Power and Priorities: Gender, Caste and Household Bargaining in India

Nancy Luke, Brown University

Three separate literatures employ bargaining power theory to examine resource allocation within the household, domestic violence, and housework. Despite this common framework, these literatures remain distinct in their theoretical and empirical applications, with few comparative studies across social groups. I examine women’s bargaining power across multiple household domains in India, where women have increasing access to wage labor and the caste system continues to stratify society. Using survey data from female tea plantation workers, I find that lower caste women use their earnings to prioritize child education and savings at a cost to their own well-being in terms of marital violence and less participation by husbands in housework. In contrast, higher caste women’s earnings have little effect in any domain, suggesting that they support male authority. These findings provide a more complete picture of household dynamics and underscore the potential for women’s earnings to narrow persistent caste inequalities in India.