Author
Listed:
- Ayona Bhattacharjee
- Jay Dev Dubey
Abstract
The literature on women empowerment highlights a positive correlation between work and decision‐making power of women within families. On the contrary, the role of work opportunities in letting women achieve greater control over their lives, making them more independent is also well‐established. In this background, we explore the effect of women employment on different dimensions of women empowerment by using a nationally representative household survey data, the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS‐II, 2011–12). As “empowerment” is unobservable, multi‐faceted and difficult to quantify, we model it by an index which aggregates the qualitative answers provided by a respondent. Due to the presence of an endogenous relation, we exploit sources of exogenous variations in employment through an instrumental variable (IV) setup. Following the literature, we identify IV as the level of transport infrastructure in the region where a woman resides. We find that the estimated coefficients are positive and statistically significant, remaining robust to changes in empowerment calculation. In the context of public initiatives aimed at improving female labour force participation and empowering women in India, our results show how policymakers can look beyond standard policies and take the help of transport‐related initiatives to improve employment and empowerment.
Suggested Citation
Ayona Bhattacharjee & Jay Dev Dubey, 2024.
"Can Employment Empower Women in Rural India,"
Economic Papers, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 43(1), pages 34-49, March.
Handle:
RePEc:bla:econpa:v:43:y:2024:i:1:p:34-49
DOI: 10.1111/1759-3441.12397
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:econpa:v:43:y:2024:i:1:p:34-49. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/esausea.html .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.