Problem statement

Women empowerment can have significant implications for food security and nutrition in many ways, which is why studying this particular relationship has gained a lot of attention in the development literature (Haddad and Hoddinott, 1994; Lepine and Strobl, 2013; Imai et al., 2014). It has been well demonstrated that households do not necessarily pool their incomes and particularly women may have different preferences than men with regards to the investment of additional resources (Alderman et al., 1995; Lundberg et al., 1996). Empirical literature shows that women invest substantially higher amounts of resources into the well-being of their family members, compared to their male counterparts (Duflo, 2012).

Furthermore, it has been found that women might also invest more into particularly healthy types of food (Duflo and Udry, 2004).

However, studying the role of women and their level of empowerment heavily relies on the definition and conceptualization of empowerment. According to Kabeer (1999), women empowerment should be seen as ‘... the process by which those who have been denied the

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ability to make strategic life choices acquire such an ability.’ (p. 435). However, developing the tools to analyze this process is challenging. Gender equality is a multidimensional concept, and different dimensions of equality depend on a number of factors and are highly context-specific. For example, women may experience some level of power in participating in decisions on income, but at the same time lack ownership of critical resources to exercise real power. Akter et al. (2017) point out that in order to design meaningful policies targeting gender inequalities, it is important to acknowledge the specific contexts in which certain policies are developed. Therefore, studying gender equality and women empowerment in different contexts is critical to evaluate specific needs and constraints with respect to gender.

It follows that addressing both the context-specificity as well as the multidimensionality of women empowerment in the development context is critical in examining the relevance of empowerment for outcomes such as food security and nutrition.

There is a growing body of literature investigating the linkages between women empowerment, food security and nutrition, and a woman’s ‘power’ has been measured by various indicators in empirical literature. Many studies focus on proxy measures of empowerment such as education, the share of household income held by women, or physical capital in the form of assets (Haddad and Hoddinott, 1994; Doss, 1999; Duflo, 2004). More recently, empirical research tried to conceptualize women empowerment and acknowledge its multidimensionality. Lepine and Strobl (2013) for example developed a measure of a woman’s bargaining power by asking individuals in rural Senegal about who in the household makes decisions with regards to the wife’s health, the children’s health, the schooling of children, what to cook and other matters. Subsequently, they empirically analyzed how this measure of a woman’s bargaining power relates to child nutritional status and found that female bargaining power has a significant effect on child nutritional status. Another example of such a measure is the Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) (Alkire et al., 2013). The WEAI analyzes women empowerment in agriculture within five domains of empowerment, i.e. production, resources, income, leadership, and time. It has thereafter been used in a number of studies and contexts to analyze women empowerment in general, and the relationship between women empowerment and nutrition in particular (Sraboni et al., 2014;

Malapit et al., 2015; Malapit and Quisumbing, 2015; Zereyesus, 2017). The general picture is that the positive relationship between a strong position of women and nutritional outcomes can be confirmed in various contexts. However, virtually all of these studies either focus on South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa, but very little evidence exists for the Arab region.

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Therefore, we collected extensive data on household food security, dietary diversity and detailed information related to gender roles in rural Tunisia. We analyze these data with respect to the level of women empowerment and nutrition in Tunisian farm households, and particularly focus on the relationship between women empowerment and dietary diversity.

The results can help to further understand patterns of intra-household resource allocation, dietary patterns and women empowerment and more specifically to understand the role of women in the Arab culture.

Apart from analyzing differences in outcomes related to the well-being of children between households, another approach is to investigate differences between individuals within the same household. Empirical literature suggests that children within the same household often do not experience similar amounts of care and resources, especially in developing countries, but resources are rather allocated unevenly across siblings, typically by birth order and gender (Behrman, 1986; Horton, 1988; Ota and Moffatt, 2007; Azam et al., 2012). In India, especially girls with older siblings are particularly vulnerable to being neglected (Pande, 2003; Raj et al., 2015). While daughters usually leave the parental home after marriage and stay with their grooms’ families, the practice of dowry poses a financial burden after marriage of daughters, which is especially problematic for comparatively poor families (Sen and Drèze, 2002). Evidence shows that girls receive less childcare, are breastfed for shorter periods of time and receive less vitamin supplementation (Barcellos et al., 2014).

Empirical studies focusing on differences between children within households usually analyze disaggregated data in a descriptive manner and include dummy variables into their empirical specifications to examine specific group effects, such as birth order or gender (Pande 2003;

Sraboni et al., 2014; Barcellos, 2014; Raj et al., 2015). We argue that patterns of intra-household inequalities in outcomes can be better examined by actually constructing a measure of inequality within households and using it as dependent variable. To the best of our knowledge, this dissertation is the first that uses such a measure to analyze the role of women empowerment for explaining differences in nutritional outcomes within households.

Furthermore, we are not aware of any study analyzing linkages between women empowerment and nutritional outcomes using panel data.

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