Historical perspective
ICPSR’s General Archive contains studies that provide historical perspective on the subject of this Spotlight. The specific studies mentioned here contain data that were collected in the second half of the 20th century, when major societal changes were underway in the region. Publications using the Rural Development in Deccan Maharashtra, India: Village Panel Study, 1942-1977 provide historical context to the current circumstances of rural Indian women. As principal investigator Hemalata Dandekar points out in her 1983 article(PDF), even though women managed 25 percent of the farms in rural Sugao, Maharashtra, it didn’t mean that this provided them with the necessary resources and independent decision-making. In the competitive environment of the village farming economy, the lack of communication channels between men and women, as well as certain customs, such as women not handling bullocks, barred them from effectively utilizing their farming potential. In Dandekar’s other paper(PDF) on Sugao, she shows that women were the majority of farm workers due to the labor outmigration of men, but paradoxically women achieved less independence. Further, women engaging in subsistence farming were contributing less to the household than wage-earning men, and their ownership and societal participation was limited, therefore, even in a rapidly changing society women were relegated to its lower ranks.
The First and Second Malaysian Family Life Surveys and the 1993 Indonesian Family Life Survey were conducted by RAND between the 1970s and 1990s. The studies are distributed by NACDA, therefore they have an added emphasis on aging in the developing world, however some researchers focused their analyses of the data on issues of women’s development. For instance, a more recent analysis of the Malaysian data by Babiarz et al. (2017) highlights the importance of family planning availability for women’s agency and the investment into girls’ human capital development. Malaysia was one of the first low-income countries to adopt modern contraceptives. By 1986, the year of data collection, evidence of its impacts could be measured. The authors’ preliminary findings suggest that family planning brings about indirect incentives to invest in children’s education that has a potential lifelong impact on women’s welfare.
Women’s education is an important path to empowerment, whether from the perspective of increased reproductive freedom or the better quality of life for women through economic opportunities. Gallaway and Bernasek (2004) focus on a specific skill–literacy–as an indicator of increased labor market access, using the 1993 Indonesian data. According to their findings, women were underrepresented in sectors associated with literacy, but even where occupations were segregated on a gendered basis, literacy helped women overcome barriers to better jobs.
Status and empowerment
DSDR holds several ongoing longitudinal studies that are used to highlight different aspects of women’s and children’s lives in developing countries. The India Human Development Survey (IHDS) is a longitudinal and nationally representative survey, covering various aspects of Indian society. Searching with the terms “Women” AND “India” in the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature, produces results indicating that IHDS is frequently used to investigate this topic. This major study, which is available in cross-sectional and panel formats, is one of the most downloaded at ICPSR.
A recent article (Reed 2021) utilizing IHDS panel data points out the impact of motherhood on the household status of Indian women during the life course. The fertility transitions of childbirth and adopting permanent contraception bring about an increased degree of agency and greater access to resources. However, as Reed emphasizes, the enhanced status does not necessarily mean empowerment, but is a signal of adherence to societal norms. For example, bearing a son is more likely to make women the main financial decision maker in the household, as male offspring are associated with higher status.
Labor force participation is an important way to empower women and also plays a role in the human capital development of children. Sarkar, Sahoo, and Klasen (2019) conclude that higher household income was associated with lower levels of women’s employment, and the same was true in the case of having highly educated husbands. This, again, highlights the differences between status attainment and empowerment.
Indian women’s agency has also been tied to better self-rated health. Using IHDS data, Gorski et al. (2017)(PDF) highlight the positive impact of education on health, and also finds that women of lower castes met barriers to accessing quality maternal health care, which points to broader socioeconomic trends that influence Indian women’s agency, such as the enduring power of caste and religious traditions.
Just north of India, in Nepal, the Chitwan Valley Family Study has been collecting individual- and community-level longitudinal data since 1995, with a special focus on family formation and the changes that influence families in the Chitwan Valley region. With these data, researchers can assess certain aspects of women’s lives in a rapidly changing society. Ghimire, Axinn, and Smith-Greenaway (2015) use the panel study to examine the impact of mass education on experiences of domestic violence. The proximity of school to both the wives’ and husbands’ homes was significantly associated with less exposure to domestic violence, while the education of women’s parents and future in-laws had a similar effect.
Children’s nutrition and health
Women’s agency in the household also has implications for child health. Some other life events also seem to enable women to access resources. Based on survey data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study, Acharya et al. (2019) find that “temporary migration of household members is associated with more diverse diets among children.” This improvement may occur due to added resources of remittances, women’s increased decision-making autonomy in the absence of male household members, and women’s tendency to prioritize investments in children’s health over other spending.
Analyses based on IHDS data reinforce the view that women play the most important role in ensuring that children receive optimal nutrition. Stunting, which is one of the most important markers of child malnutrition, is a pervasive problem in India, as highlighted by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)’s rankings. India was ranked worse in 2017 on the list of 119 countries than they were in 2014, and they couldn’t meet the Millennium Development Goals set for 2015 (Chatterjee and Dubrey, 2019). Chatterjee and Dubrey (2019) determine a significant correlation between a “combined index of autonomy” and stunting. When looking at the different elements of this index, they find that decision-making autonomy has no significant impact on child nutrition, while financial autonomy and physical mobility have positive effects on long-term child development.
Borooah (2019) lists women’s malnourishment as one of the possible explanations for why Indian child development lags behind many other low-and middle-income countries. According to his article, 26% of women interviewed during IHDS-2 lived in households where men eat first, which has implications for the nutritional status of expectant mothers. Child health is intertwined with another important aspect of empowerment: women’s education. De (2017) establishes a causal relationship between more years of education and completed early childhood vaccinations.
Access to water, fuel, and transportation
Lack of energy availability and household pollution are pervasive in the lives of people in developing countries, but even more so for women, whose employment opportunities and health often depend on the availability of clean energy and household fuel. This section focuses on the latest available data from the India Human Development Survey.
Using the second wave of IHDS, Samad and Zhang (2019) establish a causal relationship between the degree of electrification and different manifestations of women’s and girl’s empowerment. Their results show that girls who live in households connected to the electrical grid spend 6.7 hours studying at home, as opposed to their non-connected peers’ 4.6 hours, with statistically significant differences in the two groups’ grade attainment. Furthermore, women’s employment participation increased by 3.8 percentage points and their working hours by 36.8 percentage points due to the effect of electricity. The authors conclude that since employment and education have the greatest impact on women’s intra-household bargaining power, electrification has remarkable policy implications in the Indian context.
Similarly, Sedai, Nepal, and Jamasb (2020) assess the impact of electrification on women of different socioeconomic backgrounds. They look at poor and non-poor, rural and urban women, using as the framework four different facets of empowerment: “economic freedom, reproductive freedom, mobility and decision-making ability.” Their study shows that power outages harm educated women the most through lost employment and more time spent on collecting fuel. However, the availability of electricity in itself is not a sufficient condition for women’s empowerment. Education and employment are the most important factors improving women’s economic freedom, mobility, and intra-household bargaining power. Their results also suggest that it’s not enough to count electrified households when focusing on the agency women may derive from access to electricity, but hours of power outage also need to be taken into account.
Apart from electrification, another important barrier of entry to the labor market is the lack of transportation. Lei, Desai, and Vanneman (2019)’s analysis shows that access to dirt or paved roads and increased frequency of bus service both increased women’s participation in nonagricultural employment. Moreover, better road conditions improved women’s prospects more than men’s, thereby reducing the gender gap. As previously shown in both the historical rural data and contemporary evidence–employment, and especially employment away from the family farm, is a key factor for Indian women’s empowerment.
As the publications focusing on child nutrition have already highlighted, children’s development is very much influenced by women’s resources. Choudhuri and Desai’s 2021 article on clean fuel and children’s education highlights the adverse effects of gendered intra-household labor distribution. The more time mothers spend on unpaid work, collecting fuel and fetching water, the worse the implications are for both boys’ and girls’ educational outcomes, signaled by decreasing educational expenses and worse scores on mathematics tests.
Conclusion
This Research Spotlight does not reflect all of the existing research pertaining to women and children in developing countries of South and Southeast Asia. To see how each of the ICPSR studies mentioned in this Spotlight has been examined in other scholarly literature, to gain ideas for extending prior research, or to conduct a larger literature review, you can search the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature. Consider using search terms like women AND develop*. Your search results will contain publications linked to the study data analyzed in them. Discovering data via the literature in this way can begin your investigation of the existing and potential uses of the data distributed by ICPSR.
When authoring publications that include your secondary analysis of study data downloaded from ICPSR, be sure to cite the study in the publication’s references section, using the provided data citation and unique identifier (in the form of a URL containing a DOI). Once your paper is published, submit its citation to the ICPSR Bibliography via this form, so it can be added to ICPSR’s collection of linked data-related literature, enabling others to find, learn from, and cite your work.
