Short Abstract

What if the problem is not that gender inequality is unmeasured, but that we are looking through the wrong prism? This panel asks what African contexts reveal, what dominant indicators obscure, and what new measures might emerge from Africa and travel elsewhere.

Long Abstract

Measurement is central to global governance. Indices, and rankings do more than describe social realities: they shape what becomes visible, define progress, and how governments are held accountable. Yet measurement is not simply technical or neutral, it is political and epistemic.

This panel approaches gender measurement as a prism through which gender relations and inequalities in Africa are made visible, interpreted, compared, and governed. Like a prism, measurement can illuminate aspect of social reality while refracting others. When it fails to capture African histories, social relations, lived realities, and intersecting forms of inequality, what becomes visible and governable is a partial account of the inequalities that matter. What gets measured may become what gets governed, but what gets measured does not necessarily get done. The question is not simply whether gender is measured, but through which prism, whose concepts, categories, and with what consequences.

We invite contributions examining the gendered politics of global indices, how measurement travels, and in whose directions. We ask what African contexts reveal about the limits and possibilities of dominant approaches to measuring gender inequality, including through informal institutions and negotiated rights; resource security rather than formal access; livelihoods beyond the formal/informal divide; gendered infrastructure and mobility; plural systems of authority; contextual intersectionality; and ecology, climate, and livelihoods.

As global development goals evolve beyond the SDGs, this panel asks: what African gender realities can current and future measurement systems see, and what might measuring from Africa cause us to invent that could travel elsewhere?

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