Unlocking the Potential of Household Surveys to Measure Women’s Access to Social Protection

This paper uses household survey data from 27 countries to assess sex-differentiated access to social protection programs and their impact on mitigating gender gaps in the labor market. The analysis includes indicators of coverage, distribution of social protection recipients, and adequacy of benefits, all disaggregated by sex, to estimate two indices. The first index assesses gender inequalities in the provision of social protection benefits and ranks countries by their level of gender progressivity. The second index measures the net earnings received by men and women from both labor and social protection transfers, quantifying whether the social protection system reduces or exacerbates labor market gender inequalities. This paper demonstrates the construction and interpretation of these indices and provides practical recommendations for adapting household surveys to collect the data needed to scale them across emerging and developing economies.