Marriage and gender relations

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.

Throughout their life, women go through different stages where their autonomy is challenged. Some develop strategies to free themselves from a controlling family member and eventually, if married, from their partner. Thus, navigating through different unions may bring some women to gain more confidence in themselves and in return to have greater control of their own life. However, the relationship between the marital paths and women's perceived autonomy remains unclear. Our main goal is to evaluate the extent to which the various marital trajectories used by women in sub-Saharan Africa affect their perception of autonomy using the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project. To achieve our goal, we use sequential analysis to illustrate women's marital paths. Subsequently, we use similarly grouped marital trajectories as our main independent variable. Autonomy, our dependent variable, is represented by a series of questions on different dimensions commonly used in the literature. We use ordered logistic regression models to predict autonomy and control for covariates shown to have some effects on women's empowerment. We expect that ever-divorced women will be more likely to have higher autonomy particularly for the dimensions of divorce, decision-making and negotiation of safer sex.

It is well known that married people have better physical and mental health than their non-married counterparts. But Korean demographic trends in women’s marriage are additional evidence that might address that single life of women is becoming less disadvantaged. The proportion of the population aged 29~34 and never-married has dramatically increased for women, and most of never-married women become better educated and make progress achieving socioeconomic independence (Statistics Korea, 1975~2010 Census). With higher rate of women’s non-marriage, the norm of 'proper age' at marriage and the meaning of never-married has dramatically changed, and even social stigma used to be attached to single women aged over the 'proper age' has notably diminished (Yoon, 1994; Kim, 2005). These changes suggest that non-married women in Korea now becoming more and more selective, which may affect the health of this population as compared to those married counterparts.Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate not only the relationship between marital status and the health status, but also the health differentials in women by marital status and employment status to assess the meaning of the changes among Korean women.