head or husband and woman jointly decide,” and “other family members decide,”<sup>3</sup> A woman is considered to have the decision-making power on a particular issue if she jointly or by herself makes the decision (equal to 1), since on at least some issues, such as birth control or number of children, women do not have to have the sole decision-making power. However, we have also done the calculations by assigning “jointly making the decision” a weight of 0.5 or 0, and the results are very similar and available upon request. On the contrary, in the case of the decisionmaking power of influential male household members (husbands or household heads), only decisions made by the man alone are assigned 1, to indicate males’ dominance in decision making on those issues. Table 1 presents the descriptive results.

For decisions on education, 57.6% were made by the household’s influential males, while only 12.9% were made at least partially by women themselves. Similar results are found for decisions on women’s employment. Women have greater decision-making power about the use of birth control and having more children (71% and 76% respectively); however, about 16% of decisions in both cases are made solely by men. Women make more decisions on clothing expenditures, followed by food, medical, and recreation expenditures. On average, influential male household members have greater decision-making power than women on these aspects of consumption.

Two pairs of indices are constructed to serve as proxies for the decision-making power of women and influential male household members. The first pair is a composite score, constructed with eight raw indicators for women and influential males separately, reflecting the degree of their autonomy. The scale for both scores ranges from 0 to 8, and the summary statistics are appended to the bottom of Table 1. On average, women’s decision-making power is at 2.88, whereas influential male household members’ decision-making power is at 3.03.

The second pair is obtained from the factor analysis. Different from the single indices, factor analysis generates a smaller set of factors to explain a larger number of observed variables. These factors are identified though their accountability of the observed variables’ variance, and are allowed to be multifaceted covering different aspects of household decision making (Clarke 1970; Lawley and Maxwell 1971; Harman 1976). In this study, four factors for the eight indicators are identified from an orthogonal rotation of factor analysis using the Maximum Likelihood method. The factor loading matrices are shown in Appendix Table 1. The first factor that accounts for the most variance in the observed eight indicators is a general family planning factor, since it loads most heavily on birth control and having more children; the second and fourth factors load most heavily on consumption expenditures, with the first emphasizing food and clothing expenditures and the second emphasizing medical and recreation expenditures. Finally, the third factor loads most heavily on personal development, with significant coefficients

> 3 In the questionnaire, household head was used in the questions regarding women’s education and employment, as well as consumption decision; husband was used in birth control and more children decisions.  About 58% of household heads are women’s husbands.

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