Second, our findings underscore that the mother-in-law is a key “influencer” in patrilocal South Asian households. Well-intended interventions that exclusively target women or married couples may be ineffective if they naïvely fail to account for the role of mothers-in-law, especially if preferences and incentives between women and their mothers-in-law are misaligned. In contrast, mothers-in-law who have an incentive to support their daughters-in-law can also exert a positive impact on outcomes related to childcare, employment, and health during pregnancy (Khanna and Pandey, 2020; Varghese and Roy, 2019). Future research can inform policy makers about how to effectively engage mothers-in-law to improve women’s outcomes.

Third, our findings motivate us to reflect on approaches that can expand women’s social networks and thereby improve women’s welfare. Forming women’s collectives (e.g., microfinance and self-help groups) is a commonly used policy instrument that has been effective in strengthening women’s social connections (e.g., Kumar et al. (2019)); however, women’s participation in such groups is low (Diaz-Martin et al., 2021). Moreover, the potential role of women in impacting other women’s lives extends well beyond such groups. In contexts such as ours, women often turn to other female family members, such as sisters-in-law, for support since familial interactions are less likely to be socially sanctioned. Our study suggests that enabling women to leverage support from their sisters-in-law or female friends may, therefore, be an effective way to lower women’s reliance on more constraining members of their household.<sup>57</sup>

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> 57Although sisters-in-law could serve as potential “allies” to counterbalance the influence of the motherin-law, strategic interactions between sisters-in-law, including potential competition for resources within the household, also need to be considered, in a manner similar to polygamous households, e.g., Rossi (2019).

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