The Gender Gap in Relative Autonomy: Domain-specific Evidence on Intrahousehold Decision-making in Rural Bangladesh

Aggregate gender-parity indices rank Bangladesh ahead of its South Asian neighbours but say little about the quality of women's agency inside the household. Grounding the analysis in the capability approach, in which agency is constitutive of well-being, this paper uses the motivation modules of the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index in the 2018–19 Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey to construct the Relative Autonomy Index for spouses across nine decision domains, and studies the within-couple gap in normalised autonomy. Husbands are significantly more autonomously motivated than their wives in every domain, with the numerical gap largest for serious health problems and protection from violence, although their threat-related framing requires caution, and smallest for daily tasks. The correlates of the gap are domain-specific, but a wider spousal education gap, the husband's agricultural occupation, and the wife's experience of domestic violence accompany a larger gap, while the wife's age, her activity participation, and most robustly, her membership of a collective-action group accompany a smaller one. These associations survive clustering on the primary sampling unit and a correction for testing nine domains at once. The findings are associational and identify women's collective action, education parity, and information access as priorities for gender-responsive programme design.