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This paper analyzes multiple measures of married women’s empowerment in the domestic sphere in 56 communities spanning five Asian countries (India, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand). At issue is whether community or individual characteristics are better predictors of women’s empowerment, and whether different dimensions of empowerment are similarly related to community or individual traits. The analysis shows that, consistent with the theoretical approach employed here, which treats gender relations as heavily influenced by community norms and values, community is a far stronger predictor of women’s empowerment than are individual traits. The relationship of both community and individual traits to different measures of empowerment vary, suggesting that “empowerment” is inherently a multidimensional phenomenon, with women relatively empowered in some spheres but not in others. The primary policy implication is the importance of changing community norms and values about gender relations for empowering women. The results also suggest that policies to raise women’s age at marriage, enhance their educations and open greater employment opportunities will also help to empower them, at least in some respects. WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT AND SOCIAL CONTEXT: RESULTS FROM FIVE ASIAN COUNTRIES Social scientists and development practitioners have long been interested in the conditions that empower women. As the evidence that gender equality is important for economic growth, poverty reduction and enhanced human well-being has grown, interest in the determinants and correlates of women’s empowerment has also grown. Unfortunately, confusion over the definition and measurement of this concept remains widespread. Indeed, the tradition that measures women’s empowerment by their years of schooling, employment experience or age at marriage remains alive, even if increasingly called into question on both conceptual and empirical grounds (e.g., Balk 1994; Govindasamy and Malhotra 1996; Malhotra, Schuler and Boender 2002). The current paper takes up this topic anew in the interests of clarifying what we mean by women’s empowerment, how it should be measured and what determines it. In particular, after discussing conceptual issues, we turn to a previously unanalyzed data set collected in South and Southeast Asia that permits us to illustrate three key points about the conceptualization and measurement of women’s empowerment. The first point is that power within the household— the particular aspect of women’s empowerment on which we focus—is strongly influenced by social context (national and community) because it is strongly determined by social institutions rather than by individual characteristics. The second point is that all aspects of women’s empowerment are multidimensional and the interrelations among different dimensions depend on social context. Finally, the socioeconomic proxies for women’s empowerment used in past studies do a good job of indexing only some aspects of women’s empowerment and power—and only in some contexts. For this reason, use of direct measures is preferable to the use of proxies. The substantive implication of this finding is that, in the short run, providing women with schooling or other resources may do little to empower them, although the evidence suggests that these investments can have payoffs for particular aspects of empowerment. CONCEPTUAL ISSUES The concept of women’s empowerment implicitly assumes that in all societies, men control women—or, to be more precise, men control at least some of the women of their social class, particularly those in their households and families. In this view, women are a “class” in the (two-class) gender stratification system, a system that is governed by shared norms and values, 1 Interest in women’s empowerment among demographers and population policymakers was heightened during the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo, at which the empowerment of women was legitimated as a social goal and enshrined as a necessary condition for population stabilization (Hodgson and Watkins 1997). Since then, critiques of demographers’ views of gender and women (e.g., Presser 1997; Watkins 1993) have grown apace with the wealth of empirical studies investigating women’s empowerment and its demographic consequences (e.g., Amin et al. 1994; Balk 1994, 1997; Basu 1992; Basu and Basu 1991; Chowdhury and Trovato 1994; Das Gupta 1990; Dharmalingam and Morgan 1996; Florez and Hogan 1990; Greenhalgh and Li 1995; Jejeebhoy 1995; Kishor 1993; Kritz and Makinwa-Adebusoye 1995; Lim 1993; Malhotra, Vanneman, and Kishor 1995; Morgan and Niraula 1995; Pedraza 1991; Schuler and Hashemi 1994 ). What was once viewed as a backwater “women’s topic” has moved significantly toward the center of demographic enquiry. 4 i.e., it has a cultural as well as relational and material component (Smith 1989). This view of women’s empowerment is part of a sociological or anthropological conception which recognizes that individuals belong to and are strongly influenced by social collectivities that are integrated by common ideological or normative systems. These ideological systems make prescriptions about many fundamental principles of social life, for example, how to organize families, how to allocate wealth among different groups or individuals, and how to organize relations between males and females. In this view, the perceptions, tastes, and choices of individual decisionmakers are strongly influenced by the nature of the ideological or normative systems to which their social collectivity subscribes and into which they have been socialized. To be sure, human beings are planful and rational. They may rebel against ideological prescriptions, adapt them to their self interests, or work to change them (Hammel 1990). Thus, individual behavior is not automatically determined by group norms, nor are group norms immutable. But individual behavior is strongly influenced by norms, and because of this, largescale transformations of behavioral patterns, such those that “development” entails, ultimately involve transformations of ideologically-controlled systems, not just an accretion of changes brought about by individual rationality. For those interested in development, then, understanding gender systems—not just the situation of individual women—is critical. We suggest, therefore, that studies of women’s empowerment need to focus on the rights, obligations and resources granted to females versus males under different gender systems rather than on the characteristics of individual women. Although gender systems lend themselves to description in a variety of ways, they are complex and consequently do not admit of simple, quantitative summarization. It is important to recognize this complexity because it renders many generalizations about cross-cultural variation in gender inequality suspect, and requires that we study more than a single quantum if we wish to understand possible causes of social or economic change. Put somewhat differently, gender inequality is multidimensional and the different dimensions can vary independently of one another (Mason 1986). For example, some gender systems give women considerable power in making financial decisions within the family but simultaneously deprive them of sexual independence or of freedom of physical movement within the community or beyond. There is nothing to guarantee that when women have high levels on one dimension of gender stratification they will also have high levels on other dimensions. The current paper focuses on women’s empowerment in the domestic sphere—that is, their freedom from control by other family members and ability to effect desired outcomes within the household. Empowerment has been argued to be important for development because it determines the extent to which women gain access to education, are able to seek employment or health care outside of the family, can acquire contraceptive information, and have the freedom to act on their fertility preferences or on the illnesses of their children, among other dimensions (Caldwell 1986; Dyson and Moore 1983; World Bank 2001). The particular aspects of domestic empowerment we examine are: (1) women’s economic decision-making power—do they participate in the family’s major economic decisions and have the freedom to make minor economic decisions on their own?
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