Study Shows How Power Dynamic Persists Even as Women Gain A Sense of Individualism
Social norms exclude women in patriarchal societies, like this young Nigerian woman, from decision-making processes, even after empowerment programs increase their desire for agency.
Image Credit: USAID
True gender equality remains elusive throughout the world, but especially in developing countries, where social norms perpetuate disparities in wealth, opportunity, education and self-determination between men and women. The UN Sustainable Development Goals recognize women’s empowerment as an important objective in addressing a wide range of global challenges. And still, despite many years of well-funded, aggressive women’s empowerment programs, change has been slow to take root in some areas.
A recent study by the University of Maryland reveals some of the deeply entrenched social dynamics that can limit women’s empowerment programs in a West African country. The researchers tested the impact of one program in northwestern Nigeria and found that women’s desire to make decisions increased, but they continued to defer to or consult their husbands unless they could enact their choices secretly. The study was published online in the Economic Journal in December, 2024.
“Our study found that in this patriarchal environment, where women most often defer decision-making to their husbands, women who are exposed to a program in which they get to make many decisions change the way they internalize social norms,” said Ken Leonard, a professor in the UMD Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and lead author of the study. “These women want to have more agency, but they’re not able to tell their husbands, and they were no more assertive, unless their actions were hidden from their husbands.”
The study showed that the empowerment program reduced how much women internalized the social norm of deferring to their husbands, but it did not reduce the fear of retribution for breaking that norm. This information could guide development of future empowerment programs.
Leonard and his colleagues conducted their experiment by creating a limited shopping experience and participant surveys with married couples from 27 villages that had recently participated in a women’s empowerment program.
That program gave a substantial sum of unconditional cash to the women of randomly selected households for 15 months. After the program, female-led entrepreneurship and household consumption surged in the villages while food insecurity fell, but negative attitudes about women working outside the home and opinions about the acceptability of violence against women remained unchanged.
Leonard wondered if the household decision-making process might be preventing women from being more assertive and negotiating with their husbands, even if they had more money or more financial opportunities.
Leonard and his team experimented with a variety of situations in which individual members of a couple made decisions about where to allocate money or vouchers for specific items divided along gender lines: male items, female items and general household items. Depending on the test, decisions were kept secret, or revealed to the spouse, or partners could defer to their spouse with or without seeing their spouse’s choices.
The researchers also conducted an experiment in which people were offered one of two snacks to eat on the spot, out of view of their spouse. The participant could either choose the snack for themselves, or defer to their spouse without knowing what their spouse chose for them.
When combined, the different tests were designed to reveal what each spouse really wanted and how each member of a couple influenced the other’s decision-making. The researchers hoped to learn whether women and men were making and asserting their own choices or deferring to their spouse. The study included couples who had received the empowerment program funds and those who had not.
Their results showed that men rarely deferred to their wives, but most women deferred to or consulted their husbands, regardless of whether they had been through the empowerment program. However, when a woman’s choices were completely hidden from their husbands, the women in the empowerment program were more likely to make their own choices than those women who had not.
Leonard said that although these results suggest areas for improvement, these results do not suggest empowerment programs don’t work at all.
“Many of the decisions that women make about their lives are effectively hidden from their husbands,” Leonard said. “Even if women couldn’t change the way they act publicly, private changes in behavior can have important consequences. Nonetheless, it is important not to overstate the ease of altering norms within a society.”
