Field Trip EP 5: How Women’s Socio-Economic Status Correlates with IPV?

Hey everyone, this episode may not be suitable for all audiences as we will be discussing the topic of intimate partner violence. If you or someone you know requires for their assistance, resources will be available in our show notes. This podcast was recorded on the traditional ancestral and stolen lands of the Musqueam people. We are committed to ensuring Indigenous women's rights to health and safety and the equal opportunity to participate in a manner that recognizes and respects Indigenous cultures and traditions. Hello and welcome back to Women's Health Interrupted Field Trip. I'm Dr. Marina Adshade. And I'm Demarra Featherstone. Our next stop on this field trip is Development and Gender Economics, where we will meet Dr. Shouen Anderson. So buckle up and enjoy the ride. What drew you to the field of development to economics? I was always interested in issues of global poverty, but I come at it from a background of mathematics. I actually did my undergrad in math. So I was really drawn to the methodology of economics in terms of how they approach social problems. And I suppose a really formative part of my life was before I started the PhD, I spent a year in India as a visiting grad student. So that opened my eyes up to all the issues in real time and also just the issues of gender there. So it was sort of quite shocking for me to see the status of women in that context. We'd love to talk about your paper on intimate partner violence because I think it really gets down to that idea. But what might be structural reasons for why some countries have high rates of intimate partner violence and others? So I'd love it if you could tell us about that. So that one is really focusing from a policy perspective, this idea that economics sort of approaches intimate partner violence by understanding it from a household bargaining framework. So in that case, there's sort of this prediction that if women are better off economically in society, they essentially have the ability to negotiate in the household better because they can actually leave. If things get really bad, they can actually leave the household and leave an abusive situation. But in economics, what we're really concerned about is causality. So we sort of want to establish that if you shift property rights, so these are marital property rights. So in the case of marital dissolution or divorce, women have access. They're allowed 50% of all marital income or wealth. There's variation in that in Africa. So if they're in that situation, then they're less likely to suffer abuse in the household. It's just the fact that, hey, I actually have the power to leave this because I will be financially secure. And then they are able to sort of essentially suffer less violence in the household because they have more power outside the household. But you don't actually ever have to realize it's just this threat, this notion of power. It's almost like it's something that we take for granted in developed countries that women do have access to a share of the household wealth if they divorce. And it's so interesting how having like a real conversation about how that reduces violence in the home and improves the women's quality of life. Yeah, exactly. I mean, these are actually legacies of colonial history, right? Because it's actually the British former colonies that are worse off than the former French in this situation. And that's because the British law was really way worse off like late 19th century. And so we were England was also worse off than France in that era. But we had all this family law reform that happened in the 60s with feminism. And we completely transformed our property rights. But this is the time of independence in Africa. This total chaos, the last thing they're worrying about is reforming family law. And they never did. So these are actually legacies of colonial history as well. I think that it's interesting too because for this mechanism to actually work, women need to have access to divorce. You know, the reforming of our divorce laws here in Canada and other countries in mean Ireland has only gotten divorced in the last like 10 years or 12 years. How important that is for women's safety? Oh, exactly. This study is only in Africa where divorce is completely common. If you took this to Asia in particular South Asia, this wouldn't be relevant because exactly women do not have the rights to divorce. But also in India, for example, it's so shunned upon socially. Marriage is considered an indesovable union in a religious term. So no one does it essentially. It's only the highly educated, high status people might do it. So there are two divorces very uncommon. In Africa context, it's very common. Remarriage is very common. But that's certainly context specific as well. In this research, you suggest that there is a pretty clear path to reduce intimate partner violence that doesn't actually require a change in criminal laws. So are there examples of countries that have made this type of change? Or what do you see as the next step after this preliminary research? I was sort of surprising at the paper that didn't have to be about how much are the men punished. It was legal reform. And that's what I kind of think economics can contribute. Like what I was thinking about this podcast, what can contribute to people focused on health? We kind of take a big picture approach. We kind of find these unintended consequences. So all around the board, giving women property rights is better. But you wouldn't expect it to have such a large impact on health outcomes. And then I also find it in the HIV work too. And it's related that they're in that case I find evidence that they're able to negotiate to safer sex contraception methods to protect them from HIV. And that's why you see it mattering there too. The purpose of this podcast is for us to talk to different social scientists and kind of ask them, what are some tangible ways that the more biomedical women's health researchers can apply your research to their women's health research? Do you have any advice from your experience and what people may apply to their research? I think there's two things. One is our methodology and our focus. We do tend to take a much bigger picture approach. What I've read in a lot of the health literature, they're taking quite small case studies. So for example, I did this stuff on missing women, which is the measure of excess female mortality relative to male mortality. It's what women are demographically missing and trying to get at which part of that discrimination, what isn't. But what I noticed just looking historically is this massive differences in mortality by gender, for example, now that we observe. So everywhere in the world women die later than men. Men have a shorter lifespan. But this only started in 1920 in the developed world. Economists ask different questions. Like why are we seeing this massive divergence? So I think there's a lot of scope for interaction. I'm sure they're interested in female mortality rates. Of course they are. But the questions they ask are very different. And I think also that we are very interested in policy. So I think you find these unintended synergies. So working together could move policy more forward at a faster pace, because policy makers are just trading off. And I think economists sort of take a bigger picture sometimes it could be useful. I also think too that economists are far more comfortable with the concept of a natural experiment. And actually I think we have good tools for doing the natural experiments, like the ones that you do in both of these papers, where we're looking at people that are being randomly assigned to groups by borders that didn't exist before, right? They were created by the colonizers. And I think that is something that would be, I think, good for scientists to consider that you can do natural experiments. You can use macro data, for example, or as opposed to micro data to try to answer some of these questions. And I'm sure that a lot of health researchers are like, we should do this because it's good for people's health, whereas economists are more inclined to say, you should do this because there are very real economic benefits to doing this. To making these changes is worthwhile for governments to spend money for these outcomes because ultimately it will benefit the economy in the long run. So one of the things that I'm constantly advocating for is free contraceptives in Canada, where the only Canada is the only country in the world that has public healthcare system but doesn't have free contraceptives. There's a really clear economic argument to be made for making contraceptives available because they're pretty low cost, but the cost of labor force costs, but also cost to healthcare and so many children in the foster care system. There's a lot of economic benefits to having contraceptives, and I think that's really such a big contribution to what we do. I was wondering if maybe you could give us a little sneak peek into what you're researching now. I have a little bit of a more depressing to partner violence finding where I dug more deeply into this sort of what we mean by power in the household. There's a lot of surveys now that just ask you, "What is your decision making power with regards to household decisions?" Do you have any say in a large household decision whether you can lead the household this kind of thing? You're often looking at just women, "Do they have any power? Do they have any say?" And then if you look at that as consistent with that property rights thing I was saying, if they do have some say, then they're suffering less IPV. But then when I broke it up to, they have no say, they make the decisions with their husband versus they make all the decisions. That will depend on the type of decisions. So for example, it's contraception of women's more likely decision. You'll have all the decision making power. What you see is IPV is lowest when they're able to make a decision jointly. It's higher as you might expect when the husband makes all the decision power. But it's highest of all when she makes all the decision powers. And people are finding this increasing evidence of this backlash phenomenon. More often than not. So if women are the main breadwinners, they're more likely to suffer IPV. And this will even be in a developed country context. So even in a larger perspective, so right now it's a massive policy initiative in global policy and development. To invest in women targeting resources like I've shown you've heard of microfinance and all that. things, but they're targeting only at women. And I think people are getting a little bit concerned about the backlash phenomenon of that. And people are trying to go in and directly change gender norms and again, men are reacting to that. So I think that's something we have to be a bit aware of. I think everything just needs to be a little bit more nuanced. We have to think about the complexities of it all. Social norms interacting with these things and so forth. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Social norms, cultural norms, and it's going to be very case in place dependent, dependent on the country, dependent on the community that you're in. Going off of that research, what do you see as steps forward in that understanding now that it's nuanced and it's not just numbers, you mentioned microfinance, maybe not only focusing on women. How do you see it moving forward to decrease intimate partner violence when women have more socioeconomic status in the household? I mean, first we have to understand the context, right? So these contexts vary hugely. I mean, religious norms matter massively. You can't go in and say women should be working outside the home when they're not as completely against their religious beliefs. And I think a lot of initiatives now are trying to bring in the boys. So I think the men's are hard to change their thinking as much. So policies are targeting adolescent boys. So going into school programs and teaching gender, equity, and also a lot of focus on women's groups so that women can empower themselves within the community as well. And I saw that in even an early work of mine where I worked in the slum and looked at these informal saving groups of women, they really help each other just in terms of what we call an economic social capital, just supporting each other. And those groups are becoming much more politically mobilized. So that's also really positive. And policy makers are super aware of this. So bringing the men in and making women larger than just an individual. I saw a study that I think would interest you in Saudi Arabia. And what they did was they surveyed men and asked them how much other men would judge them if their wives worked. And then it turns out that men greatly overstate how much other men would judge them if their wives work. And then when they gave them in the true numbers on how much they would be judged by that, a lot of the men actually encouraged their women to work. It's a really, really interesting paper. And I can see it playing out here in this intimate part of violence where men are feeling degraded by the empowering violence in their home. And that a lot of that must be coming from an internal sense of how other men feel about them. And they just getting correct information about that makes a big difference. That's super interesting. I mean one thing about the intimate part of violence too. So in all these surveys, it's difficult to ask, but they serve very careful about how much you've experienced it to avoid violence. They also ask how do you justify it? So do you think it's okay for a husband to beat his wife if she argues with him if she neglects a children, if she burns a food, if she goes out without telling him this kind of thing. And what you consistently see as shockingly, right? Like you'll have places in West Africa that are 60% of women think it's okay to be beaten, right? But what is amazing? But you'll say half of men will agree to it. So if it's 60% of women agree to it, 30% of men will agree to it. So it's way less likely a man is a green that's okay to beat his wife. So that's sort of something to think about too. That the women are punishing themselves more than the men even think it's okay. I think that's something interesting to study because it shows up everywhere. I've looked at globally in all these different contexts and so it's probably not just a misreporting. What do you think are the main takeaways from your research that you wish that women's health researchers could incorporate into their work? More broadly, I think the socio-economic is absolutely crucial, right? The correlation between any poor health outcome and poverty is just massive, right? So it's an overwhelming thing to talk about and then what economists really are concerned about is causality. We really care about identifying the effects and you can do it with natural experiments or what have you. So I think from a methodology perspective, when I read these sort of global healthists, just show a correlation of something but that doesn't mean. So if A is correlated with B, if you change A, like I have a policy that changes A or Nestle you're going to change B because it could be some other reason they're correlated. The comments are really focused on that and I think that's super useful from anyone interested in changing policy and improving things at a large scale. So I think our methodology is super useful but yeah you can't underestimate the role of socio-economic and any health outcome. It's just a crazy huge correlation. So what I'm hearing is that everybody needs an economist co-author. Well, certainly to discuss, I think if you're interested in changing policy, I think it's really useful. Sometimes it just be good to chat. We don't have to do a grant together. We don't have to write a paper together just to have different perspectives and similarly I can learn so much from people who know specific contexts really carefully or even know the medical issues more carefully. Not IPV as much but HIV right? I don't really know how the disease pattern worked across Africa for example so that would be really good to learn more always. This is why we want to do this podcast is to encourage more cross disciplinary conversation on women's health in particular because across the university and across academia there's all sorts of disciplines are working in this area and there needs to be more conversation between the groups. Yeah, no, I think it's excellent. Yeah. Thank you Dr. Anderson for joining us on this journey and to all of our listeners who've been along for the ride. We would also like to thank the UBC Medicine Learning Network, the University of British Columbia and everyone that has donated to the Women's Health Research Cluster for their support of this project. If you want to help transform women's health in a global scale donate to the Women's Health Research Cluster today at www.women's health research dot ubc dot CA. If you like the episode and want to hear more be sure to subscribe on whichever platform you get your podcast to be notified when new episodes drop every second Wednesday of the month and check out our show notes online to dip into the resources we talked about today including the two papers Dr. Anderson has published that we discussed. Until next time I'm Demara and I'm Marina thanks for joining us on this journey.