Womens Working Status and Physical Spousal Violence in India

The purpose of this study is to identify the causal relationship between women’s working status and the risk of spousal violence against them. In India, working women tend to be more subject to physical spousal violence than non-working women. Given that there is virtually no option outside marriage for women in India, more spousal violence against working women can be understood as a result of male backlash. However, there are concerns that the positive relationship between women’s labor force participation and physical spousal violence might be driven by reverse causality or omitted variable bias. In this paper, I address these issues by exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in rural women’s working status driven by rainfall shocks and the rice-wheat dichotomy. The IV regression results indicate that women’s working status has a signi…cant negative e¤ect on the incidence of physical spousal violence. Women’s labor force participation will decrease the probability of physical spousal violence by 0.07. The …ndings suggest that the positive relationship between women’s working status and the physical spousal violence is likely to be a result of endogeneity rather than the male backlash.