Women's Rights Save Lives

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 418-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Burroway
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Child Health ◽  
Child Mortality ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Poverty Reduction ◽  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Bank Loans ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Infant And Child Mortality

Sociologists have long recognized women's empowerment as a key factor in improving development and health in developing countries. Using new data, this study goes beyond the traditionally used indicators of empowerment by highlighting the potential role of women's rights to land, property, and loans in explaining cross-national variation in child health. Results show that land and property rights are associated with lower rates of infant and child mortality across 75 developing countries, net of women's literacy and a variety of controls. Notably, the robustness of the land and property variables is comparable to that of GDP or access to clean water/sanitation. This provides some suggestive evidence that perhaps these aspects of women's empowerment may be just as important as some of the more conventional correlates of child health. However, access to bank loans is not significantly associated with lower infant and child mortality. This is consistent with a growing body of research that questions the efficacy of microfinance and loan programs for poverty reduction, health, and other development outcomes.

Women in the Malay World

2018 ◽  
pp. 69-84
Author(s):  
Khairudin Aljunied
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Women In Islam ◽  
Personal Experiences

This chapter examines Hamka’s writings about the place of women in Islam and in societies across the Malay world. Hamka was engaged in the project of “recasting gendered paradigms,” which involves reinterpreting, reconceptualizing and reconfiguring various dominant understandings about the roles, functions and responsibilities of women in Islam as reflected not only in the Qur'an and the adat (traditional customs), but also in modern discourses about women's empowerment. The chapter shows that Hamka’s commitment to advocating for women’s rights and critiquing prevailing ideas about the place of women in religion and society was a product both of his personal experiences and of the profound social and intellectual shifts that characterized his day and age.

Women’s Education May Be Even Better Than We Thought: Estimating the Gains from Education When Schooling Ain’t Learning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Kaffenberger ◽  
Lant Pritchett
Keyword(s):  
Child Mortality ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Basic Education ◽  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Life Outcomes ◽  
Primary Schooling ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Financial Practices ◽  
Attenuation Bias

Women’s schooling has long been regarded as one of the best investments in development. Using two different cross-nationally comparable data sets which both contain measures of schooling, assessments of literacy, and life outcomes for more than 50 countries, we show the association of women’s education (defined as schooling and the acquisition of literacy) with four life outcomes (fertility, child mortality, empowerment, and financial practices) is much larger than the standard estimates of the gains from schooling alone. First, estimates of the association of outcomes with schooling alone cannot distinguish between the association of outcomes with schooling that actually produces increased learning and schooling that does not. Second, typical estimates do not address attenuation bias from measurement error. Using the new data on literacy to partially address these deficiencies, we find that the associations of women’s basic education (completing primary schooling and attaining literacy) with child mortality, fertility, women’s empowerment and the associations of men’s and women’s basic education with positive financial practices are three to five times larger than standard estimates. For instance, our country aggregated OLS estimate of the association of women’s empowerment with primary schooling versus no schooling is 0.15 of a standard deviation of the index, but the estimated association for women with primary schooling and literacy, using IV to correct for attenuation bias, is 0.68, 4.6 times bigger. Our findings raise two conceptual points. First, if the causal pathway through which schooling affects life outcomes is, even partially, through learning then estimates of the impact of schooling will underestimate the impact of education. Second, decisions about how to invest to improve life outcomes necessarily depend on estimates of the relative impacts and relative costs of schooling (e.g., grade completion) versus learning (e.g., literacy) on life outcomes. Our results do share the limitation of all previous observational results that the associations cannot be given causal interpretation and much more work will be needed to be able to make reliable claims about causal pathways.

Property Rights over Marital Transfers *

2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (3) ◽  
pp. 1421-1484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siwan Anderson ◽  
Chris Bidner
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Marriage Market ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Market Clearing ◽  
Market Clearing Price ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract In developing countries, the extent to which women possess property rights is shaped in large part by transfers received at the time of marriage. Focusing on dowry, we develop a simple model of the marriage market with intrahousehold bargaining to understand the incentives for brides’ parents to allocate the rights over the dowry between their daughter and her groom. In doing so, we clarify and formalize the “dual role” of dowry—as a premortem bequest and as a market clearing price—identified in the literature. We use the model to shed light on the intriguing observation that in contrast to other rights, women’s rights over the dowry tend to deteriorate with development. We show how marriage payments are utilized even when they are inefficient, and how the marriage market mitigates changes in other dimensions of women’s rights even to the point where women are worse off following a strengthening of such rights. We also generate predictions for when marital transfers will disappear and highlight the importance of female human capital for the welfare of women.

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