Sarah Day

Does Improving the Status of Women Reduce Fertility in the Third World?

By Sarah Day

The relationship between reducing fertility and the role of women in the third world has been a topic of serious debate in the past few decades. The reproductive role of females is only a small piece of why addressing the status of women may be the key to addressing fertility concerns. Recently, studies have focused on the role of education, the amount of autonomy women have, and women’s income as they relate to fertility. This paper will help outline the results of recent studies and examine how the politicization of the fertility debate can affect policy development and implementation.

In 1994, the United Nations held the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt to discuss and develop agendas for global population policies. The conference, held every ten years, at this particular session made women’s issues a priority. Specifically, the final document emphasized the need for improving women’s access to education, health, and political and economic power. Increasing educational opportunities for women and girls is the main strategy for eliminating the gender gap in schooling and elsewhere in society. John Knodel and Gavin Jones present a conflicting argument in response to the Cairo conference where they suggest that promoting education for girls is not necessarily the most effective way to address fertility concerns in the third world. Rather, Knodel and Jones explain that because the gender gap in education varies so much between countries (and hardly applies to some) and is closing everywhere, there is less need for policies addressing this disparity. They propose that the more urgent problem is closing the socioeconomic gap that creates obstacles to schooling and other services. The access to education that women receive from broadening population policies will undoubtedly affect fertility rates and other social externalities such as health, nutrition, and children’s schooling and health. The problems that Knodel and Jones see in the assumption that closing the gender gap will reduce fertility is that it does not address the need for greater incomes to keep children in school or the distribution of public funds for education that frequently compounds the existing inequalities in education. Their study emphasizes that while closing the gender gap in education is important in many countries, most third world countries would be better served by broader policies that address the overarching socioeconomic obstacles to educational opportunities.

Still others believe that other types of policies directed towards women would have a greater affect on fertility. Several studies have shown that the degree of autonomy a woman has in her community is strongly related to fertility rates. Sousan Abadian is one such scholar who has argued that autonomy of women is a key factor in determining variation in fertility rates. Abadian writes, "the fundamental absence that distinguishes the lives of many poor women can be characterized as an absence of freedoms, especially the freedom or capability to achieve well-being." Measuring the impact of autonomy (or lack thereof) on fertility can be done by using several different factors. Abadian chooses female education, female age at marriage, spousal age difference, infant mortality, urbanization, and family planning efforts as the main factors in her analysis. The empirical evidence from studies in more than fifty developing nations using the aforementioned factors shows that enhanced autonomy for women "as measured by female education, female age at marriage and spousal age difference seems to have a significant negative impact on fertility." The other factors of infant mortality, urbanization, and family planning also appear to be significant. The study shows, perhaps most importantly, that policies such as increasing the availability of contraception or increasing schooling for girls (as Knodel and Jones studied), are missing the mark. The sheer demographic objectives of such policies preclude any fostering of respect for women and do not help them to achieve fundamental freedoms that will eventually allow for changing fertility rates. According to Abadian, many current population control methods, "ultimately diminish the autonomy and well-being of women even further—compromising the welfare objectives of development—and…may perversely perpetuate and reinforce the problems they set out to solve." Increasing the autonomy of women may have even larger societal effects by changing traditional views of the role of women in society. If such a drastic transformation of perspectives can take place, the path will be paved for fertility reduction. Abadian admits that her recommendation for broadening the focus of population policies to include the enhancement of women’s autonomy would require a significant amount of time and social upheaval to be successful. She is not, however, the only demographics scholar to stress the importance of female autonomy in reducing fertility rates.

Another study done by Dharmalingam and Morgan looks at the varying levels of women’s autonomy in two different South Indian villages. The first village employs most women in rolling beedis or cigarettes. The nature of the work is such that women pick up their own materials from the contractor each day and return the finished products later on. Because they are contracted employees, only the women can retrieve materials and return the finished beedis, and they are also the only ones that can receive the paycheck. They, therefore, have a substantial amount of autonomy. In the second village, few women work for a wage; rather, most do housework or some type of agricultural labor. The study done on the two villages used three measures of women’s autonomy; perceived economic independence (as reported by the woman herself), freedom to move within and between villages, and spousal interaction (whether spouses discuss family decisions such as having children and finances).

The results of the study show that women living in the first village have greater economic power from beedi work that allows them more freedom of movement and decision-making power. Additionally, because of the mass scale of beedi work in the village, the entire community is affected by the economic independence of women. Traditional norms and roles of women have changed and have caused a social transformation that has increased the likelihood of contraceptive use. In the second village, women have much less freedom and are twice as likely to not use birth control methods. The likely reasons why women with greater economic and social freedoms or autonomy might be more likely to have lower fertility are: 1) a women’s increased power could cause her to marry later and shorten the reproductive span; and 2) a women’s autonomy would motivate her to have fewer children within marriage because her higher status would "undermine patriarchal family structure, reduce son-preference, and increase the opportunity costs of having children." Dharmalingam and Morgan’s study reinforces Abadian’s claim that increasing women’s autonomy has a significant effect on lowering fertility in developing nations.

Just as women in the first South Indian village studied above may make different reproductive decisions because of their increased economic power, a study by Ruth Pearson shows that women in Cuba were forced to make different decisions within the family because of economic changes in their country during the 1990s. While women in Cuba have had significant autonomy since the 1960s and have been fully integrated into the workforce, the economic crisis had reversing effects. Women were expected to provide childcare and all other services (food, etc) to children, such that maintaining a job in the formal labor force was made extremely difficult. Many women gave up their jobs in order to dedicate themselves to housework and meeting the reproductive needs of the family. Under such conditions of economic hardship and less female autonomy, fertility declined in Cuba. This result is contradictory to the expectation of what would happen in a developing nation, perhaps partly because fertility in Cuba was low even before the economic crisis.

All of the studies mentioned here imply that fertility is most certainly a political issue and that certain policies can be aimed at achieving demographic objectives. Alaka Malwade Basu argues that the ‘politicization’ of fertility may also help achieve non-demographic objectives such as greater autonomy for women. Basu writes, "once the key role of women’s welfare in fertility reduction has been acknowledged, women’s voices have acquired a new legitimacy, even when they demand special treatment on matters which are less clearly linked with their fertility performance." There are several risks in the greater visibility of the women’s movement as related to fertility, one of which is that measuring the effect of women’s status on fertility does not always yield the same results—some studies have shown that increases in education and employment of women in certain countries actually increases fertility. Another possible risk is that such a concentration on the female role in fertility rates will appear to be a call to completely reverse traditional power relations between men and women. The ‘politicization’ of fertility may not always work in favor of the women’s rights and autonomy. However, what is clear from all of these studies is that, although increasing the status of women may not be the key to reducing fertility in every country, increasing female autonomy is extremely important and could play a large role in achieving demographic objectives in the developing world.

REFERENCES

A. Dharmalingam and S. Philip Morgan, "Women’s Work, Autonomy and Birth Control: Evidence From Two South Indian Villages", in Population Studies, Vol. 50, No.2, July 1996, pp. 187-202.

Alaka Malwade Basu, "The ‘Politicization’ of Fertility to Achieve Non-Demographic Objectives" in Population Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1, March 1997, pp. 5-18.

John Knodel and Gavin W. Jones, "Does Promoting Girl’s Schooling Miss the Mark?", in Population and Development Review, Vol. 22, No 4, December 1996, pp. 683-702.

Ruth Pearson, "Renegotiating the Reproductive Bargain: Gender Analysis of Economic Transition in Cuba in the 1990s", in Development and Change, Vol. 28, 1997, pp. 696-703.

Sousan Abadian, "Women’s Autonomy and Its Impact on Fertility", in World Development, Vol. 24, No. 12, December 1996, pp. 1793-1809.