سنجش توانمندسازی زنان در مناطق روستایی بنگلادش

Women’s empowerment is a dynamic process that has been quantified, measured, and described in a variety of ways. We measure empowerment in a sample of 3,500 rural women in 128 villages of Bangladesh with five indicators. A conceptual framework is presented, together with descriptive data on the indicators. Linear regressions to examine effects of covariates show that a woman’s exposure to television is a significant predictor of three of the five indicators. A woman’s years of schooling is significantly associated with one of two self-esteem indicators and with freedom of mobility. Household wealth has a significant and positive association with a woman’s resource control but a significant negative association with her total decision-making score.

With declining population growth rates in many developing countries, the attention of the population and development community has shifted away from fertility reduction and toward maternal and child health (MCH) goals. However, what has not shifted is the belief that women’s empowerment is key for attaining both health and population goals. Thus, understanding the relationship between women’s empowerment and maternal and child health (MCH) outcomes is an increasing focus of demographic and public health research (Basu and Koolwal, 2005, Bloom et al., 2001, Gupta and Yesudian, 2006, Mullany et al., 2005 and Portela and Santarelli, 2003). The fact that many women in the developing world are now better able to control fertility does not necessarily mean that they have become more empowered. Despite nearly two decades of empirical research on assessing women’s empowerment and measuring empowerment indicators, the process of women’s empowerment is still poorly understood. Furthermore, the causal relationship, if any, between women’s empowerment and MCH outcomes could be quite different from the relationship between women’s empowerment and fertility outcomes. Hence, there is renewed interest in measuring empowerment indicators in a more systematic manner (Narayan-Parker, 2005, Chap. 1). In this paper, we attempt to measure empowerment of rural women in Bangladesh using a number of selected indicators with data from 128 villages where an NGO health and microcredit experimental study was conducted. Our objective is to gain a better understanding of the relationships between empowerment indicators and the context or background factors that affect them.

The results confirm that the empowerment process does not necessarily occur simultaneously across the different dimensions. Thus, it is quite possible for there to be an increase in a woman’s value to herself and the household (self worth and role in decision-making) without a commensurate increase in her personal autonomy and independence vis-a-vis men (freedom of mobility and access to cash). In a society undergoing rapid economic change this is a reflection of the emerging “patriarchal bargain” (Kandiyoti, 1988). One limitation of this study is that women’s responses may be affected by social desirability bias (Jejeebhoy, 2002a and Jejeebhoy, 2002b). Since Bangladeshi society has been strongly patriarchal, women may give responses that represent lower empowerment than is actually the case. However, the fact that women’s responses cover the whole range of possible responses implies that at least some women are not reporting the socially normative response. Another perspective on this can be had by comparing responses on these questions from both wives and their husbands (Becker et al., 2006 and Ghuman et al., 2006). In a subsample of households in the current study, husbands were interviewed. From matched data for 512 couples we found that in 63–87% of couples, spouses had concordant responses on women’s role in decision-making across the 10 decisions (not shown). In the case of discordant responses, we cannot know whose response is correct. However, these cases do suggest that perceptions of decision-making differ within some couples and possibly that norms are changing. One specific recommendation is that other researchers add the component of self-esteem as another dimension of empowerment, as first proposed by Basu and Koolwal (2005). Empowerment is a process in each woman’s life but is also a process occurring over time in a society. In Bangladesh, for example, the widespread availability and door-to-door provision of contraception, availability of microcredit and women’s participation therein, and government subsidization of girls’ schooling have all combined to create conditions for increased empowerment. That is, 20 years ago and 20 years hence, results on indicators reported here would very likely differ. This analysis has presented a snapshot of rural Bangladeshi society in 2006.