that block opportunities to contribute independently to the enhancement of their farmstead operations. In recognition of the need to measure, document, and analyze gendered inequities in power and inclusion in the agricultural sector, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), in collaboration with Oxford University and USAID, developed the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). In its original form, the WEAI consists of ten indicators covering five domains (decisions about agricultural production, access to and decision-making power over productive resources, control over use of income, leadership in the community, and time use). A distinctive methodological feature of the WEAI is that it requires that both partners in a couple-headed farm family complete the survey, and relies on differences between partner responses to operationalize gender differences in empowerment within households.
This paper is drawn from a broader USAID-funded research and outreach project on the gendered dimensions of the value chains for horticultural crops in Western Honduras. As part of that project, we conducted a household survey that included the WEAI items, and was otherwise designed to gather representative and reliable information on the circumstances of smallholder farm households in the region. To achieve a representative sample of smallholder farm households (those with less than seven hectares of land), we developed and followed a stratified two-stage cluster sampling design. In all 953 surveys were conducted in 562 households. Of the 953 completed surveys, 41 percent were completed by men, and 59 percent were completed by women. Noting that the WEAI already required both partners in a couple to respond to the survey, we decided to administer the entirety of the survey to both, not just the WEAI items. This opens up possibilities for meaningful comparison that go far beyond mere operationalization of the WEAI. We explore these possibilities in this paper. Specifically, we explore the level and correlates of consonance (versus dissonance) between the responses of women and men in couple-headed households.
