Dimensions and determinants of women empowerment in developing countries

Abstract

This study is an attempt to construct a women empowerment index using multi-dimensional factors in the context of demographic and socio-economic characteristics of women's living conditions at household level. The secondary objective of the study is also to measure the contribution of each factor towards the level of women empowerment. We have employed data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) of 38 developing economies on ever-married women in the age of 15-49. Five broad dimensions of women empowerment are created using 19 indicators from DHS that are related to the women empowerment. These five dimensions are; (i) women's work status, (ii) awareness, (iii) participation in decision making, (iv) self-esteem and, (v) self-confidence and multiple regression analysis are used for the estimation of empirical mode. The study finds that women's characteristics, primarily higher education and women's health, husband higher education, husband employment status and household wealth are positively associated with work status, awareness, decision making, self-esteem and self-confidence. Age difference younger than husband have positive association with works status, awareness, self-confidence while have negative association with self-esteem. Further, the number of children alive above five years and the number of children ever born also have significant impact on the women's empowerment. Similarly, age of head of household, gender of head of household, household size, and locality showed significant affect on the women empowerment in the sampled developing economies.