Women Empowerment in Bangladesh: A Study on Rural-Urban Differentials

Abstract

Women empowerment has been considered as essential precondition for the elimination of world poverty and as central issue in the process of development for many countries in the world today. Reviewing many relevant literatures, this study tries to clarify the term -women empowerment and an attempt has been made to measure women empowerment index (WEI), the relation between contraceptive behaviour and women empowerment, the impact of women empowerment on fertility using Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) -2004 data. WEI has been constructed averaging three important dimension indices namely, economic decision making index, household decision making index and physical movement index and consequently it has been found that four out of ten of Bangladeshi women have high level of empowerment. Comparatively low empowerment in physical freedom has been observed in comparison with economic and household decision making empowerment. Higher level of empowerment in all the three dimensions has been found for the 35 -49 age grouped women, whose husband's age are 35+ years, who have same aged husbands and for currently working women as well. In addition, respondent's current age, educational level, children ever born (CEB) and media exposure have been identified as important determinants for the aforementioned three dimensions of women empowerment. The study also reveals that urban women are more empowered in all dimensions than their rural counterparts. Using various types of mathematical models, here it is found that quadratic polynomial model is more applicable to WEI score in all areas on the basis of cross validity prediction power (CVPP) test. Regarding contraceptive behaviour, more use of contraception has been found for higher aged, higher educated women and for the respondents who have media access, discussed family planning more frequently with their husbands. The study also reveals that urban women use more contraception than their rural counterparts. In this study, respondent's current age, age at first marriage, work status, CEB, spousal discussion of family planning have been identified as significant factors affecting contraceptive behaviour on the basis of multinomial logistic regression analysis. The study also shows that CEB increases with the increase in respondent's age, number of children dead and household decision making index. Finally this study tries to find out the significant factors affecting fertility using multiple linear regression analysis and confirms respondent's current age, age at first marriage, educational qualification, husband's educational attainment, number of children dead, religion, media exposure, discussion on family planning and household decision making participation as significant determinants. The findings of this study have a great importance to promote women empowerment in Bangladesh. Thus to face challenges in the coming future, the policy makers, planners should have to take not only necessary policies but also to implement them at their earliest convenience.