Her job, her safety? Domestic violence and women’s economic empowerment in Ethiopia

Domestic violence against women is a pervasive public health problem in all countries regardless of cultural, economic, and political background. Yet, the prevalence of domestic violence is very high in sub-Saharan Africa. In this paper, I examine the effect of women’s employment on domestic violence using the Demographic and Health Survey in Ethiopia. Using the Instrumental Variables approach, this paper exploits exogenous geographical variation of the employment rate of women to address the endogeneity of women’s employment decisions due to reverse causality. After accounting for the endogeneity issue, the estimation result shows that women’s employment significantly reduces the risk of domestic violence. This result holds robust across different dimensions such as physical, sexual, and emotional violence and for urban and rural places of residence.