What Gives Women a Say in Decision-Making in Households? Agency and Bargaining Power in Pakistani Households.

This paper analyses the factors that influences Pakistani women’s decision-making agency within the household and determines their participation in intrahousehold decisions. Gender and Development theorists have prescribed integration of women into the formal labour market through education and employment as the solution to the development woes of the Global South. However, this study challenges women’s economic ‘empowerment’ under the premise of capitalism and neoliberalism. Extending from Naila Kabeer’s resources, agency, and achievements framework, decision-making agency is considered as a proxy for a woman’s relative position and status within the family and household. Women in the sociocultural context of Pakistan achieve bargaining power within households by a combination of individual- and household-level determinants. Individual-level determinants include women’s age, education, employment, occupation, relationship to the household head, type of relationship with husband, involvement in spousal choice, and ownership of property while household/family-level determinants include duration of cohabitation of couple, number of children, particularly sons, and household wealth. Relative bargaining power of women, indicated by their relative age (with regards to their husbands’), relative earnings, and relative education, impacts the complex dynamics of intrahousehold decision making. Furthermore, decision making dynamics between couples follow the patterns of any other form of negotiations and the outcome is determined by the bargaining power of the parties involved.

This study uses social survey data from Pakistan (Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2017-18) to explore the factors influencing bargaining power of Pakistani women in intrahousehold decision-making. It is critical to engage with negotiations of agency and autonomy as experienced by contemporary Pakistani women. This research is an important contribution to the enquiry into social inequalities in the South Asia, because it studies women in Pakistan as they navigate structural inequalities within homes, despite getting education and entering the labour force in more numbers than ever before.