Understanding the Mediation Effect of Women's Empowerment in Education-Fertility Nexus in Bangladesh

Background: Although the relationship between education and fertility is found to be universally inverse, something about what causes the two to interact in this manner still needs to be known. This study aimed to explore whether the mechanism by which education affects fertility is through women empowerment (WE) in the context of Bangladesh. We hypothesized that higher education leads to women’s empowerment which in turn reduces their fertility.

Data and Methods: We utilized cross-sectional data from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2022 to test the hypothesis. The analytic sample comprised 17102 currently married women aged 15-49 with at least one child ever born. We conducted mediation analysis based on the multivariable ordinary least squares regression method.

Findings: Women with higher education had on an average two children less than the women with no education (r=-0.433; P<0.001). We found eight dimensions of WE from the 30 observed variables. These dimensions included the resources (asset ownership and exposure to mass media, and reproductive knowledge), agency (attitude towards wife-beating, participation in household decisions, and reproductive autonomy), and achievements (economic autonomy, social independence, and knowledge and use of contraceptives). In terms of the mediation effect of WE, we found that higher education led to higher social independence (b=0.105, p=0.000) among the women which in turn decreased their number of children ever born (b=-0.346, p=0.000). Thus, education had a significant negative indirect effect on fertility through women’s social independence (b=-0.036; p=0.000). However, the hypothesis that higher education leads to WE which in turn leads to lower fertility didn’t hold true for the rest of the seven dimensions of WE.

Conclusion: Our study advances research on education, women empowerment, and fertility by examining whether women’s empowerment mediate the negative relationship between education and fertility in the context of Bangladesh.