Women's empowerment in western China: measurement, determinant factors and its correlation with poverty

Women’s empowerment is a key focus of the Sustainable Development Goals. It is
also an element in China’s national poverty reduction strategies. As most poverty
identification, alleviation, and graduation strategies are targeted on households
rather than individuals, the status of rural women’s empowerment remained
insufficiently studied. This paper examines the status of women’s empowerment in
the formerly poverty-stricken rural areas in western China, using data obtained in
2021 from a questionnaire-based survey on 1027 rural households in seven
counties of four provinces. It constructs a women’s empowerment index with 10
indicators in five domains – production, resources, income, leadership, and time
use – based on women’s empowerment theories and practices in agriculture. The
study finds that the average level of women's empowerment is 0.654. Women are
most empowered in the time use domain while least empowered in the leadership
domain. Logistic regression results reveal that women’s ages, women’s educational
years and the decision-making in women’s parental families are significant
determinants of women’s empowerment. Further studies indicate that the role of
family legacy is getting weaker in younger generations and stronger among
spouses with closer ages. The household relative poverty status has no significant
effect on women’s empowerment in this study, which implies that in rural areas,
sociocultural factors might outweigh economic factors in determining women’s
empowerment.