Gender-Differentiated Health and Related Impacts of Improved Cooking Technologies in Rural India

Abstract

The literature base examining the impact of household energy interventions on the health outcomes of populations exposed to indoor air pollution ignores gender dimensions. Understanding these gender-differentiated impacts is crucial to undertaking effective energy interventions because women suffer more from energy poverty compared to men. Using rare events logistic regression analysis, I estimate the differences by gender in the probability of health outcomes, depending on stove type and fuel type. These technologies include clean stoves (such as improved cookstoves and household biogas production plants) and clean fuels (liquid fuels such as LPG and kerosene) among rural households in India. I find that the likelihood of a negative health condition is higher in households using traditional stoves and dirty fuels; in unclean stove-using or unclean fuel-using households, for most health outcomes, women suffer more compared to men. In unclean stove-using and dirty fuel-using households, there is no additional effect of gender on children’s writing and math cognitive skills or BMI measurements.