Abstract/Summary

This thesis is based on three individual papers all of which focus on women’s empowerment from different perspectives. The primary purpose of all these papers is to analyse the effects of women’s access to resources (i.e., education and employment) on their level of empowerment. Since empowerment is a latent variable, it is measured via autonomy as a proxy indication of women’s subjective state of empowerment. Henceforward, the following discussion will briefly illustrate the central theme of each paper. The significance of education as a powerful intervention for advancing women's empowerment is evident from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations (UN) to be achieved by 2030 which highlight ‘education as a fundamental element for acquiring knowledge and skills to attain gender equality and empower women’. Identifying education as a fundamental resource to initiate the process of empowerment, the first paper (chapter 2) wants to explore how increased access to education influences women’s empowerment via pathways of autonomy within the HH domain. The primary aim of this paper is to examine the effects of women’s education on four different types of autonomy i.e., financial, physical (freedom of movement, HH decision-making, and perceptual (tolerance of domestic violence) in the context of Bangladesh. For this reason, the difference-in-difference (DID) method is adopted using three rounds of the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) dataset. A government stipend programme (FSSSP) is exploited to create an exogenous variation in the multivariate DID model to generate a regression discontinuity for analysing the effects of secondary education on women’s autonomy in Bangladesh. The second paper (chapter 3) explores women’s autonomy using the same theoretic framework of empowerment where women’s access to resources is considered as a mediator of their augmented bargaining power within the HH. However, it is argued that resources might not inherently translate into tangible bargaining power for women, particularly in a social context that is dictated by patriarchal social norms where women’s choices and authority are constrained by male-dominated HH dynamics. Moreover, women's participation in jobs often revolves around basic survival, lacking the ability to modify gender roles, redistribute domestic responsibilities, or secure equal property rights, thereby limiting the empowering capacity of employment. For this reason, women’s employment in Bangladesh is used as a form of resource to investigate the stimulating effects on their autonomy as an indicator of their enhanced empowerment. This paper primarily focuses on women’s HH decision-making from both financial and non-financial perspectives and hence uses two specific outcome variables i.e., financial autonomy and HH decision-making autonomy. Employing an instrumental variable (IV) technique using district-level employment rates derived from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS 2011) dataset, it investigates the stimulating effects of employment on women's autonomy.