A Field of Her Own: Property Rights and Women’s Agency in Myanmar

• In Event: Gendered Political Economy

Abstract

Women are economically and socially disadvantaged throughout the world. A critical driver of gender inequality is women's limited access to assets, especially land: Women are 43% of the global agricultural labor force, but women only hold only 25% of agricultural land globally. Many global poverty-reduction programs focus on giving cash and other assets to households, and in particular to women, in order to reduce gender inequality and jump start a range of positive outcomes, but what policy makers know about both how to sustainably increase equality and the consequences of such shifts in power dynamics in limited. In this paper, we explore what happens when men are financially motivated to increase women's individual real property wealth. To do so, we take advantage of exogenously determined bank policy that incentivizes men in households with land-holding above 10 acres to title the surplus land in their wives’ names. Which men (and women) respond to financial incentives that create more formal property rights equality in the household? What is the impact of changing practices and norms of formal property ownership on economic and social experiences of individuals and households? We exploit a rich survey of 5068 men and women living in the Ayeyarwaddy region of Myanmar, including information from both partners in each household on a wide range of demographic and economic factors, as well as on household decision-making processes, agency or "empowerment", norms, and the quality of intimate relationships.

Authors

• Alexandra Hartman, UCL

• Edmund J. Malesky, Duke University

• Lakshmi Iyer, University of Notre Dame