Empowering Women in Pakistan's Agriculture: Rethinking Sharecropping, Education, and Rural Dynamics

This study examines the impact of sharecropping agricultural structures on women'sempowerment in Pakistan, utilizing data from the Pakistan Social and Living Standard Survey (PSLM)across three-time cohorts: 2010-2011, 2014-2015, and 2019-2020. Employing a comprehensiveempirical model and the Heckman two-step approach to address potential sample selection bias, weanalyze a sample of 315,835 respondents. Contrary to initial expectations, our findings reveal thatparticipation in sharecropping does not have a statistically significant impact on women's empowerment,as measured by female employment. However, the study identifies several other crucial determinants ofempowerment. Education consistently demonstrates a positive and significant relationship withempowerment, reinforcing its vital role in enhancing women's status. Surprisingly, rural residence showsa strong positive effect on empowerment, challenging assumptions about urban areas offering moreopportunities for women. Ethnicity emerges as a significant factor, with non-minority (Punjabi) womenshowing higher levels of empowerment. An unexpected finding is the positive association between beingfemale and empowerment in the combined model of both genders, suggesting potential gains for womenwho overcome barriers to economic participation. These results have important implications for policy,highlighting the need for continued focus on education, targeted rural development programs, andinterventions that increase women's control over resources in the agricultural sector. The studycontributes to the broader understanding of the complex interplay between agricultural practices, socioeconomicfactors, and women's empowerment in developing nations, while also identifying areas forfuture research, including the need for more nuanced, multidimensional measures of empowerment andlongitudinal studies to establish causal relationships.