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5. Análisis de una unidad de PL: el restaurante El chorrillano
61 This chapter studies how education and employment are associated with the level of intrahousehold decision-making power for women, allowing for heterogeneity in the magnitude and size of this relationship across different levels of power. However, it is important to keep in mind that the level of decision-making power is not a measure of wellbeing itself, since the desirability of each level of power might vary according to the nature of each decision. The level of women’s decision-making power in this paper has been used as a proxy for a much broader and hardly measurable concept: the bargaining power.
3.2.1 A Bargaining Approach for Household Decision-Making
Bargaining models appeared as an alternative to the unitary approach introduced by Becker (1965; 1981) that proposes the household as the decision-making entity of interest, without allowing for any negotiation process among family members. The bargaining approach considers that each person living in the household has different preferences, and consequently any decision-making process in the household will inevitably involve two elements: cooperation and conflict (Agarwal, 1997). Although cooperation allows allocations that can generally make members better off, it also implies some level of loss for one or more of the participants, who might have to compromise their own preferences or wellbeing in order to comply with what was agreed during the negotiation process. In exchange, individuals may gain power in some other aspect of decision-making or potentially improve their social capital by complying with social norms. So, for example, a woman might be willing to compromise her decision-making power regarding large expenditures if this makes her comply with a social norm that recognises the husband as the main decision-maker of the household.
In theory, the level of an individual’s bargaining power will depend on their “fallback position”, also called “reservation wellbeing”, which represents the maximum level of wellbeing a person can achieve if the negotiation fails (Agarwal, 1997; Dauphin, 2001). As stated by Chiappori and Donni (2009), the difference between each particular bargaining model found in the literature can be reduced to the choice of the threat point. In the particular context of married women this notion suggests that their bargaining power will be strongly related with any factors that improve their fallback position, i.e., her wellbeing in case she divorced her partner. McElroy (1990) calls these variables the “extra household environmental parameters (EEPs)” which include aspects such as parental wealth, nonwage income, legal institutions regarding
62 marriage and divorce, unemployment faced by the person’s demographic group, among others. If the way a woman is socially perceived is considered as an additional variable in her fallback position function, her bargaining power will be also determined by sociocultural factors such as gender norms and traditional values.
Nonetheless, there is another branch of the literature suggesting that divorce or partnership dissolution might not be an accurate representation of a realistic threat point since it might seem excessive. Lundberg and Pollack (1993), for instance, proposed a model where the threat point is given by the classification of household decisions into gender-specific “spheres”, where each spouse becomes an exclusive decision-maker in their own masculine or feminine sphere. In this context, the separate spheres approach would suggest that if negotiation fails women would make decisions regarding traditionally “feminine” aspects (most likely those related with food and everyday housekeeping) while their husbands would make decisions regarding aspects that are perceived as “masculine (possibly large expenditures and other important decisions in the household).
3.2.2 Empirical Evidence
Most of the empirical research on the determinants of female intrahousehold decision- making power has focussed on the socioeconomic elements that provide women with bargaining power within the household. Ownership of financial and physical assets, earnings and income are positively associated with female power (Wiklander, 2010; Oduro, Boakye-Yiadom, & Baah-Boateng, 2012; Huber & Spitze, 1981). Some direct inteventions in the form of microfinance and other self-help group programmes targeted to enhance women’s control of the household’s resources have also been found to significantly increase their level of decision-making power (Brody, et al., 2017; Ashraf, Karlan, & Yin, 2010; Bali Swain & Yang Wallentin, 2009), however the effectiveness of such projects depends widely on the particular context being studied and women’s social identity (Garikipati, Johnson, Guérin, & Szafarz, 2017; Duvendack & Palmer-Jones, 2017) .
Other factors, such as the woman’s age, level of education, years of marriage and urban residence have also been found to have a positive correlation with decision- making power (Arooj, et al., 2013; Khan & Sajid, 2011). However, the relative impact of the woman’s socioeconomic status on her bargaining power is not the same for all
63 the decision-processes that occur in the household. There is evidence from Sri Lanka suggesting, for instance, that a woman’s level of education and employment status are strongly associated with her decision-making power in financial matters, but not for social and organisational issues (Malhotra & Mather, 1997). On the other hand, there is also evidence supporting the relevance of some factors across all levels of decision- making. For the Nigerian case, the work by Oyediran and Odusola (2004) concludes that the determinants of female decision-making power are different depending on the nature of the decision, however economic influences such as women’s education and employment status have a significant influence across all dimensions of intrahousehold decision-making, including those regarding reproductive, cultural, and economic issues.
Institutions in the form of traditional conventions and social norms also play an important role in the distribution of power inside the household, especially in highly gender-stratified communities where “autonomy continues to be shaped largely by traditional factors” (Jejeebhoy & Sathar, 2001). There are culture-specific aspects, such as religion, ethnicity, or even traditional values and beliefs that are strongly associated with gender norms which prevent women from participating in the household decision-making process (Banerjee & Roy, 2015; Kritz & Makinwa- Adebusoye, 1999). The sociocultural context can also help explain the apparently contradictory results found in the literature suggesting that some economic characteristics that were thought to enhance female autonomy, such as paid employment or age at marriage actually have a neutral or even negative effect (Hossain, 1998; Wiklander, 2010). According to Mabsout and Van Staveren (2009), gendered institutions in the form of social norms and practices play an important role in the intrahousehold distribution of bargaining power and might mediate the effect of other individual and household characteristics. The authors suggest that well-educated women with a high economic contribution to the household may perceive themselves as deviations from a social standard that has established the man as the breadwinner and try to compensate this fact by being submissive with their male partners at home, a behaviour that had been previously identified in the literature and conceptualised as “doing gender” (West & Zimmerman, 1987). In certain cultures, some of the apparently power-enhancing characteristics in women are associated with a negative social connotation, which harms the woman’s self-esteem and impoverishes the image that the husband has of her. In some rural areas in India, for example, it is not socially acceptable for women to get married at an old age, and those who do might be subject
64 of criticism. So, even though being older can give the woman more experience and ability to bargain, this effect can be reversed for social pressures that make her less capable of claiming power inside the household. In practice, social norms can be quantified in the form of community averages. Mason and Smith (2003), for instance, study the determinants of women’s empowerment across different dimensions for five Asian countries and find that gender norms in the form of community’s average values for age, age at marriage, age difference with husband, education and paid work have the potential to explain around two-thirds of the within-country variation in the level of women’s intrahousehold decision-making power.