Male Backlash and Female Guilt: Women’s Employment and Intimate Partner Violence in Urban India

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between a married woman’s paid work participation and her exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) in urban India. Results show that due to the male backlash channel, women in employment face significantly higher levels of IPV compared to women involved in domestic work only. The study does not find evidence that any autonomy women gain by doing paid work lowers their experience of IPV. Furthermore, this paper contributes to the literature on gender-based violence by introducing and testing for a “female guilt channel” – a phenomenon in which women in paid work justify IPV against them more than those not in paid work – that, in turn, further raises their IPV exposure. The paper finds weak evidence for the guilt channel in the overall sample and stronger evidence among women with intermediate levels of education.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Women in paid work in urban India are more likely to accept intimate partner violence (IPV), as well as experience a higher degree of marital controlling behavior by husbands.

• Urban women and men with tertiary education are most likely to overcome gendered norms for paid work.

• IPV is higher among urban women in paid work whose husbands are not employed or earning less.

• Raising women’s economic opportunities alone may not lead to universally better outcomes for them inside households.

KEYWORDS:

• Violence against women
• women’s paid work
• gender relations
• gender roles

JEL Codes:

• J12
• J16

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper was presented at the UNU-WIDER Annual conference: Think Development – Think WIDER in September, 2018 and the Australian Gender Economics Workshop, 2020. We thank the participants for their useful comments. We thank Arunima Chakraborty for her research assistance. We are very grateful to three anonymous referees and the associate editor of Feminist Economics for their constructive comments that helped us improve the initial draft of the paper greatly.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2021.1986226https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2021.1986226.

Notes

1 During a twelve month period prior to the date of interview of National Family Health Survey (NFHS) conducted in 2015–16.

2 The unit-level data is available from Demographic Health Survey (DHS) data repository and can be accessed upon a data request through www.dhsprogram.com/data/.

3 We did not include separated or divorced women in the sample since information on control variables such as spouse characteristics is not available.

4 Refer to Table A1 in the Online Appendix for a detailed explanation of construction of these variables using DV module questions.

5 Results are not shown here for the sake of brevity.

6 In the Online Appendix, Tables C1–C3 present statistics based on men’s responses to questions about gender attitudes. The men’s questionnaire was administered to the spouses of only a subsample of women who were interviewed for the DV module. Table C1 shows the association between men’s gender attitudes and IPV reported by their wives. Table C2 tests if there is any difference in men’s responses to gender norms questions by their wives’ paid work status. Table C3 compares the responses of men and women to the gender attitudes/relations questionnaire. Though we find evidence that men’s gender attitudes are associated with higher violence faced by their spouses, we do not find that men’s attitudes differ by their wives’ paid work status. Also, in general, men are less likely to justify violence than women, which may be because of reporting bias.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sowmya Dhanaraj

Sowmya Dhanaraj is Assistant Professor of Economics at Madras School of Economics. Her research interests include development economics with a special focus on education, health, labor, and gender issues.

Vidya Mahambare

Vidya Mahambare is Professor of Economics at the Great Lakes Institute of Management, India. She has a doctorate in economics from Lancaster Management School, UK and was earlier with Cardiff Business School, UK. She has published in academic journals, including World Development and Oxford Economic Papers. A revised edition of her co-authored book Should Britain leave the EU? An Economic Analysis of a Troubled Relationship was published in 2015. Professor Mahambare’s current research interests include, among others, analyzing less-explored barriers to women’s employment and empowerment such as the role of travel mobility and gender inequality in the ownership of personal vehicles.