Women’s Empowerment in Times of Conflict: Evidence from Yemen

Phoebe W. Ishak (), Alia Aghajanian () and Yashodhan Ghorpade ()
Additional contact information
Phoebe W. Ishak: World Bank
Alia Aghajanian: World Bank
Yashodhan Ghorpade: World Bank

No 18252, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper studies how female participation in household decision making has been affected by the ongoing civil conflict in the Republic of Yemen in areas under the control of the Internationally Recognized Government. Using a unique survey dataset that tracks households between 2014 and 2021 and a geo-coded data on conflict, we document an increase in women’s participation in decision making since the start of the conflict, particularly on decisions related to household purchases and children’s education. This is mainly driven by households living in districts with medium intensity conflict as compared to low intensity conflict. This result holds up to a series of robustness checks and is explained by changes in household composition, whereby men are more likely to leave the household in conflict affected districts, leaving women in charge of household decisions.

Keywords: conflict and fragility; decision making and poverty; Yemen; gender; female-headed households (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp18252.pdf (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:iza:izadps:dp18252

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().