Women Empowerment or Autonomy : A Comparative View in Bangladesh Context

This study attempts to measure and distinguish women empowerment and autonomy from each other by constructing indices in three specific dimensions namely economic decision making, household decision making, and physical movement in Bangladesh context. Using data from BDHS-2004, we observe that there prevails a mid-level of women empowerment but autonomy level of Bangladeshi women is absolutely low. The level of women autonomy decreases with the increase of education whereas education increases the level of women empowerment but not smoothly. Women’s current age, place of residence, education, religion, media exposure etc. are the important factors affecting women empowerment and their autonomy. Introduction Based on the biological (sex) differences every society imposes certain rules, regulations, responsibilities, and rights of men and women. If we try to observe these behaviours and practices carefully, we will see that most of these rules and regulations are discriminatory. This discriminatory behaviour creates difference between men and women, which eventually gives a lower status to women in terms of men socially, culturally, religiously, economically and legally. At the 2005 World Summit, Governments of all nations agreed that “progress for women is progress for all”. But the technical terms such as autonomy, empowerment, status, gender equality etc. through which we indicate the progress of women are sometimes difficult to separate from each other, for example, autonomy from empowerment, and sometimes because of misconception, are used improperly. It is important to understand the actual meaning of these terms to find out the absolute way of meaningful progression of women as well as society. The frequency of the use of a technical term has usually been inversely proportionate to the understanding of its meaning. For example, “empowerment” is a very widely used term, particularly in the context of women and the poor, but is often misused and poorly defined. It is not always clear whether those who use terms such as * M. Phil Fellow ** Research Assistant *** Assistant Professor **** Associate Professor and Head, Dept. of Population Science and Human Resource Development, University of Rajshahi, Rajshahi-6205, Bangladesh. Emails: tareque_pshd@yahoo.com, tarequemi_pops@ru.ac. bd Bangladesh e-Journal of Sociology. Volume 8, Number 2. July 2011 18 women empowerment, gender equality, female autonomy or women’s status are referring to the same or different concepts. Some scholars argue that often there is no clear demarcation between these terms. Mason (1998) and Mason and Smith (2000) for example, treat empowerment, autonomy, and gender stratification interchangeably. Similarly, Jejeebhoy (2000) considers autonomy and empowerment as more or less equal terms, and defines both in terms of women “gaining control of their own lives vis-à-vis family, community, society, markets. ” In contrast, other authors have explicitly argued that autonomy is not equivalent to empowerment, stressing that autonomy implies independence whereas empowerment may well be achieved through interdependence (Govindasamy and Malhotra 1996; Kabeer 1998; Malhotra and Mather 1997). Various studies of “women’s status” often covered aspects of empowerment without explicitly labelling it as women’s status, refers only the women’s overall position in the community. Acharya and Bennett (1981) used the more general term “women’s status” but located a nexus of gender-related power differentials in the household, noting how important the family unit is to understanding the operation of gender in a society. They also highlighted the links between women’s economic roles and their control over resources and life options. While defining status, Dixon (1978) stated “women’s power can be distinguished from women’s status, in that status refers to women’s overall position in the society, while power refers to women’s ability to influence and control at the interpersonal level. Thus, female power can be defined as women’s ability to control or change other women’s or man’s behaviour and the ability to determine important events in their lives, even when older women are opposed to them. Empowerment may be defined as the process of removing the factors which cause the powerlessness. Empowerment has been used to represent a wide range of concepts and to describe a proliferation of outcomes. The term has been used more often to advocate for certain types of policies and intervention strategies than to analyse them, as demonstrated by a number of documents from the United Nations (UNDAW 2001; UNICEF 1999). Kabeer (2001), whose definition is the most widely accepted, defines empowerment as “the expansion of people’s ability to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied to them”. Bennett (2002) described empowerment as “the enhancement of assets and capabilities of diverse individuals and groups to engage, influence and hold accountable the institutions which affect them. ” Keller and Mbwewe (1991) described women empowerment as “a process whereby women become able to organize themselves to increase their own self-reliance, to assert their independent right to make choices and to control resources which will assist in challenging and eliminating their own subordination”. The core of the meaning of women empowerment lies in the ability of a woman to control her own destiny. Almost all definitions of women empowerment Bangladesh e-Journal of Sociology. Volume 8, Number 2. July 2011 19 include some reference to an expansion of choice and freedom to make decisions and take the actions necessary to shape life-outcomes (Malhotra and Schuler 2005). According to the framework developed by the Task Force on Education and Gender Equality of the United Nations Millennium Project, resources can be seen as including capabilities (including health, nutrition, and education); access to opportunities (including access to economic assets and resources and political opportunity); and security (safety from violence and conflict). In the Task Force’s conceptualization, the term gender equality reflected equality in access between women and men to each of these sets of resources. Such equality, however, is necessary but not sufficient to achieve empowerment. It creates the enabling context for an empowerment process, but does not guarantee empowerment. Gender equity “recognizes that women and men have different needs, preferences, and interests and that equality of outcomes may necessitate different treatment of men and women” (Reeves and Baden 2000). As a result, any discussion of empowerment emphasizes the process of engaging people more than the content of what is done with them. It encompasses the ability to formulate strategic choices, and to control resources and decisions that affect important life outcomes. From the above discussion we can conclude that women empowerment is a process through which they start gaining more power and control over their own lives and circumstances than that of the previous times whereas women autonomy is certain power of women by which they can do whatever they like to, without seeking permission or without having consent of others. The status of women means that the power and facilities women are presently having in the society. The determinants of women’s status are ratio of male to female adult literacy rate, ratio of female to male life expectancy at birth, earned income share etc. (Haddad 1999). Gender equality refers to the equal opportunities for women to have in case of law, resource, power etc. Objectives This study attempts to clarify the differences among the technical terms like women empowerment, autonomy, status, gender equality etc. which have frequently been misused in many studies. Due to the lack of direct data, in many previous studies, proxy variables have been used to measure the empowerment of women. This study measures the empowerment and autonomy of women directly by computing indices. It presents levels of women empowerment and autonomy in different dimensions and their differences. Also an attempt has been made to examine the net effect of different variables on women empowerment and autonomy in Bangladeshi context. Bangladesh e-Journal of Sociology. Volume 8, Number 2. July 2011 20 Data Source and Methods This study utilizes the data extracted from a nationally representative survey, Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) – 2004, which was conducted under the authority of National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT) of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The data collection took place over a five-month period from January 1 to May 25, 2004. Information were collected from 11,440 ever-married women of age 10-49 and 4297 men of age 15-54 from 10,500 households covering 361 sample points (clusters) in 122 urban areas and 239 rural areas throughout Bangladesh. The planning and implementation of the 2004 BDHS has not been done specifically for women empowerment. Therefore, in this study, due to missing data, instead of 11,440 ever married women, information of 2282 women for economic decision making, 5106 women for household decision making and 5699 women for physical movement dimension were available. First we compute indices in different dimensions of women empowerment and autonomy in accordance with Haque, Tareque and Mostofa (2010) which has been explained in next section named construction of index. At the bivariate level, simple descriptive method of mean analysis and finally at the multivariate level, multiple linear regression analysis are employed. Construction of Index Although the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 2004 was not designed to capture the specific concept of “women empowerment” or “women autonomy”, the information in this survey did cover the major dimensions of these concepts, namely, (a) economic decision making, (b