Ethnic Inequalities, Migration and Women Empowerment in Pakistan: An Evidence from Pakistan Demographic Health Survey 2017-2018 (PDHS)

Abstract

This thesis aims to capture variations in women empowerment and the role of internal migration keeping in view the embedded ethnic inequalities in Pakistan’s society. The women empowerment is proxied by their role in household decision making over resource allocation, violence justifying perceptions, their asset ownership and financial empowerment, whereas the ethnicity is defined on linguistic basis. Further, it controls for socio economic and household characteristics, which are household size and wealth, women’s education, employment status and their asset ownership. To this extent, this thesis utilizes dataset of more than 13,000 women taken from Pakistan Demographic Health Survey (PDHS) 2017-2018. By employing OLS regression, our empirical findings confirm that in terms of ethnicity, Urdu speaking women are found to be more empowered where as Siraiki, Hindko, Balti and Pahari women are less empowered. Further, the migration analysis shows that the Pukhtun and Sindhi women’s decision-making power decreases with migration and their patriarchal beliefs tend to be more pronounce unlike Balochi and Siraiki women. Moreover, migration leads to increase in the financial empowerment of Punjabi and Pukhtun women. This thesis provides insights on strategies that national governments can focus on to increase the empowerment of women of different ethnic groups in Pakistan.