THREE ESSAYS ON SOCIAL POLICY IN LOW- AND MIDDLE-INCOME COUNTRIES: TOWARD GENDER EQUALITY AND FREEDOM FROM VIOLENCE

While there has been considerable progress in promoting gender equality across the world, women and girls continue to lag behind men and boys in several domains, including food security, social protection, and time use. Poverty and discriminatory cultural and social norms remain at the core of gender inequality, and constrain women’s participation and productivity in households and in society. This dissertation aims to further illuminate processes of gender inequality, particularly in the context of economic vulnerability. To this end, Chapter 1 examines the long-term dosage impacts of the Malawi Social Cash Transfer Program (STCP) on young women’s and men’s relationship quality and young women’s experiences of IPV. Chapter 2 uses qualitative in-depth interviews to map out trajectories of intimate relationships to understand the economic context of relationship formation and identify relationship stressors and triggers of IPV among young women in SCTP households. Chapter 3 uses three waves of data from the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey to examine concordance in different measures of empowerment, and understand determinants of empowerment transitions among women and men in the same household. The first two chapters add to growing evidence on how economic vulnerability early in life interacts with gender and social norms to influence intimate relationships. The findings support strengthening the SCTP in terms of transfer amount and targeting to improve the program’s intergenerational effects. Furthermore, cash transfer programs can be layered with additional and targeted interventions that address group-specific vulnerabilities (cash plus programming). The precise combination of cash and cash plus to effect positive change, however, likely varies by context and requires further study. The third chapter underscores the need to better measure, track, and understand empowerment transitions with panel data in the longer term. Efforts to advance and sustain women’s empowerment should consider the sensitivity of metrics used, discuss the inherent challenges with measuring empowerment transitions over time, and tailor programs to meet the needs of women and men who are on different empowerment trajectories. Together, these chapters improve our understanding of gender equality and women’s empowerment in two contexts with the goal of improving women’s lives everywhere.