Women's Paid Work and Intimate Partner Violence: Insights from Tanzania

Seema Vyas, Jessie Mbwambo and Lori Heise

Feminist Economics, 2015, vol. 21, issue 1, 35-58

Abstract: Theoretical and empirical research provide conflicting views on whether women who do paid work are less at risk from violence by an intimate partner in low- and middle-income countries. Economic household-bargaining models propose increased access to monetary resources will enhance women's "agency" and hence their bargaining power within the household, which reduces their vulnerability to intimate-partner violence. Feminist theorists also argue, however, that culture, context, and social norms can impede women's ability to access and benefit from employment. This study uses semi-structured interviews conducted in 2009 to explore the implications of paid work among women market traders in Dar es Salaam and Mbeya, Tanzania. While in this sample, informal-sector work did not result in women being able to fully exercise agency, their access to money did have a positive effect on their lives and reduced one major source of conflict and trigger for violence: that of negotiating money from men.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13545701.2014.935796 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:femeco:v:21:y:2015:i:1:p:35-58

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2014.935796

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().