title: Essays on empowering women with resources: reflection on women’s autonomy and intimate partner violence in Bangladesh
Creators: name: Afrin, Jisan
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2024

description: 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.