When women eat last: Discrimination at home and women’s mental health

Payal Hathi, Diane Coffey, Amit Thorat and Nazar Khalid

PLOS ONE, 2021, vol. 16, issue 3, 1-22

Abstract: The 2011 India Human Development Survey found that in about a quarter of Indian households, women are expected to have their meals after men have finished eating. This study investigates whether this form of gender discrimination is associated with worse mental health outcomes for women. Our primary data source is a new, state-representative mobile phone survey of women ages 18–65 in Bihar, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra in 2018. We measure mental health using questions from the World Health Organization’s Self-Reporting Questionnaire. We find that, for women in these states, eating last is correlated with worse mental health, even after accounting for differences in socioeconomic status. We discuss two possible mechanisms for this relationship: eating last may be associated with worse mental health because it is associated with worse physical health, or eating last may be associated with poor mental health because it is associated with less autonomy, or both.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247065 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 47065&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0247065

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0247065

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().