difference in years of schooling between husbands and wives in India and Nepal is reducing as well, from around 1 to 3 years for women born before 1980, to less than 1 year for the most recent birth-cohorts. Despite the drastic reduction in the schooling gender-gap, couples in Bangladesh throughout the past five decades have the highest, albeit decreasing, age gaps. Spousal differences in age are important as they have a bearing on women’s agency within the marriage and are often indicative of marriage quality (Carmichael, 2011). In the other South Asian countries, spousal age gaps have been mostly stable since the 1970s, going from 6 to 5 years in India and holding steady at 5 and 4 years in Pakistan and Nepal, respectively.

Figure 4 (top right) also shows the long-term trends in fertility as the difference between self-reported desired and realized fertility.<sup>22</sup> Apart from India and Afghanistan, the rest of the countries have witnessed a declining difference meaning that women born in later years are more likely to give birth to their ideal number of children. Whether this decline is a result of women using their agency in the household to bargain for their desired number of children or the availability of contraceptives is not investigated in this study.

The last outcome considered in this group is experiencing IPV. Social norms can play a role in the acceptability of violence, and when and why is it justified (Weber et al., 2019; ALIGN 2021). Regarding the incidence of IPV, a set of questions were asked to the women whether they have ever experienced any form of physical and sexual violence by their current or previous partners.<sup>23</sup> The bottom graph in Figure 22 We construct our outcome variable as the difference between actual and ideal number of children for women 40 years and above. The DHS asks women questions on the ideal number of children that she would have liked to have in her whole life, irrespective of the number she already has. Another question asks the total number of children actually born who are living. We arrive at the plotted fertility variable by subtracting the ideal number a children a women reported at age 40 from the actual number of living children. We focus on 40 years because, at this age, women are less likely to continue childbearing (United Nations Demographic Yearbook 2019, available at: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic-social/products/dyb/dyb_2019).

23 We coded the IPV experience variable as 1 if a woman has experienced any of these two forms of violence and 0 for no violence. The options included are whether the respondent has ever been either slapped, punched with fist or hit by something harmful; strangled or burnt; threatened with knife/gun or other weapon; had arm twisted or hair pulled; physically forced into unwanted sex; forced into other unwanted sexual acts; physically forced to perform sexual acts respondent did not want to. There is no response for the sexual violence experience for Bangladesh. These data were collected in limited surveys: one survey round for Afghanistan (2015), Bangladesh (2007), Maldives (2016-17), and Pakistan (2017-18) and two survey rounds in India (2005-06 and 2015-16) and Nepal (2011-2016).

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