Decoding Decision-Making Power: How Culture and Context Shape Autonomy
"Unveiling the nuanced relationship between individual choices, cultural norms, and feelings of autonomy in Bangladesh and Ghana."
Measuring women’s empowerment has gained increasing attention, driven by the goal of identifying programs and policies that reduce gender inequalities. The empowerment of women and girls is included in the Sustainable Development Goals. However, the lack of high-quality, sex-disaggregated data and ambiguity around how to define and measure empowerment confidently make it difficult to measure gender inequalities. These challenges impede assessing the impact of development interventions on girls and women.
Social scientists mostly define empowerment as based on the concept of agency—the ability to use capabilities and opportunities to expand choices and control one's destiny. They mainly focus on women's ability to participate in decision-making over important matters like major household purchases or healthcare. Questions about decision-making are common in large-scale surveys and provide a body of evidence on how socioeconomics, health, and demographic outcomes are linked with women’s empowerment and agency.
Despite the widespread use of decision-making metrics, uncertainty remains about constructing indicators of women’s empowerment from these questions. It’s particularly unclear to what extent sole and joint decision-making should be considered different expressions of individual decision-making power, and to what extent joint decision-making reflects a consistent understanding of decision-making power within households.
Why Context Matters: Unpacking the Nuances of Decision-Making and Autonomy
This paper analyzes some common critiques of household decision-making indicators using comparative information on women’s autonomy. It conceptualizes autonomy in terms of the motivations behind a person's actions. Motivational autonomy is defined as behavior experienced as willingly enacted and fully endorsed by a person. Greater understanding of the relationship between motivational autonomy and decision-making may provide insights into the validity of using decision-making data to measure women's empowerment.
- On aggregate, the study finds differences between men and women, and across countries, in the significance of the association between feelings of autonomous motivation and sole and joint decision-making.
- It also finds heterogeneity in the strength of this association, depending on the domain and whether partners agree on who normally makes decisions within the domain.
Implications for Policy and Research: A Path Forward
The study shows that the degree to which men and women associate different decision-making outcomes with autonomous behavior is idiosyncratic and likely to vary from one context to another, depending on the particular decision being made, sociocultural norms, and other local features. These results highlight the complexity of measuring empowerment and the need for context-specific approaches.