Women's Intrahousehold Decision-Making Power and Their Health Status: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This study examines how various determinants of women's decision-making power affect their health status in rural Ethiopia. It identifies the determinants of women's decision-making power using a qualitative survey conducted over 2008–9, and it investigates their effects on women's health status using the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey panel dataset for the period 1994–2004. The study finds that women's health status is positively associated with their education, the number of brothers they have, whether they live in their birthplace, and whether their age is close to that of their husband. In contrast, women's health is negatively associated with whether they are in a marriage of their choice compared to an arranged marriage. The study concludes that multiple factors originating from context-specific gender norms affect women's decision-making power and have differential effects on women's health outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Intrahousehold bargaining
• intrahousehold allocation
• household bargaining
• gender economics
• social norms

JEL Codes:

• C81
• D1
• I12

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR

Bilisuma Bushie Dito obtained her PhD in December 2011 from the Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University. Her research examined intrahousehold resource allocation and women's bargaining power in rural Ethiopia. She is currently a lecturer at Maastricht University in the Globalization, Transnationalism, and Development research program. She is working on a research project that looks at the functioning and effects of transnational child-raising arrangements among Ghanaian migrant parents in the Netherlands. Her main research areas of interest are health, labor, gender economics, and migration issues. She is highly interested in interdisciplinary research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank three anonymous referees, whose comments and questions substantially improved the quality of this contribution. I am grateful to Professors Michael Grimm and Irene van Staveren for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of the paper. This paper has benefited considerably from the comments received from participants of the workshop “Engendering Economic Policy in Africa,” South Africa, June 9–11, 2013.

Notes

¹ All personal information that would allow the identification of person(s) described in the article has been removed.