Women’s empowerment is a dynamic process that has been quantified, measured, and described in a variety of ways. We measure empowerment in a sample of 3,500 rural women in 128 villages of Bangladesh with five indicators. A conceptual framework is presented, together with descriptive data on...

In his PAA presidential address and corresponding article in Demography, David Lam (Demography 48:1231–1262, <CitationRef CitationID="CR32">2011</CitationRef>) documented the extraordinary progress of humankind—vis-à-vis poverty alleviation, increased schooling, and reductions in mortality and fertility—since 1960 and noted that he...</citationref>

Becker Stan. ? The Causes of the Seasonal Trend in Births in Rural Bangladesh. Seasonal fluctuations in the birth rate in Bangladesh are large : there are twice as many births in December as July. Since contraception is not practised, these variations seem to result from sizeable fluctuations in...

Surveys have attempted to measure married women's decision-making power by asking women who has a say and/or final say in a number of household decisions. In several studies where the same questions were posed to husbands, considerable discrepancies in reports were found. This paper assesses...

Research has consistently demonstrated that a woman is more likely to be abused by an intimate partner than by any other person. Many negative health consequences to the victims have been associated with domestic violence against women. Data from the 1995 Egyptian Demographic and Health Survey,...

Women's empowerment programs focus primarily on increasing the decision-making power of women, while male involvement/couple-friendly programs emphasize communication and negotiation within couples in making decisions. In-depth-interviews and focus group discussions were conducted to investigate...

Maternal mortality is high in Pakistan, particularly in the rural areas which have poor access to health services. We investigated the risk factors associated with maternal mortality in sixteen rural districts of Balochistan and the North-West Frontier (NWFP) provinces of Pakistan. We designed a...