Women’s Decisionmaking and Child Health: Familial and Social Hierarchies

Ever since the advent of Women in Development literature in the 1970s, many researchers have argued that women’s empowerment is closely linked to positive outcomes for families and societies (Presser and Sen, 2000). Nowhere has this argument been more important than in the literature on child health (Mason, 1986). While intuitively plausible, the empirical work on this topic has been limited. Two major factors account for this paucity in the literature: 1) conceptually, as we begin to use an increasingly sophisticated and nuanced conceptualization of empowerment, the way in which different dimensions of empowerment relate to each other has become increasingly problematic; and 2) data for empirical research on this topic have been limited at best.