Female Control of Household Resources and Cooking Behaviors in Rural India
Abstract
Indoor air pollution due to traditional biomass-burning stoves poses a major respiratory
health
risk in the developing world. Children, in particular, disproportionately bear the
burden of
disease caused by this problem. One way to directly address this issue is through
increasing
access to “cleaner” cooking technology, whether in the form of “improved” biomass-burning
cookstoves that reduce exposure to emissions, or in the use of cleaner, non-biomass
fuels such as
liquid petroleum gas. Existing research suggests that when women in less-developed
countries
enjoy more “bargaining power”—control over household resources—outcomes favorable
to
women and children are more likely.
I attempt to determine whether this conclusion can also be applied to cooking behaviors,
using a data set drawn from approximately 2,000 household-level surveys in the Indian
states of
Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. I use linear regression to estimate the effect on use
of such fuels
of four factors that could conceivably proxy for women’s control over household resources:
relative ages of a husband and wife, husbands’ and wives’ relative years of education,
female
household headship, and whether or not a wife engages in an income-generating occupation
outside of housework.
My results show a clear positive correlation between both wives’ and husbands’ years
of
education and improved stove ownership; when regressed together, however, wives’ years
of
education are correlated with improved stove ownership by a greater magnitude than
their
husbands’ years of education. This suggests that education may have a stronger effect
on
women’s preferences for improved cooking technology and/or their ability to exercise
these
preferences. In contrast, age, female headship, and wives’ income generation did not
show a
significant correlation with improved stove ownership, and had ambiguous correlations
with
related outcomes, such as time spent cooking and preparing fuel. This indicates a
need for more
qualitative and narrative studies in this field, as well as more direct empirical
inquiries into
gendered preferences, to better understand these relationships and their effect on
indoor air
pollution.
Type
Master's projectDepartment
The Sanford School of Public PolicyPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/7929Citation
Lubet, Alyssa (2013). Female Control of Household Resources and Cooking Behaviors in Rural India. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/7929.More Info
Show full item record
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Rights for Collection: Sanford School Master of Public Policy (MPP) Program Master’s Projects
Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info