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Our Work

Overview

Women's Empowerment Data for Gender Equality, or WEDGE, is a project headed by Sonalde Desai and Feinian Chen from the University of Maryland.  Our goals are to promote better measurement of women's economic empowerment in the global South and to connect scholars, activists, and others in the field with current trends in improved measurement.  Please view here a curated selection of our current work and that of our colleagues in this area, separated into broad yet interrelated categories.  We are also engaged in innovative projects exploring different aspects of measuring women's empowerment, which can be viewed on our Projects pages.

Paid and Unpaid Work

Paid and Unpaid Work

An overview of the measurement of women's work, both paid and unpaid.

Autonomy, Agency, and Subjective Dimensions

Autonomy, Agency, and Subjective Dimensions

Measuring how women's personal characteristics are related to women's empowerment.

Rights and Legal Representation

Rights and Legal Representation

Women are often disadvantaged in areas related to legal rights and representation.

Reproduction and Gender Norms

Reproduction and Gender Norms

An overview of how gender norms interact and shape women's empowerment experiences at all levels of social interaction.

Violence against Women

Violence against Women

Women in the global south may experience violence across a wide variety of different spaces: in their homes, at the workplace, and public spaces.

Gender and Covid-19

Gender and Covid-19

The global pandemic has exacerbated many of the already existing disparities; our challenge is to accurately record and understand how women fare.