Bargaining Power of Married Women Engaged in Domestic Duties
摘要
The chapter explores the supply side possibility of adding to the labour force a large section of married women (18 to 50 years) currently engaged in domestic duties. It focuses on the factors affecting the bargaining power of married women to enter the labour force. It emphasizes the importance of the higher education level of married women in increasing their relative intra-household bargaining power, proxied by the changes in the couple years of education gap. The analysis is based on five rounds of the unit-level employment dataset of NSSO covering five thick rounds of 1987–1988, 1993–1994, 2004–2005, 2009–2010, and 2011–2012. The key methodology involves the generation of a sample of married couples from the datasets. The bivariate probit analysis framework provides support for the underlying hypothesis, and the results are robust to the conversion of the continuous variable of couple years of education gap into a categorical variable of marital assortative mating. From the policy perspective, providing higher education to girls in India may gradually pave the way for reducing gender disparity in labour force participation of women.