Title: Exploring the Multifaceted Correlates of Household Decision-Making Autonomy Among
Married Women in Cameroon
Version: 0 Date: 03 Dec 2023
Reviewer:  Charles Lwanga
Reviewer's report:
Submission ID 5a2e3ce4-e964-4278-b1c5-0bf45fe6a9be
Manuscript title: Unveiling the Threads of Autonomy: Exploring the Multifaceted      Correlates
of Household Decision-Making Autonomy Among  Married Women in Cameroon
Reviewer comments:
Thank you for the opportunity to review this interesting paper.
Introduction
This study considers the dynamics of women’s autonomy in household decision-making in
Cameroon. It examines the power of decision making among Cameroonian women. In paragraph
3 of the introduction, the authors clearly set out the concept of women’s autonomy and what
the gap of the study is, that few studies in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) and in particular Cameroon;
and base their argument on this, however, I have the several issues which I think may improve
this paper:
1. One would have expected the authors to further interrogate how gender inequality is
established in the case of Cameroon. The authors seem to assume that what happens elsewhere
is what is happening in Cameroon, which I don’t think it is true! And failure to have this will
feature in the discussion section.
2. Why consider only married women? I guess it should have been among women in union
because cohabitation is rising in many SSA countries and according to Kamgno and Mengue,
2014, the proportion of women in this form of relationship by 2004 was around 38.9%. I guess
by now the proportion is likely to be higher.
3.  Are married women in this study synonymous to women in union? From the methods section,
the answer looks like a YES! But not clearly stated in the body. And if the answer is a NO, then
it would have been interesting to compare the marrieds and cohabitors.
4. It would be better to use international literature to show how it applies to or not to Cameroon,
and how do studies in Cameroon talk back to the international literature.
5. There is need for a much broader and deeper literature on gender inequality and gender
socialisation and I am convinced that there is enough literature on the African continent to make
strong and substantive argument.
6. On gender socialisation, what is the body of literature in Cameroon say in respect to Women’s
autonomy and the theme of this manuscript. The discussion provided here seems inadequate.
7. One would have expected to see the role of religion and culture (given the patriarchal
nature) in the literature analysis. Studies on how religion affects decision making should have
been discussed especially in relation to gender stereotyping – See the section on “independent
variables”.
Methods, results and discussion
1. While the reason for descriptive analysis was stated clearly, that of bivariate was not. I would
have expected the authors to indicate how bivariate analysis (perhaps using “ulogit”) helped
them to identify the factors that were taken to the multivariate model, unfortunately this is
lacking!
2. Looking at the dependent variable as generated (YES, NO), I would have expected this to
be shown in table 2. Why? Because the distribution who give an indication as to whether the
analytical model consider the use of models that can accommodate skewed data just to avoid
perfect separation or inflated estimates or just use logit regression. It is not enough to just use
logit regression because the dependent variable is binary!
3. I would have expected the authors to do:
a. A diagnostic test of the fitted model, just to see how well the model fits with no specification
errors, but this is grossly lacking;
b. In addition, no multi-collinearity test was done given the variables in Table 2.
4. Authors should also understand that one of the reason why young women may have low
decision making, is that their partners could be older than them, and I would have expected to
find this in the discussion but seems to be lacking.
5. While the authors tried to present the results, the discussion would benefit from focusing
more on the implications of the results – as policy-makers, what does this tell us? How can we
use these relationships within the household to improve outcomes for both the households and
individuals within them?
General comment:
• Overall, the manuscript should be subjected to an English editor who might not necessarily be
a subject specialist to correct the grammatical errors.
• I advise the authors to carefully work on the above to improve the manuscript and subsequently
undergo onward forwarding.