WOMEN'S STATUS AND FERTILITY

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Our overall aim is to understand the status of women and how it affects their fertility. Both are critical to enhancing the health of women through improving their status and helping them to achieve a healthy fertility regime. Specific aims include understanding which aspects of women's autonomy/power (economic and social) influence their fertility goals and actual fertility; how these influences vary according to social setting; the precise pathways through which these influences occur (important policy purposes); what determines the level or nature of women's autonomy and power, and whether the dimensions of power/autonomy and their interrelationships vary according to social context; whether proxies for women's power/autonomy used in past studies are valid; and whether power and autonomy can adequately be measured through survey interviews. These goals will be pursued through statistical analysis (supplemented by qualitative data) of two related datasets, the first a five-country comparative study that sampled countries and communities varying in gender traditions, and interviewed married women age 15-39 and their husbands, and the second a two-country extension using a similar design and interview schedules (both studies also collected community- level data and conducted focus group discussions of gender issues). The data from both studies have been computerized, cleaned, and subjected to preliminary analysis. In the proposed project, a variety of analyses will be conducted, most importantly (a) comparative analysis of how social context (country & community) interacts with household traits (class, family type) and personal characteristics of women (age, education, employment, etc) to influence different aspects of their autonomy and power (freedom of movement, personal control of economic resources, participation in economic and non-economic household decisions, task division of labor and responsibilities, interpersonal control of the wife through intimidation and domestic violence; interrelationships among these different dimensions will also be studied), and (b) comparative analysis of how context, household, and personal traits--most particularly, women's autonomy and power--interact to influence fertility and its proximate determinants (contraceptive knowledge and use, fertility desires, son preference, etc). The project will thus provide an empirical basis on which to understand how best to implement the recent call for women's empowerment as a population stabilization strategy.