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Report Explores Links Among
Women's Autonomy, Smaller Families, and Healthier
Children
Population Reference
Bureau
Research in developing countries over the past
30 years suggests that maternal and child health
tend to improve, fertility and childhood mortality
tend to decline, and population growth slows when
women gain greater autonomy and equality with men.
But the links between women's status and population
change reflect each country's culture. They are not
the same everywhere or at all times, according to a
new report from the private, nonprofit Population
Reference Bureau.
Demographer Nancy Riley's survey of the social
science research suggests that gender equality is
not likely to translate automatically into
mortality or fertility declines, and that both
mortality and fertility have declined in societies
with little gender equality. Dr. Riley found that
education and paid employment are more likely to
lower fertility and child mortality if they
increase a woman's power to make decisions about
health care, contraception, or the timing and
number of her children.
"But in societies where a woman's major source
of power comes from her role as a mother, increased
female education, paid employment, and lower
fertility may actually lessen women's power," she
noted.
Education's influence on health and
fertility
In nearly all societies, Riley found that the
amount of education a woman achieves affects the
number of children she has and her children's
health and nutrition.
Fertility levels are usually lowest among the
most highly educated women within a country. In
Brazil, for example, women with no formal schooling
have an average of 6.7 children while those with a
secondary or higher education have only 3.2
children on average.
The relationship between women's education and
child health and mortality is even stronger.
Mothers with more education witness fewer deaths
among their children. In Indonesia, for example,
the death rate for children under age five drops
from 131 deaths per 1,000 births for mothers with
no formal education to 51 for mothers with a
secondary or higher education.
The mother's education also effects a child's
nutritional status. Children whose mothers
completed a secondary or higher education are much
less likely to be short or underweight for their
age than are children with less educated
mothers.
"Women's education can influence fertility by
providing women with new job opportunities and by
introducing women to new values or ideas," said
Riley. "Education probably influences infant and
child mortality in similar ways," she said.
Power more important than earned
income
"In general, employment outside the home
operates much like education in that it exposes
women to new ideas, new norms of behavior, and the
influences of people outside the family," she said.
"Because of interactions with people outside the
family and a greater sense of power within it,
women may feel they should have a larger role in
decisions about how many children they should have,
how to treat a sick child, whether and what kind of
contraception to use, or decisions about moving to
another area."
But the key to whether female employment affects
demographic change lies in whether work translates
into increased power for women. Employment might
signal increased income and status for women in one
culture, while it means poverty and arduous
physical labor in another, she reported.
"In a society where women are expected to work,
work may reflect positively on women's self-worth
and signal that women have opportunities in an
important sphere of society," explained Riley. "In
another setting, women's labor force participation
may be a sign of lower status or her husband's
failure to earn enough to allow her to stay home
and attend to family."
In most countries, women who work for cash have
fewer children than those who do not work for cash.
In Brazil, for example, women who work for pay
average nearly two fewer children than those who do
not.
But earned income does not translate into more
power, or encourage smaller families in every
culture, she reported. The fertility differences
between women who do and do not work can be quite
small within the same country. In Ghana, for
example, women working for cash have only 0.7 fewer
children than those not working for cash. In Mali,
family size is the same whether or not a mother
works. And in Nigeria, women who earned income had
more children than women who did not.
Women's labor force participation does not have
a consistent effect on child health either. In
Uganda and Guatemala, children of employed mothers
are less likely to have stunted physical growth
from severe malnourishment, but in Sri Lanka the
opposite appears to be true. There is also no
uniform relationship between mother's employment
and the percentage of children who are underweight
for their age, another measure of
malnourishment.
Riley's findings suggest that there is no
"one-size-fits-all" policy for improving gender
equality. But she is encouraged by the discussions
following the International Conference on
Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, and
the move to broaden population policies and family
planning programs to consider the cultural factors
that shape women's lives in developing
countries.
"Policymakers, family planning practitioners,
and demographers are now engaged in a wide-ranging
discussion on priorities for population programs
and how to achieve them," she said. "Efforts to
empower women and make family planning programs
more culturally sensitive are drawing new
attention."
Copies of "Gender, Power, and Population Change"
may be purchased for $8.50 (price includes postage)
from PRB.
Founded in 1929, the Population Reference Bureau
is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to
the dissemination of timely and objective
information on population trends.
From: Population Reference Bureau, Washington,
DC. Copyright 1997. All rights reserved. Reproduced
with permission.
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