Exploring the Bidirectional Relationship between Women’s Employment and Intimate Partner Violence during Pregnancy in India

Poushaly Talukdar , International Institute For Population Sciences
R Nagarajan, Professor and Head, Department of Population and Development, International Institute for Population Sciences
Chander Shekhar, International Institute for Population Sciences

Pregnancy increases a woman’s vulnerability to intimate partner violence (IPV) due to stressors like son preference, unintended pregnancy, women’s acceptance of IPV and partner’s alcohol abuse. While women’s employment is widely viewed as a pathway to greater empowerment, it may contradict normative gender expectations, provoking male backlash in India. Our study uses a sample of 58,993 ever-pregnant women from the National Family Health Survey data (NFHS-5,2019–21) to examine the nature of the association between a woman’s employment status and the experience of physical IPV during pregnancy in India. We used linear probability model (LPM) to assess the linear association. To address reverse causality, we employed a two-stage residual inclusion (2SRI) model, instrumenting women’s employment with the cluster average female employment status. LPM estimates indicated a modest positive relationship (ß = 0.013, CI 0.007-0.019, p<0.001), but women’s employment was endogenous. After accounting for endogeneity, our findings revealed that employed women had a higher probability of reporting IPV during pregnancy in India (M.E. = 0.033, CI 0.012-0.053, p<0.001), supporting the male backlash theory. Affluence (M.E.= -0.011, CI -0.020--0.002, p<0.05) and higher household decision-making agency (M.E.=-0.024, CI -0.032--0.016, p<0.001) were among the protective factors. Hence, considering employment as having a non-unidirectional relationship with IPV during pregnancy would improve the predictive power of the factors associated with the reproductive health of women in India.

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 Presented in Session P6. Health, Mortality, and Ageing 2