Effect of Years of Marriage on the Decision-Making Power of Women: A Study of India

Sudatta Banerjee, Grahithaa Sarathy and Bincy George

A chapter in The Finance-Innovation Nexus: Implications for Socio-Economic Development, 2024, vol. 34, pp 15-26 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: In India, women make up 48% of the population, but only around 20% of the labour force. Their empowerment could potentially play a key role in the country’s economic growth. At the household level, most of the decisions are taken by males and the attitude of females has been to accept it as a norm. This study measures changing levels of women’s empowerment in terms of decision-making capability at the household level at different stages of marriage in the context of India. Data from India’s National Family Health Survey is used to create indices based on freedom of movement, personal decisions, and household decisions. Then, these three indices are used to create a women empowerment index. Multiple regression analysis is used to find the relationship between decision-making and the number of years the respondent has been married, controlling for other factors. It is found that the number of years of marriage has a highly significant, positive relationship with the empowerment index, indicating gender differences may indeed be evolving in nature with respect to the number of years married. Additionally, through regressions on the indices that make up the empowerment index, the above relationship appears to be primarily driven by personal decision-making.

Keywords: Women empowerment; stage of marriage; age of women; decision-making; gender equality; C3; D1; J12; J16; O1; O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... 1-038620240000034002
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
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:eme:isetez:s1571-038620240000034002

DOI: 10.1108/S1571-038620240000034002

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().