Socio-Economic Factors and Women's Empowerment: Evidence from Punjab, Pakistan

The empowerment of women is an essential objective to fully engage them in economic life and achieve sustainable growth throughout the world. Providing basic facilities to women is one form of empowerment. This paper examines the extent of women's empowerment in Punjab, Pakistan and its divisions, along with rural and urban regions. In addition, we check the effect of the gender wage differential on the current dilemma by implementing Alkire et al.'s [2013.The women's empowerment in agriculture index (Working Paper No. 58). Oxford, UK: Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. Retrieved from https://www.ophi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/ophi-wp-58.pdf.] indexing on HIES 2013-14 datasets. Our results show that 34.91% of women are empowered in Punjab overall, with independence being the highest dimensional contributor, and ownership of assets being the least. Women are 31.43% more empowered in urban regions. The results indicate that Islamabad has significantly more women's empowerment, while Dera Ghazi Khan has the lowest percentage of empowered women. To assess particular impacts of different socio-economic and demographic variables on women's empowerment, logistic regression model is applied, revealing that most socio-economic and demographic variables have significant impacts on the current scenario, and variation in any variable causes significant variations in the status of women's empowerment, with increased wage differential in particular, decreasing the probability of women being empowered.