Women's empowerment and fertility preferences in Southeast Asia

Abstract

In this thesis I examine the relationship between women’s empowerment and fertility preferences of women in four Southeast Asian countries, including Cambodia; Indonesia; the Philippines and East Timor, using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys. First, micro data are utilized to create measurement models for women’s empowerment using principal axis factoring. Three factors of women’s empowerment are found, which are women’s labor force participation, women’s education and women’s household decision-making. Second, these three women’s empowerment factors are examined to see if they have any associations with women’s fertility preference, measured by the ideal number of children and the ideal number of sons. Results from OLS, Poisson and ordered logit models show that women’s empowerment has significant and negative association with the ideal number of children and the ideal number of sons in the four countries of study. This research overcomes current obstacles in the operationalization of women’s empowerment by moving from the aggregate to the individual level using data from developing countries. The results of this study suggest that female labor force participation is the key in keeping fertility at a balanced level, and son preference is mostly associated with inside-the-household factors such as household decision-making rather than outside-the-household factors such as education and employment. All in all, the impacts of women's empowerment on fertility decision-making are more differentiated than the theoretical literature might suggest, relating specific types of empowerment to specific types of fertility preference.