Examining effects of women’s participation in non-farm work

Abstract

Literature is replete with studies on impacts of participation in non-farm work in the rural context and how it contributes to attenuation of rural poverty. The differential impacts of women’s participation in non-farm work have received less importance. The three essays of this dissertation bring to the forefront the gendered impacts of participation in non-farm work. It explores impacts of women’s participation in non-farm work on social esteem and diet quality. The first essay provides an overview of the evidence related to the determinants and impacts of non-farm incomes. The determinants include individual, economic and household level determinants that have varied effects across countries. The major impacts included in this essay comprise household income, poverty and inequality, agricultural productivity and food security. However, we argue that the impacts of livelihood diversification to non-farm employment is not restricted to only these tangible welfare indicators, especially when women are employed in non-farm work. We establish a conceptual framework using the Gender, Gaps and Assets Framework of Quisumbing et al. (2015) and empowerment framework of Kabeer (1999) to outline the pathways of women engagement in non-farm work to social esteem, an intangible indicator and nutrition of the household focusing on diet quality. The objective of this essay is to establish the relevance of the focus of the dissertation and serve as an introduction to the other essays. In the second essay, we explore intangible effects such as social esteem and self-worth that have been studied less in the literature of non-farm work participation by women. We investigate whether higher levels of social esteem will be observed among women employed in non-farm work, reflected in greater altruistic behaviour. To test this, we conduct dictator games in a lab-in-the-field setting to observe donations of participants across occupation types in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, followed by a survey of the participants. Using a between-subjects design and a treatment of public vs. private donations and associated social esteem concerns, we find that making the donation action visible increases the donation by 15 percentage points on average. Results also show that giving significantly vary among women across the visibility of the donation action, social esteem and the occupation type. The predicted donation amounts of women participating in both farm and non-farm work are higher by 32 percentage points on average than those of the women participating only in farm work. The third essay investigates whether the household diet quality is improved when the women participate in non-farm work for a rural farming household in India. We argue that women’s engagement in non-farm livelihoods, not only generates a positive income effect, but also a higher bargaining power effect that promotes diet qualities. Using a secondary panel data set (Indian Human Development Survey) and employing instrumental variables regression techniques, we find that participation by women in non-agricultural livelihoods enables greater dietary diversity by positively affecting, the share of food expenditure on proteins and diet quality, as measured by the household diet diversity score. We find that the diet diversity score will increase by 6% if the women in the household are employed in non-farm work versus households where women are employed in only farming activities. Income from non-agricultural livelihoods has a significant positive impact on the diet quality of the households and this corroborates findings from earlier research. Diversification of occupations and changing dietary habits, features of the rural Indian economy, underscore the significance of such research with implications for both employment and nutrition policies. Policies or programs aimed at expansion of the non-farm sector could benefit from such research that highlights promotion of intangible prosocial behaviour and community level welfare effects via the channel of empowerment arising from employment in non-farm work by women.