Women’s Empowerment Across the Life Cycle and Generations: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Florence Arestoff (1, 2) , Elodie Djemaï (3, 1, 2)

1 LEDa - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dauphine
2 IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement
3 DIAL - Développement, institutions et analyses de long terme

Does female empowerment evolve over the life cycle, and has it changed across generations? We use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys covering a sample of about 191,000 adult women to evaluate the age, period and cohort effects regarding individual attitudes to marital violence. Pseudo-panel data are constructed from repeated cross-sections from five African countries in the 2000s. The estimates show that, over the life cycle, women tend to think that marital violence is less and less justifiable, and that younger cohorts are less likely than older cohorts to view marital violence as justifiable, even controlling for education.

Mots clés: empowerment; marital violence; age-period-cohort; pseudo-panel; Sub-Saharan Africa

Domaines: Économie et finance quantitative [q-fin]

Florence Arestoff, Elodie Djemaï. Women’s Empowerment Across the Life Cycle and Generations: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa. World Development, 2016, 87, ⟨10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.06.002⟩. ⟨hal-01385796⟩