'Indian women who earn more than husbands face violence risk'

Indian women who are more educated than their husbands, who earn more or are sole breadwinners have a higher likelihood of experiencing frequent and severe intimate partner violence (IPV), a new study has claimed.

Programmes to improve women's financial resources or employment opportunities may increase their risk of IPV, researchers said. Microfinance and vocational programmes for women should consider making legal and psychological counselling available to participants, they said.

Abigail Weitzman, a graduate student at New York University, looked at data from the female-only module of India's National Family Health Survey (NFHS) collected between 2005 and 2006.

The module contains data from a nationally representative sample of women aged 15-49 and includes nine variables pertaining to IPV.

It also asks a number of questions about women’s current employment, relative earnings, and access to other money. Weitzman looked only at data from married women and explored the occurrence, frequency, and severity of violence.

Weitzman found that compared to women with less education than their husbands, women with more education face 1.4 times the risk of IPV, 1.54 times the risk of frequent violence, and 1.36 times the risk of severe violence.

She found a similar pattern for women who were better employed than their spouse. And women who were the sole breadwinners in their family faced 2.44 times the risk of frequent violence and 1.51 times the risk of severe violence as unemployed women whose husbands were employed.

The research was published in the journal Population and Development Review.