This paper uses survey data from rural Senegal to model the effects on married women’s subjective wellbeing of the amount of freedom they have in the home. Senegal has a democratically elected government, which broadly supports human rights and women’s empowerment, but this contrasts with conservative attitudes towards women in some traditional rural communities.
Our data reveals substantial variation in the treatment of women, and we find the effect of this variation on women’s wellbeing to be large when compared with the direct effects of more traditional development goals, such as raising consumption and education, or lowering morbidity. This result suggests a reassessment of the current allocation of foreign aid, with more emphasis to expenditure on women’s empowerment, and more concern about the interaction of empowerment with other dimensions of development.
Key Findings:
- The micro-econometric analysis does not provide strong evidence that improvement in other development areas wil lead to more women’s empowerment in the long run. Firstly, the effect of education on women’s empowerment is ambiguous. Some education outcomes such as male literacy are associated with more empowerment, which suggests that educating boys can improve their attitudes towards women. However, for a given literacy level more male education reduces women’s empowerment, possibly because it raises men’s bargaining power within the home.
- Secondly, women in poor households have more empowerment. This may again reflect a positive correlation between the overall level of development of the household and the bargaining power of its (male) head, to the detriment of rich men’s wives.
- These results are contradictory to those of cross-country macroeconomic studies. Understanding the reasons for this should be looked into. However, this study’s results to cause doubt on whether general development initiatives within an individual country will improve the lot of its women, and there is reason to be concerned about the lack of attention currently given to women’s empowerment by aid donors.
- In the absence of aid programs that specifically target empowerment, it is quite possible that development initiatives which are successful according to standard metrics (such as per captia consumption or education levels) will worsen the lives of half of the target population.
