Evolving Nature of Women Empowerment in India

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Title

Perspectives on Economics and Management Essays in Honour of Anindya Sen

Abstract

This chapter takes a fresh look at the issue of women's empowerment and its relationship with development. The authors address the slower pace of development in women empowerment in India by looking at two aspects: empowerment and determinants. In this regard, they construct a measure of women empowerment (WEMP) onboarding its multiple dimensions such as education, health, domestic autonomy, and access to free mobility-related indicators. Second, they analyze the association of different socioeconomic, demographic, and household-level characteristics with the women empowerment index measure. In this regard, they exploit multiple rounds of National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data – the NFHS-IV(2015–16), and the NFHSV (2019–20) at the district level. Our results show that the districts in the southern region not only perform better in terms of empowering women but also remain in the top-quintile of the distribution of the WEMP index. By comparison, poor-performing districts in the central-eastern region have made certain improvements during this period, although they remain in the lower quintiles. Our multivariate regressions for two rounds separately indicate the dominance of family-level demographics and educational and family structure variables in explaining WEMP as compared to socioeconomic and sociodemographic variables.

First Page

250

Last Page

275

DOI

10.4324/9781003509721-14

Publication Date

1-1-2024

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