Women’s Economic Empowerment Transparency Guidelines

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All gender indexes should be accompanied by complete documentation of their design and  construction. These guidelines will help governments and other relevant stakeholders better  monitor progress in WEE-related outcomes. A technical report or equivalent documentation  should include the following:

	A conceptual framework that identifies the ultimate outcome monitored (for  example, women’s economic empowerment, gender equality, statistical capacity, governance) as well as the outcomes represented by the index’s dimensions and  sub-dimensions.
	A measurement model that identifies the indicators used to measure each sub- dimension and dimension and the criteria used to select the indicators.
	The data sources and the years for which the data for each indicator are  available.
	All adjustments made to the raw data (for example, recoding, normalization. imputation of missing values, suppression of extreme values, censoring of values  exceeding certain limits).
	Description of any analytical methods used to construct the index (such as  correlation, regression, principal components, factor analysis, item response  theory, structural equation modeling) .
	Methods used to combine the indicators into sub-dimensions, dimensions  and the overall index, including the formulas and weights used at each level of  aggregation (for example, unweighted arithmetic means, weighted geometric  means).
	Description of any methods used to evaluate the internal or external validity of  the index (for example, criterion validity, sensitivity analysis, comparison of country  rankings to those of other indexes).

Full transparency requires that the index and the data used to construct it should be readily  available in a convenient form that facilitates its analysis.

	The downloadable data set should include the raw data prior to any  adjustments.
	The data should be in the format of a widely used statistical package, such as R, SPSS, Stata, or SAS, and when feasible in CSV format, so that interested users  can analyze the data without having to invest a lot of time converting, recoding and  re-labeling.
	All indicators should be clearly labeled, with labels no longer than necessary to  uniquely identify the indicator.
	The “country” variable should include standard UN country names when available and ISO 2-alpha or ISO 3-alpha country codes (to facilitate comparisons  with external data sets).
	The data and metadata should be accompanied by a statement of the terms  of use. For the index to be considered fully transparent, the terms of use should  be compatible with a Creative Commons by Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) license. The  license should identify the author or organization to which the work is attributed.

Once equipped with the data and the technical documentation, an interested user should be able  to reproduce the outcome measure and country rankings.