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The preceding discussion shows that policies and projects aimed at improving women’s access to resources and their control over decision-making are likely to have a beneficial effect on household food security. This section seeks to alert policy-makers about some trade-offs that may be involved in this process.

Two Kinds of trade-offs

Two kinds of trade-offs deserve particular mention. First, there is a trade-off arising from women’s time constraints. Poor rural women are already so overburdened with work in the subsistence and domestic spheres that any additional involvement in income-earning activities on their part may be possible only if they sacrifice some other work. In this case, as discussed earlier, the utilization aspect of food security is liable to suffer even as the acquirement aspect improves.

Second, there is a possible trade-off in terms of the contribution of husbands to the household economy. As women begin to earn additional income and take control of household affairs, husbands may begin to withdraw partially from productive activities in order to enjoy more leisure. In terms of the usual utility-maximizing models of household time allocation, it is quite easy to see how this might happen. One can think of simple models in which the husband will work only up to the point where his marginal disutility from work equals the marginal utility derived by the household from his contribution to household income. But the marginal utility of any given level of contribution depends, among other things, on the total income of the household: the higher the total income, the lower the marginal utility of a husband’s contribution. If the total income rises as a result of the wife’s engagement in income-earning activities, then the marginal utility of the husband’s contribution will decline. He will then want to reduce his marginal disutility of work as well, and the way for him to do so is to work less and enjoy more leisure.

This is, of course, only one possibility. One can think of more complex models of the household in which a husband’s contribution does not decline in the wake of the wife’s involvement in income-earning activities. But if it does decline, then it is quite probable that men’s control over decision-making within the household will also decline vis-à-vis that of women. In that case, the greater control of women will have been purchased at the cost of the reduced contribution of men towards the household economy.

This can have negative consequences for household food security. In the extreme case, any gain that might arise from greater income and greater control on the part of women may be offset by lower income from men’s work. There will simply be a redistribution of the burden of work from men to women. Even in the less extreme case, where the gain from women’s work is only partially offset, the impact on food security will still be less than the impact if the husband’s contribution had not declined. Evidence for both these trade-offs has been found in the survey regions of India and Nepal.

Evidence for the first kind of trade-off

Consider first the trade-off imposed by women’s time constraint. Table 30 presents a comparison of the work burden of two groups of households: those in which women’s control over decision-making within the household went up in the five years preceding the survey and those in which women’s control declined or remained unchanged.¹⁶ A change in women’s control is used here as an indicator of a number of interrelated phenomena such as a change in women’s access to resources, in their involvement in income-earning activities or in their involvement in IFAD-assisted projects.

As can be seen in Table 30, both groups of women are exceedingly hard pressed for time, working, as they do, more than 16 hours a day, as against 9 to 10 hours a day among the men. This shows that both groups of women are working almost the maximum amount of time that is physically possible. But the allocation of their time among the various activities shows some interesting differences.

The group whose control had increased during the five years previous to the survey had been working more hours on subsistence production relative to the other group. This is understandable in view of the fact that this group also happens to possess almost double the amount of operating land. Given that these women are required to work longer hours on subsistence, they would normally be expected to work less on market-based activities if they were to maintain their overall time constraint. But, in fact, both groups work almost the same number of hours on market-based activities.¹⁷ This perhaps reflects the incentives and opportunities for women’s’ involvement in off-farm activities as a result of project interventions.

In order to take up these opportunities, however, the women had to compromise somewhere, since it would have been physically impossible for them to extend their overall time of work. As it happens, they chose to reduce the time they were spending on domestic work (on average, 6.5 hours a day, compared with 7.2 hours spent by the other group). The absolute difference between the two averages may not seem like very much, but it is statistically significant. More important, since this group of women has, on average, bigger households to take care of, one would normally expect them to spend more rather than less time on domestic work compared with the other group. This implies that the actual sacrifice of domestic work on their part is perhaps larger than what is indicated by the difference between the two averages.

It may be surmised, therefore, that in those households in which women had acquired greater access to resources, became more involved in income-earning activities, or acquired greater control over decision-making, thereby improving the acquirement aspect of food security, the utilization aspect of food security suffered. In other words, women’s time constraint is very likely to have entailed a trade-off between the acquirement and utilization aspects of food security.

Evidence for the second kind of trade-offs

Evidence for the trade-off involving the reduced contribution of men and the consequent increase in women’s relative work burden has also been found in the survey area. Table 31 shows that women’s relative work burden increased more in those households in which food security had improved in the five years preceding the survey; this is true for all three criteria of food security used in this study. Table 32 shows that women’s relative work burden increased more in those households in which the women were participating in IFAD-assisted projects, had gained greater access to resources, or had acquired greater control over decision-making within the household. Together, these two tables suggest that the improvement in food security achieved through the empowerment of women entailed a trade-off in the project areas because it increased women’s work burden relative to that of men.

The potential consequence of such a trade-off can be gauged by considering the change that has occurred in men’s time allocation. As can be seen in Table 30, the husbands of the women who gained greater control over decision-making during the five years preceding the survey are found to have worked nearly two hours less, on average, on market-based activities compared with those husbands whose wives had not gained greater control.¹⁸ It is also worth noting that the proportion of husbands who had increased the time they devoted to market-based activities over the preceding five years was lower in the group of households in which women had gained greater control.

These figures imply that, as women engaged in market-based activities to avail themselves of the opportunities opened up by project interventions and other external factors, their husbands either withdrew partially from these activities or refrained from increasing their involvement. In either case, the households failed to reap the full benefits of women’s involvement in income-earning activities.

Designers of programmes aimed at increasing women’s involvement in income-earning activities must bear in mind the possibility that these trade-offs will occur. The idea is not to discourage women from engaging in these activities, but to take appropriate measures so as to minimize the trade-offs. For instance, measures must be taken to reduce women’s time burden in subsistence and domestic activities by giving them access to time-saving technologies, and ways must be found to ensure that men do not take time off at the expence of their hard-working wives. For the latter measures, apart from creating lucrative income-earning opportunities for men, it may be necessary to carry out some motivational work as well. The relevant policy issues are discussed further in the following section.

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16/ The precaution has been taken to include only those households in which the husband and the wife are both alive and living together, regardless of who happens to be the head of the household, and to exclude those in which the woman is the de jure head of household in the absence of the husband, since the question of a trade-off in terms of a husband's contribution does not arise in the latter case.

17/ Market-based activities include both production for the market and market transactions, that is, buying and selling.

18/ In the former group, the husbands do of course work more hours on subsistence production compared with their counterparts in the other group, but this is explained by the larger amount of land operated by them.