Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, The University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Kyiv School of Economics, Kyiv, Ukraine.
PLoS One. 2024 Sep 11;19(9):e0310266. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0310266. eCollection 2024.
Nepal is characterized by low empowerment of women which may have negative effects on their health status as well as sexual and reproductive rights. We seek to identify key determinants of women empowerment in Nepal using a rich set of socio-demographic and socio-economic characteristics as well as behavioral factors and regional indicators.
This study utilizes 4,211 women aged between 15 and 49 years from the 2022 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) for Nepal. Following the previous study for Mozambique, we use Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to identify components of women's empowerment along three domains: beliefs about violence, decision-making and control over sexuality and safe sex. We use logistic regressions to identify significant predictors of empowerment in each domain and provide crude and adjusted odds ratios along with their 95% confidence intervals.
We found that older age is generally associated with higher empowerment across all these domains. Interestingly, while partner controlling behavior tended to decrease empowerment in beliefs about violence and control over sexuality, it was linked to increased decision-making empowerment. Notable regional differences emerged, with higher levels of empowerment observed in the Madhesh and Sudurpashchim regions. Further, education level and wealth were correlated with increased empowerment in control over sexuality and safe sex, though not in the other two domains. Access to media showed mixed effects, reducing empowerment in decision-making but enhancing it in control over sexuality and safe sex.
Our results have many similarities but also notable differences with previous literature which emphasizes the importance of regular and region-specific studies of women's empowerment, acknowledging the potential for its change over time and also the prevailing differences across regions.
尼泊尔女性的赋权程度较低，这可能对她们的健康状况以及性和生殖权利产生负面影响。我们试图利用丰富的社会人口学和社会经济特征以及行为因素和区域指标，确定尼泊尔女性赋权的关键决定因素。
本研究使用了来自 2022 年尼泊尔人口与健康调查（DHS）的 4211 名 15 至 49 岁的女性。遵循之前对莫桑比克的研究，我们使用主成分分析（PCA）来确定女性赋权的三个领域中的组成部分：对暴力的信念、决策和对性行为的控制以及安全性行为。我们使用逻辑回归来确定每个领域赋权的显著预测因素，并提供未经调整和调整后的优势比及其 95%置信区间。
我们发现，年龄较大通常与所有这些领域的更高赋权相关。有趣的是，虽然伴侣控制行为往往会降低对暴力和性行为控制的信念方面的赋权，但它与增强决策赋权有关。出现了显著的区域差异，马德西和苏德普拉什姆地区的赋权水平较高。此外，教育水平和财富与对性行为和安全性行为的控制的赋权增加相关，但与其他两个领域无关。媒体的获取显示出混合效应，减少了决策赋权，但增强了对性行为和安全性行为的赋权。
我们的结果与之前的文献有许多相似之处，但也有一些显著的差异，这强调了定期进行针对特定地区的女性赋权研究的重要性，同时承认其随时间变化的潜力以及不同地区的普遍差异。
