Empowerment, Wellbeing, and Fertility through STEM Careers

Does women empowerment, caused by STEM human capital and employment, improve low-income Indian women’s health, wellbeing, and fertility choices?

Researchers hypothesize that low empowerment may limit women’s health, well-being, and reproductive autonomy. STEM skills and jobs can be a path to empowerment for low-income Indian women. Yet, if societal values do not support women’s economic emancipation, there may be backlash, and wellbeing, health, and fertility may be hurt.

In Delhi and Maharashtra, in partnership with Anudip, the program's founder, researchers will enroll 1,500 women engineering graduates and randomly assign 70 percent to receive DeepTech, a bundle of STEM training, soft skills, and job placement. The remaining 450 applicants are barred from the program for three years (as determined by the field partner). Researchers will measure earnings, empowerment, health, marital status, marital satisfaction and surplus, family planning, and fertility for three years.

The practical value of this project is to shed light on the complex interplay between women’s economic empowerment, caused by human capital and employment, and their health, well-being, and fertility choices in a setting in which women’s economic independence is not the norm. Its distributional implications are that increasing women’s economic empowerment changes the intramarital and societal distribution of power by reducing relative the power of men and increasing the relative power of women.