THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WOMEN IN DETERMINING THE CONSUMPTION PATTERN IN THE HOUSEHOLD- THE STUDY OF

UTTAR PRADESH

Ms. Amita Marwha*

INTRODUCTION

The processes by which resources are allocated among individuals and the outcomes of those

processes are commonly referred to as "intrahousehold resource allocation."

Development projects often focus on improving the welfare of vulnerable individuals by

providing resources to their household .The distribution of benefits derived from these resources

however cannot always be assumed to confirm to the priorities of the project designer .Many

important decision that affect economic development outcomes takes place at household level

including fertility decision ,education of children ,labor force participation and production

activities at various agricultural and non –agricultural household enterprises. Naturally ,many

empirical studies in development economics use household as the unit of analysis .Most of those

studies ,albeit with a growing number of exceptions ,treat the internal decision making process

inside the household as “ black box”; that is relatively little attention has been paid to how

decisions are made and how resources are allocated in the household. A growing body of

literature points to serious errors in estimating the level of inequality and poverty

when the intrahousehold resource allocation is overlooked ( Hadad and

Kanbur ,1990 ; Apps And Savage 1989) Gender refers to the socially constructed roles,

* Lecturer, Department of Economics, Isabella Thoburn College,

E-mail –ladys3074@gmail.com

behaviour, activities and attributes that a particular society considers appropriate for men and

women.The distinct roles and behaviour may give rise to gender inequalities, i.e. differences

between men and women that systematically favour one group.. At the turn of the millennium

and after over half a century of independence, the world’s largest democracy is expected to stop

and consider the state of women in its country. IT was more than a century ago, in 1870 that

Queen Victoria wrote to Sir Theodore Martin complaining about “this mad, wicked folly of

‘Woman’s Rights’ the formidable empress certainly did not herself need any protection that the

acknowledgment of women's rights might offer. Even at the age of eighty, in 1899, she could

write to A.J. Balfour, "We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist."

That, however, is not the way most people's lives go - reduced and defeated as they frequently

are by adversities. And within each community, nationality and class, the burden of hardship

often falls disproportionately on women.

On the surface, one sees increasing international exposure, urbanization and a growing industrial

sector, rising male and female literacy, and relatively low inflation—aggregate indicators that tell

stories of progress and development, but also hide volumes behind their numbers. Women and

men, upper castes and dalits, urban workers and rural workers; none share alike. Many women

have risen to positions of power within the government at the centre and state levels; others head

businesses, hold high-salary jobs, outperform boys in school examinations and are, generally,

more visible than they have been at anytime outside the freedom struggle. Yet, seeing the Indian

scenario a decade after reforms, it seems that for every woman that gains in power, several more

silently recede further into the depths of poverty.

II

MODELS

Unitary Approaches to Intrahousehold Allocation

The idea that the household represents a locus of economic activity dates back at least to

Chayanov's study of Russian peasants, first published in 1926 (Chayanov 1986). However, the

economics of the family and the household was fully brought into the mainstream by Gary

Becker, the 1992 Nobel Prize winner in economics, in the mid-1960s. The essence of Becker's

approach was that, in accordance with a single set of preferences, the household combines

time, goods purchased in the market, and goods produced at home to produce commodities that

generate utility for the household (Becker 1965).It is known as “Unitary Model, Common

Preferences Model, The Altrusim Model or the Benevolent Dictator Model.The Unitary model

is so named because this label describes how the household acts as one ,where as other such label

tend to reflect the means by which the household is hypothesized to act as one.

Collective Approaches to Intrahousehold Allocation

Fundamental to the unitary model is the assumption that there exists a parental, or household,

welfare function and that all resources—capital, labor, land, and information—are pooled.

Unitary model of Household behavior has been criticized on the ground that its assumptions are

not the good descriptions of the reality especially the Incoming Pooling outcome (Brawing et al

1914; Haddded and Schultz 1990)As a consequence various alternative theoretical models has

been developed that relax the key assumption of the unitary model. Those more general models

are loosely called “collective Models”

Collective models typically assumes that different household members have different preferences

and / or different “Bargaining Power” and Intrahousehold resources outcome emerge as a result

of interactions among those elements.Although most researchers acknowledge that the problem

of how the common actions come about is not solved, many argue that the unitary model is a

useful approximation and that an exploration of the underlying decision-making process yields

no additional useful information.

Others are more troubled by this assertion. These concerns have spawned a set of approaches—

the "collective" approaches (Alderman et al. 1995)

III

POLICY

Even if policymakers are agnostic about the usefulness of any specific household model, unitary

or collective, they neglect patterns of intrahousehold inequalities at their peril. Consider a

common policy situation: a government attempts to target a program to individuals by age or

gender, rather than to households. Many examples exist in which governments assume either (1)

that amelioration of household poverty is sufficient for the alleviation of individual poverty or

(2) that individual poverty can be alleviated without regard to the actions of other household

members. These assumptions will lead to policy failure, irrespective of the choice of resource

allocation model.

Consider a nonwelfarist approach to raising the food consumption of undernourished individuals

through an in-kind transfer to undernourished households. Haddad and Kanbur (1990)

demonstrate that the undernourishment rankings of various socioeconomic and geographic

household groups can change when individual-level food consumption information is used

instead of household-level information. For example, although individual-level data may indicate

that individuals from certain households are an important food poverty group, a reliance on

household-level data might imply that they are not an important group. This result occurs when

patterns of intrahousehold inequality differ between different household groups. If inequality

were similar in all groups, food poverty rankings would be identical, whether or not individual

level data were used to target the transfer.. A welfanst approach to poverty assumes that the level

of income indicates the welfare of the individual or household in question, regardless of how that

income is spent. A nonwelfarist approach focuses on the consumption of one or more goods or

services without direct invocation of the household's own assessment of the utility of consuming

that commodityPrograms that do rely on individual-level data for targeting purposes are prone to

another type of error of neglect of household decisionmaking. These programs often confuse the

need to isolate the individual outcome with the assumption that the food allocation mechanism

within the household can be ignored. Suppose there is concern regarding the nutrition of

children. A possible policy response is the implementation of a school meals program in which

children who are recorded as being particularly undernourished receive extra food. The success

of this intervention cannot be ascertained in the absence of information on the pattern of food

allocation among household members. Households might respond to this program by reducing

the amount of food the targeted child receives at home (and increasing the amount of food

consumed by other household members). Indeed this was the conclusion of Beaton and

Ghassemi's (1982) review of international experience with supplementary feeding programs (see

also Kennedy and Alderman 1987). Ironically, the naive approach to targeting individuals in

isolation from the household is an extreme version of a child as a "separate sphere" and thus is

inconsistent with the unitary model, among others.

Recent research has shown that improving women’s decision making power relative to men’s

within households leads to improvements in a variety of well-being outcomes for children. In

South Asia, where the influence of women’s power is particularly strong, these outcomes include

children’s nutritional status and the quality of feeding and health care practices. Focusing on

nutritional status, this paper presents the results of a study investigating whether increases in

women’s power have a stronger positive influence on the nutritional status of their daughters

than their sons. If so, then increasing women’s power not only improves the well-being of

children as a group, but also serves as a force to reduce long-standing discrimination that

undermines female capabilities in many important areas of life as well as human and economic

development in general. South Asia is the region with the most severe anti-female gender

discrimination in the world. Among adults, it is manifested in strong gender differences in

education levels, employment, and earnings (World Bank 2001). The region’s high rates of

maternal mortality (Adamson 1996) indicate a neglect of women’s health care.

While not all studies agree, many find that males are favored in the allocation of food within

households, especially when it comes to diet quality (Haddad et al. 1996; Chen, Huq, and

D’Souza 1981; Bouis and Novenario-Reese 1997; Del Ninno et al. 2001; DeRose, Messer, and

Millman 1998; Miller 1992).

Gender-based discrimination in the region is not limited to adults. Among children, boys are

treated for illness more often than girls, and immunization rates are higher for boys, indicating a

relative neglect of girls’ health needs (Haddad et al. 1996;Filmer, King, and Pritchett 1998;

Arnold 1997; Ryland and Raggers 1998; Hazarika 2000). The most extreme son preference in

the world is found in South Asian countries. It stems from economic considerations such as the

greater ability of sons to provide old age economic support to parents, and from deeply engrained

traditions, such as dowry, which make it costly to marry off daughters (Arnold 1997; Alderman

and Gertler 1997;Rosenzweig and Schultz 1982). Perhaps the most disturbing manifestations of

son preference are female infanticide (relatively rare) and an increasingly common

“hightech”form of discrimination, sex-selective abortion, leading to “natality inequality

“between the genders (Sen 2001; Miller 2001). With these practices, girl children’s rights are

violated before they are even born or shortly after, times when they are most vulnerable and

innocent.

The end result of gender discrimination among both adults and children in South Asia is a high

rate of excess female mortality, unnaturally low life expectancies for females relative to males,

and population sex ratios skewed disproportionately in favor ofmales. At an aggregate level,

these skewed ratios document that millions of women are missing from the region’s population

(Sen 1992; Klasen and Wink 2001).

Poor health among girls and women leads to low birth weight in babies and continued health

problems for both men and women, including increased incidence of cardiovascular disease later

in life. Further, gender inequalities slow the pace of development by stalling economic growth

and poverty reduction (Sen 2001; World Bank 2001). Reducing gender discrimination would not

only improve equity, it would benefit the regions’ overall social and economic development in

many ways. While women’s decision-making power within households, where most of the

decisions about care for children take place, is known to be lower than that of their husbands,

women are the main caretakers of children in South Asia, as in most of the developing world.

Past studies have demonstrated that when their power is increased, women use it to direct

household resources toward improving their caring practices and, therefore, the health and

nutritional status of their children (see, for example, Smith et al.2003; Thomas 1997; Doss 1997;

Kishor 2000; Mencher 1988).

This study asks if there is an association between women’s power and discrimination against girl

children in South Asia. The results will help assess whether women would use increased power

to direct household resources toward equalizing the well-being of girls and boys. Nutritional

status is the outcome of a child’s nutrient intakes and health status, both of which are strongly

influenced by the quality of the care children receive(UNICEF 1998). The objective of the paper

is to determine whether increases in women’s decision-making power relative to their husbands

will lead to greater improvements in girl children’s nutritional well-being than boy children’s,

evidence that increasing women’s power would serve to reduce gender inequalities not only

among adults but in the next generation as well.

Most of the studies look at the consumption patterns of health and education resources between

boy and girl children.

Indeed, relative to studies on the intrahousehold allocation of food, the results of studies

examining the consumption of health inputs appear to have stronger and more consistent results.

Reasons cited for the pro-boy bias are duration of breast-feeding, quantity and quality of health

care, and survival probabilities after diarrhea episodes all of which are reported to favor boys.

Indeed,in India and Pakistan, breast-feeding duration is longer for boys partly because there is

less urgency to have another child after a boy (Miller 1981). DasGupta's study on the Indian

Punjab (1987) found that wider sex differentials existed for medical care than for food allocation.

And in Nepal, mothers were more frequently concerned about the adequacy of their milk for

boys (Levine 1987).

In Pakistan, lower income households, sought care more often for boys than for girls, and were

likely to use higher quality providers for boys although this difference in frequency and quality

of care disappeared as income increased (Alderman & Gertler 1996.Below given are the

key indicators of the National Family Health Survey held in India in 2005-

06.In Uttar Pradesh .There is a complete neglect of questions related to

household decisions making, intrahousehold equalities across gender,

earning potential or expected future benefits etc which highlight the gender

bias in Indian household consumption pattern in the data collection Results of

the household and individual interviews (as asked in the fact sheet of NFHS-3, 2005-06) .

Neglect in data collecting could be harming an optimum result itself as benefit may not be

reaching to the right kind of potential target in poverty alleviation schemes and other social

benefits schemes.

Table: FINDINGS OF THE NATIONAL HEALTH FAMILY SURVEY -3 HELD IN THE STATE

OF UTTAR PRADESH.

2005-06

Source: National Rural Health Mission -3

NFHS-3 RESIDENCE EDUCATION

URBAN RURAL NO

EDUCATION

< 8 YEAR

COMPLETE

10 YEAR

COMPLETE

A) MARRIAGE AND FERTILITY

1) WOMEN AGE 20-24 MARRIED BY

AGE 18(%)

53.0 30.0 61.1 72.9 55.8 17.6

2)MARRIED WOMEN WITH TWO

MORE CHILDREN WANTING NO

MORE CHILDREN

64.2 76.3 58.6 52.7 59.2 82.7

2(a) TWO SONS 73.7 78.3 71.4 66.9 67.4 84.6

2(b)ONE SON ONE DAUGHTER 72.2 84.2 66.5 57.4 78.0 90.2

2(c)TWO DAUGHTER 30.8 51.9 21.3 23.8 22.2 52.2

(B) WOMEN EMPOWERMENT

3) CUURENTLY MARRIED WOMEN

WHO USUALLY PARTICIPATE IN

HOUSEHOLD DECISION

48.2 59.0 44.9 50.4 44.6 47.9

IV

WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT- Employment and earnings

Thirty-four percent of currently married women age 15-49 were employed in

the last year, compared with 98 percent of currently married men in the same age group; one-

fifth of these women received no payment for their work, and a little more than one-third were

paid only in kind (35%). Overall, only 45 percent of employed women earn cash, compared with

95 percent of employed men. Among married women who work and are paid in cash, 90 percent

decide how their earnings will be used, either alone or together with their husbands; only 7

percent have no say in how their earnings are used (data not shown in tables). Twenty-one

percent of women who work for cash earn about the same or more than their husbands.

Decision making

Married women were asked who makes decisions about their own health care, making

large

household purchases, making household purchases for daily household

needs, and visiting

their own family or relatives. More than half of currently married women (50-

64%) participate

in making each of these decisions. However, only 34 percent participate in

making all four of

these decisions and 22 percent do not participate in making any of the four

decisions. Women

in nuclear households and women who are employed for cash are more likely

to participate in

these household decisions. Other groups of women who are more likely to

participate in all

four decisions are women in urban areas, those with more years of

education, scheduled-tribe

women, and those who are 30-49 years old.

Other indicators of women’s empowerment

Sixty percent of women have some money that they can decide how to use.

The proportion of

women with money which they control is highest for women in the highest

wealth quintile,scheduled-tribe women, and women with at least 10 years of

education. Only 13 percent of women have a bank or savings account that

they themselves use.

Women’s knowledge and use of microcredit programmes is very limited.

Only 14 percent of

women have heard of any microcredit programme in the area and about

one-half of one percent have ever used one. Only about 40 percent of

women are allowed to go by themselves to the market and to a health

facility and only one-quarter of women have freedom to travel outside their

own village or community.

National Family Health Survey 2005-06

Uttar Pradesh

V

To reach to the more substantive conclusion I conducted a primary survey(sample of which

attached in the Appendix 1) in which questionnaire was prepared,some of the main parameters

which were used are highlighted below.survey tried to find an answers to questions like

1. Does gender difference has significant impact on expenditure patterns ?

2. Does social and economic status of women affect expenditure patterns in the household?

3. Which factors affect the variations in expenditure in children?

4. Does variation in economic and social staus of women significantly impact expenditure

for children (in favour of female child)

Table 2:Highlights of the survey

Challenges

Faced by

women

Opportunities

For women

Maximum

income spent

on male/ female

Role of civil society Expectations

From The Law

Makers In The

Country

98% of the

respondent

said Gender

inequality,

safety and

security

75% feels More

opportunities are

available to younger

generation than older

generation,credit

given to technology.

80-85%

respondents feel

Still in todays

time male gets

larger share in

the income of

the family.

we can make people

educated by opening

night schools for poor

families ,we can make

them understand the

benefits of educating

girls and making them

aware about the

necessity of giving

equal rights to girls

proper law for the

safety of

women ,giving

more equality to

women in which

men enjoy greater

powers

Source:conducted by author

VI

CONCLUSION

Developments projects often focus on improving the welfare of vulnerable individuals by

providing resources to the househld .The distribution of benefits derived from these resources

however can not be always be assumed to confirm to the priorities of the project designer which

raises the significicance of the study intra household allocation issue.findings of the above given

survey and various other surveys conducted by National Sample Survey organization and various

others have to include Intra household resourse allocation as a key indicator in their survey

which will help thwe identifiy most vulnerable group instead treating family as a

group.Empowerment of women and especialy married women have the capacity to reduce

gender bias and change consumption pattern in favour of children.

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(Ed.) Human Well-Being: Concept and Measurement. London: Palgrave

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Development Economics*

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Appendex1

Gender Challenges/Inequalities and New Opportunities for Women

  QUESTIONNAIRE  

1. Name of the respondent---------------------------------------------------------

2. Housemaker/school going/college going/profesional--------------------------------------------------------

3. If professional ,mention profession---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4. Define gender equality (what respondent think in generall)--------------------------------------------------

5. Challenges faced by women in today’s society ------------------------------------------------------------------

6. Are there generation having more opportunities than older generation----------------------------------

7. Will they allow there girl child to choose career of her choice-------------------------------------------

8. Who gets the bigger share of spending in the family male child or female child and why ------------9. Is investment on girls education a burden or cosidered right of a child without discrimination-----10. How as a mother they are differrent from oldergeneration in giving opportunities to girl child-----

11. Do they think if mother earns girl child gets adequate and equal opportunities as amale child then when mother is non erning member-------------------------------------------------------------------------

12. Who is the final decision maker in the family- father/ father and mother/ mother 13. What are the new opportunities for women available in the field of career 14. What can we as a civil society do to reduce gender ineuality-------------------------------------------------

15. What are your expectations from the law makers in the country---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Declaration

This article submitted by me is original, has not been published

earlier, and has not been submitted /or accepted for publication

elsewhere.

Ms Amita Marwh

Faculty, Department of Economics,

Isabella Thoburn College