Social norms and perceptions drive women’s participation in agricultural decisions in West Java, Indonesia
Date
2021-11-02
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer Nature
Abstract
Increasing women’s participation in intrahousehold decision-making has been linked with increased agricultural productivity and economic development. Existing studies focus on identifying the decision-maker and exploring factors affecting women’s participation, yet the context in which households make decisions is generally ignored. This paper narrows this gap by investigating perceptions of women's participation and the roles of social norms in agricultural decision-making. It specifically applies a fine-scale quantitative responses tool and constructs a women’s participation index (WPI) to measure men’s and women’s perceptions regarding women’s participation in decisions about 21 agricultural activities. The study further examines the correlation between social norms in these perceptions as measured by the WPI for 439 couples in West Java, Indonesia. We find that first, men and women have different perceptions about women's decision-making in agricultural activities, but the same perceptions of the types of activities in which women have the most and the least participation. Second, joint decisions come in various combinations but overall, the women’s role is smaller. Third, social norms influence spouses' perceptions of decision-making participation, which explains most of the variation of the WPI. These results suggest that rigorous consideration of social norms is required to understand intrahousehold decision-making.
Description
© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Version of Scholarly Record of this Article is published in Agriculture and Human Values, 2021, available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-021-10277-z . Keywords: gender; intrahousehold decision-making; women's participation index; agriculture; social norms; Indonesia.
item.page.type
Article
item.page.format
Keywords
Citation
Qanti, S.R., Peralta, A. & Zeng, D. Social norms and perceptions drive women’s participation in agricultural decisions in West Java, Indonesia. Agric Hum Values 39, 645–662 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10277-z