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ABSTRACT
Women's limited intra-household decision-making power has several dimensions: geographic, cultural, economic, and demographic. The dimension we focus on in this paper relates to women's transition into marriage. Marriages in India are near universal and age at marriage is low implying that nearly all women spend a large part of their lives in a marriage. However, little is known about the bearing events transpiring at the beginning of a woman's marriage have on the path of her decision-making power in the household over her life course. Drawing on the life course theoretical framework, we argue that household authority follows a trajectory, which begins at least with her transition to marriage. Our analysis using panel data of 20,927 mothers from IHDS indicate three marriage types- self-choice marriages (5 per cent), parent-arranged with no choice on the part of young women (39 per cent) and parent-arranged - with some choice (56 per cent). Women who started married life in self-choice marriages later end up with the most decision-making power. But a complex pattern of power relationships emerges among wives, husbands, and in-laws. ‘Some-choice' marriages empower husbands and not the parents-in-law while ‘no-choice’ marriages typically benefit the parents-in-law and not the husbands or the wives.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2 Since our sample consists of women who were surveyed in both the rounds, the number of women who are excluded on account of the above restrictions is smaller in Wave 2.
3 Women were also asked ‘who had the most say in what to cook on a daily basis’. More than 90% of the women reported they had the most say; so it has been left out of the decision making index.
4 A note of caution- a score of ‘0’ does not mean that such women have no say in household decision making. It means that on none of the items asked in IHDS they have the ‘most say’. For example, of the women who reportedly don’t have most say on any of the decision making items in both the IHDS waves, 75.65% had ‘some say’ in as many as 4 items, 8.26% in 3 items, 3.83% in 2 items and 3.82% in 1 item. Only 8.43% had no decision making authority at all.
5 Because we control for woman’s age, her age at marriage and husband’s age, we are implicitly controlling for the duration of marriage in the regression model.
6 This classification of states is also used in the National Family Health Survey reports. The distribution of women in the estimation sample by region is as follows: North (13%), Central (21%), East (26%), North- East (2%), West (17%) and South (21%).
7 Education and Health Questionnaire, IHDS- II, page 8.