Room for empowerment

ABSTRACT

The South African National Housing Program has sought to address housing insecurity by subsidising millions of low-cost housing units. The policy uses a gender-sensitive approach, by mandating joint titling and prioritising women-headed households as subsidy recipients. This paper examines the extent to which the policy has succeeded at empowering women through housing ownership. The paper finds limited evidence on the policy’s impact as a mechanism for women’s empowerment. No significant change is detected in women’s labour supply or well-being. Women who are co-owners appear to participate less in primary decision-making, but more so in joint decision-making. For women who are sole-owners however, the subsidy seems to increase primary decision-making and decrease joint decision-making. Moreover, the subsidy appears to decrease consensus within in the household about the identity of the decision-makers. Despite ambiguous results, the distribution of housing to women should not be abandoned and remains a pressing policy objective.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing
• South Africa
• gender
• empowerment

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my supervisor Douglas Gollin for all his guidance. I am also grateful to Margaryta Klymak for helping me to further develop my ideas and to Cheryl Doss for her comments. Thank you also to Anna and Hendrik Roos, Paul Whelan, Phoebe Laing, Chloé van Biljon and Kevin Doering for edits and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. These subsidies are paid to the individual’s bank or financial institution and reduce the monthly loan instalments (Western Cape Government, 2019).

2. 40 square metres consiting of two bedrooms, a separate bathroom with toilet, shower and basin, combined living area and kitchen with wash basin, electricity access (Department of Human Settlements, 2009). Minimum construction cost is 100 thousand rand (Picarelli, 2019).

3. Public housing refers to all housing delivered through housing policies.

4. 49% of household heads in the NIDS sample (2008–2016) are either married or living with their partner (means weighted).

5. Ownership can be shared with any family member and is not restricted to partners.

6. Here we do not differentiate between the woman who owns the property and the other women in the household.

7. All women are of interest because of the rich body of evidence showing how increasing bargaining power of the female head benefits all women in the household (see section on decision-making). Moreover, both the benefits of better housing and the disadvantages of peripheral location affect all women in the household. Results are similar when the sample is reduced to the property owning women.

8. All robustness checks can be found in the appendix.

9. Clusters are the primary sampling unit of the survey. There are 398 randomly selected clusters, containing an average of 49 individuals.

10. Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) enables an analysis of the pattern of relationships between several categorical dependent variables. As such, it is a generalisation of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and is used when variables are categorical rather than quantitative (Abdi & Valentin, 2007).

11. If a conditional fixed effects logit is employed on the two questions separately, a decrease in primary decision-making on daily expenditures is detected for joint female owners (significant at 1% level), whilst no significant results are found for large purchases. Tables are available on request.

12. Using a conditional fixed effects logit on the two questions separately reveals a significant (at 1% level) increase in joint day-to-day financial decisions as well as large purchases (at 1% level) for female joint owners and a significant (at 5% level) decrease in joint decisions about large purchases for female independent owners. Tables are available on request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louisa Roos

Louisa Roos completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney, Australia in Mathematics and Political Economy. She finished her MSc in Economics for Development at the University of Oxford in 2019. Her research interests lie in the field of Feminist Economics.