Women's Participation in lntrahousehold Decision-making: A Case in Rural Smallholder Farm Households in West Java Indonesia

Abstract

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Goal 5, “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”, highlights the importance of women’s empowerment and gender equality. Empowering women contributes to faster economic growth, better social development, more stable and just societies, and enhanced food security. As a form of empowerment, increasing women’s participation in decision-making within the household (intrahousehold) is believed to result in better outcomes for women and their families, and is widely recognised as an important pre-condition for agricultural growth. However, studies have shown that the extent to which this condition holds, is context specific. In Indonesia, especially in rural communities where agriculture is the foundation of people’s livelihood, women play important roles in agricultural production. Despite their profound involvement in providing labour and management to activities within the broader production system, their participation is often under-recognised. This thesis attempts to understand the extent, determinants, and outcomes of women’s participation in intrahousehold decision-making in smallholder farm households. The objective of this thesis is to investigate women’s participation in intrahousehold decision-making, to assess the instruments that are used to measure this participation, and to study how this participation correlates with agricultural technology adoption in the context of rural smallholder farm households in West Java, Indonesia. This work is informed by the theories of women's agency developed by Kabeer (1999) and intrahousehold cooperative models of decision-making by Chiappori (1992). It is also informed by the conceptual frameworks that try to explain instrumental agency and how it is measured (Ibrahim & Alkire, 2007). The thesis has three main analytical chapters, which address the research objectives through a combination of descriptive analysis and econometric estimation. The study utilised two cross-sectional surveys: 500 couples of crop farming households and 600 couples of dairy farming households in West Java, Indonesia. The first analytical chapter investigates how men and women perceive women’s participation in 21 agricultural activities. Using a women's participation in decision-making index, this paper further examines the correlation between social norms and these perceptions. Results show there are differences between men’s and women’s perceptions about women's decision-making in agricultural activities; and that spouses’ perceptions of decision-making participation are influenced by social norms about gender roles. The second analytical chapter investigates the spousal discrepancies in responses to 39 farm and non-farm decision-making participation questions within six domains. This paper examines whether these discrepancies are explained by random or asymmetric measurement error, or by information asymmetry. Using pairwise t-tests and multivariate mean tests, in accordance with the existing literature, the results suggest that the differences in response vary based on the type of activities. The results suggest that spousal discrepancies likely portray the separate-sphere gender-based involvement in different activities. The final analytical chapter examines how women’s participation in dairy farming activities and decision-making correlate with the adoption of dairy farming technology. Using linear probability model regressions, the analysis finds that women’s participation in dairy farming activities and decisions have a positive correlation with the adoption of improved dairy cow nutrition, specifically on the adoption of feeding legume forages and improving drinking water availability for the milking cow.