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Keywords: women’s autonomy, intra-household resource allocation, economic experiment, cocoa, Peru
Women’s autonomy over intra-household resources has been shown to be a lever to achieve better food security and nutrition (Njuki et al. 2022). However, women in patriarchal and patrilineal societies are often less autonomous in decision-making around household resources. A large body of the literature has shown that household decisions are not always based on common preferences and agreement with other members, but rather on the bargaining power of each member (Doss and Quisumbing 2020). Moreover, when women are recipients of external resources, as in the case of some development programs, their decision-making power over them remains tied to their level of autonomy, which in turn depends on their bargaining power within the household (D’Exelle and Ignowski 2022). The fact that sustainability initiatives, such as certification schemes, transfer resources directly to the farmer or household head, rarely a woman, underscores the importance to investigate the bargaining power of women within farming households. Still, despite the proliferation of certification and other supply chain sustainability initiatives, the evidence on women’s autonomy in this value chain segment remains scant. In this study, we use economic experiments to explore women’s autonomy over intra-household resource allocation in the context of certified cocoa farming households in Peru. The study investigates the following research questions: 1) to what extent women are less autonomous over external resources than men and 2) to what extent higher levels of specialization affects this autonomy.
Between April and July 2023, we interviewed cacao-farming households that were members of cooperatives in three cocoa-producing regions in Peru. Through a two-stage, stratified sampling, we first selected ten cooperatives with multiple certification schemes and other sustainability initiatives. Second, we stratified the cooperative lists by sex and randomly selected women and men members. Our final sample consists of 566 households, of which 484 are dual-adult households and 82 are female-adult-only households. We carried out a household-level and farm-level survey with the cocoa manager in each household, as well as separate individual-level surveys with the cocoa manager and other primary male/female in the household, most of the time the partner, resulting in 1,050 respondents.
Before starting the surveys, we randomly select one individual among dual-adult households to participate in two economic experiments in order to elicit, respectively, 1) participant’s willingness to pay to avoid disclosing receipt of a participation fee to their spouse and 2) participant’s willingness to pay to avoid transferring a participation fee to their spouse. In the first experiment, the participant receives a private participation fee that can be chosen in cash, in kind, or as a voucher from the cocoa cooperative. Then, the participant is given the option to increase the participation fee and, if they wish, to also change the payment method, in exchange for disclosing receipt of the fee to their spouse. By varying the level of increase in the participation fee, we measure participant's minimum willingness to pay to avoid disclosing the participation fee. In the second experiment, the participant also receives a participation fee and can chose from the different payment methods. However, this time the fee is public, i.e., revealed to their spouse. Then, the participant is given the option to increase the participation fee in exchange for transferring the fee to their spouse, who may again choose a different payment method if desired. By varying the level of increase, we measure participant's minimum willingness to pay to keep the fee for themselves. Although participants make decisions in both experiments, only one of the two is randomly selected at the end to define the payoff. We run OLS and Probit regressions for the analysis of differences in the willingness to pay between men and women, controlling for individual (income, education), household (household size, wealth status), and farm (land area, number of cash and food crops cultivated) characteristics. Then, to assess to what extent cocoa production specialization affects women’s autonomy over the participation fee, we use the share of land devoted to cocoa production and marketing as a cocoa specialization indicator and include it as main explanatory variable in an OLS regression on women’s and men’s willingness to pay. Again, we control for a battery of individual, household, and farm characteristics, as well as using agroecological, spatial data to correct for potential endogeneity issues.
Preliminary results show that women are, on average, more willing to pay to avoid disclosing the fee to their spouse than men. None of the men interviewed were willing to pay any amount to avoid disclosing the fee. This is line with previous literature finding that when resources are disclosed in the household, women have lower autonomy and, therefore, would rather pay to keep it private (D’Exelle and Ignowski 2022). We also find that women are more willing to pay to keep the fee for themselves than men. This suggests that women’s decision-making power is hindered when resources are pooled. Based on previous studies that found cash crop specialization further exacerbating gender inequalities (Fischer and Qaim 2012), we expect subsequent analyses to show that women are less autonomous (i.e., have a higher willingness to pay in both experiments) in households with higher cocoa specialization.
This study contributes to a better understanding of women’s autonomy in the context of cash crop production using both experimental and survey-based primary data. Such nuance evidence can inform intervention aiming at promoting women’s empowerment and gender equality.
D’Exelle, Ben; Ignowski, Liz (2022): Intra-Household Resource Allocation in Rural Tanzania: Why Women Care about Disclosure. In the Journal of Development Studies 58 (10), pp. 2021–2043.
Doss, Cheryl R.; Quisumbing, Agnes R. (2020): Understanding rural household behavior: Beyond Boserup and Becker. In Agricultural economics (Amsterdam, Netherlands) 51 (1), pp. 47–58.
Fischer, Elisabeth; Qaim, Matin (2012): Gender, agricultural commercialization, and collective action in Kenya. In Food Security 4 (3), pp. 441–453.
Njuki, Jemimah; Eissler, Sarah; Malapit, Hazel; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth; Bryan, Elizabeth; Quisumbing, Agnes (2022): A review of evidence on gender equality, women’s empowerment, and food systems. In Global Food Security 33, p. 100622.
