Government’s Income Support and Women Empowerment: Regional Estimates of a Lower Middle-Income Economy

Investment in women is the smart thing to do. Pakistan has to meet SDGs till 2030, among which the 5th goal is empowering women and gender equality. We have to find the correlates that affects the empowerment of a woman to empower them. For this purpose, the current study was designed. A large sample of 12339 married women aged between 15 to 49 years was taken from PDHS 2017-18. The status of women empowerment was evaluated by formulating an index (ranged from score 0 to 10) by taking the 8 dimensions of women empowerment namely, woman’s decision making autonomy, digital inclusion, educational status, employment status, ownership of house, self-esteem, consent in choosing husband and her inclusion in financial sectors. The extent of women empowerment is observed at urban and rural areas. For analysis, ordered logistic regression technique was applied by using SPSS-23. It was concluded that as compared to women of urban areas, the women belonged to rural areas were less empowered. The disaggregated analyses showed that the determining factors of women empowerment were affecting in similar way in both urban and rural areas, except that of BISP which was increasing women empowerment in rural areas but not in the urban areas.