An Empirical Examination of Sustainability of Women’s Empowerment Using Panel Data from India

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, we empirically test the sustainability of women’s empowerment using representative and rich individual-level panel data from India for the years 2004−5 and 2011−12. Sustainability is defined in terms of durability (whether empowerment is carried forward or continues in the long run) and diffusion (whether empowerment has positive spillover effects). A domain-based framework is used to capture the multidimensional nature of empowerment. In terms of durability, we find that the majority of the women remained empowered over time. The baseline characteristics that determine empowerment durability are (1) individual capabilities such as age, education, and wage work, (2) asset endowment, and (3) opportunity structure such as access to water, electricity, and owning a toilet. Additionally, we find that a change in collective assets over time is positively and significantly correlated with empowerment durability. Finally, we observe that empowerment has a significant diffusion effect from empowered women to other women in the same household as well as to women who do not co-reside but share family ties. These findings imply that empowerment is dynamic and the social benefit of empowering women appears considerably higher than what has been previously estimated when its long-term effects are considered.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. We are immensely thankful to participants at the Development Studies Association Annual Conference 2017 and Human Development and Capabilities Association Annual Conference 2016 for their valuable comments. We thank our colleagues at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) for their constructive feedback. We wish to acknowledge the excellent research assistance provided by Mr. Lim Zhu En (Joel) and Ms. Luu Diu Khue. The findings, interpretations, conclusions, and any errors are entirely those of the authors. The study uses open access data from the India Human Development Survey, which are freely downloaded from the following link https://ihds.umd.edu/data-download. Replication codes are available on request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplementary Materials are available for this article which can be accessed via the online version of this journal available at https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2019.1605054

Notes

1. As a robustness check, we perform a principal component analysis (PCA) to identify the empowerment domains. There is a significant overlap between PCA and our domain definitions. Table SM2 shows the factor loadings for the components identified by PCA.

2. Descriptive statistics show that only 7.3 per cent EW are empowered in Wave 1 and 7.5 per cent EW are empowered in Wave 2 if we apply empowered in at least 80 per cent of all weighted indicators as the cut-off based on Alkire et al. 2013.

3. We also computed average marginal effects for the other three empowerment status categories. Results are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.