Determinants of Women's Empowerment in Rural India: An Intra-Household Study

Abstract: Using household level data from the Survey on the Status of Women and Fertility provided by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Population Studies Centre of University of Pennsylvania, the purpose of this thesis is to investigate the determinants of women’s empowerment and the presence of gender-related constraints within the household in rural India. Households from two states of different demographic development, Uttar Pradesh in the North and Tamil Nadu in the South are included in the data. Women’s empowerment includes mobility, voice, decision-making in the family, property rights and freedom from domestic abuse. The explanatory variables are individual, household, husband, and geographical characteristics as well as differences in spouses’ perspectives of women’s empowerment. In Uttar Pradesh women’s empowerment was determined by age, education (both men’s and women’s), income, district and village. In Tamil Nadu women’s empowerment was explained by less traditional ideas of determinants, such as age at marriage, if she ever had a stillbirth, the amount of sons in the household, husband’s presence in the household, as well as income and district. This shows that social norms and intra-household gender-related constraints greatly influence women’s possibility of being empowered. Religious affinity and belonging to Scheduled Castes were also found to be significant to some extent in both states. Differences in spouses’ perspectives were significant in determining women’s empowerment and increased the coefficient of determination considerably for both states. Differences in determinants of women’s empowerment shows that there is not a one-model-fits-all, instead, policies need to be directed towards institutional change and be particularly focused on shaping social norms.