Empowerment of married and separated/divorced women in Mexico

Most of the instruments developed for the measurement and analysis of empowerment have taken as a subject of analysis the married women or in union, proposing various indicators which take as a reference a marital relationship. However we want to look at possible differences that women with different marital status may have in terms of some dimensions of their empowerment process and then inspect and compare the role that these empowerment´s dimensions play in their risk of partner violence.
This work has three objectives. First, the estimation of various indexes related to the empowerment of women. Second, to compare the levels of married and unmarried women across these indicators. And third, to examine the associations between these empowerment dimensions and married and unmarried women’s risk of partner violence.
The data used comes from the Mexican National Survey of Household Relationship’s Dynamics 2011 (Endireh 2011). For the first objective Factorial Analysis is used to estimate additive and weighted indexes. For the second objective we use Analysis of Variance and t-tests. And finally we estimate separated logistic models (for married and unmarried women) to examine the associations of these empowerment dimensions and the risk of partner violence.