Women Empowerment in India: Evidence from the NFHS

Social history and novels in many Indian languages record violence against married women in India, mainly perpetrated by their husbands. Yet, only in the last two decades has a systematic effort been made to estimate the magnitude of violence, its determinants and reasons, the forms in which it is manifested, and its health, social, legal and economic consequences. This paper uses data from the NFHS-3(2005–06) to document women's empowerment as a some selected state. In general, it finds that the average woman in India is disempowered absolutely as well as relative to men, and there has been little change in her empowerment over time. This result is obvious no matter how empowerment is measured, be it in terms of the indicators of the evidence, sources or setting for empowerment. However, there is great variation in the level of women's empowerment across the different states and across indicators. If NGO employees are advocating behavior change for self-empowerment such behavior must also be modeled for successful transmission as suggested in the self-efficacy models of behavior change.