The State of Female Autonomy in India: A Stochastic Dominance Approach

Abstract

The promotion of female autonomy is both intrinsically and instrumentally desirable. We document differences in the distribution of female autonomy in India (using the National Family Health Survey 2005–2006) addressing two methodological challenges: the multidimensional nature of the concept and its frequent measurement with ordinal variables (which are not amenable to direct comparisons of social averages). We tackle these challenges with three methods based on stochastic dominance techniques suited for ordinal and dichotomous variables. Whenever these dominance conditions hold for a pairwise comparison, we can conclude that the multidimensional autonomy distribution in one state is more desirable than in another one across a broad range of criteria for the individual and social welfare evaluation of autonomy. Consistently across the three methods, we find that most of the states with better autonomy distributions (in pairwise comparisons) come from the north east and the south, whereas most of the states with worse autonomy distributions come from the north.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees, Paola Ballon, Sabina Alkire, Suman Seth, participants at the conference of the Society for Economic Measurement, Paris, July 2015, and seminar participants at OPHI Seminar Series, 28 November 2013, and at the Leeds Economics Seminar series, February, 2014; for very helpful and constructive comments. We would also like to thank Melissa Friedman for very valuable and efficient research assistance. Data and code can be provided upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We would like to thank an anonymous referee for emphasising the importance of ‘sanskritisation’ in this literature.

2. There is an old literature investigating the possible original causes behind the low autonomy of women among Hindu societies in India, vis-à-vis other southern and eastern Asian peoples. For instance, Boserup (2011) relates it to the degree of female participation (or lack thereof) in the different modes of agricultural production across the regions.

3. By first-order cross-partial difference we mean the non-continuous equivalent of first-order cross-partial derivatives. For example with , the first-order cross-partial difference would be: .

4. Alternative dominance conditions can also be applied if we allow for welfare functions not fulfilling the property of weak complementarity. However, there are not enough conditions for all possible combinations of first-order cross-partial differences, and the interpretations of their different possible signs becomes quite challenging, unlike condition 1. For a discussion see Yalonetzky (2013).

5. Since the first survival probability is equal to 1.

6. Telangana, formed in 2014, was still part of Andhra Pradesh when the survey was carried out.

7. We would like to thank an anonymous referee for suggesting the alternative dichotomisation.

8. Detailed results are available from the authors upon request.

9. See censusindia.gov.in/Tables_Published/A-Series/A-Series_links/t_00_006.aspx.

10. See censusindia.gov.in/Tables_Published/A-Series/pca_main.html.

11. Although Kerala dominates in less than 50 per cent of its relationships according to method 1.

12. We would like to thank Melissa Friedman for pointing out this issue.