The probes included power differences in decision making, gender roles, gender-based ownership and expenditure of household resources, and gender dynamics in disclosure of HIV status.
This is a common feature of collectives focused only on economic outcomes which achieve increased income and control over resources for women but have no positive impact on health, household decision-making, independence, Gender Based Violence (GBV) or gendered social norms (Baden 2013, Beath et al. 2013).
The degree to which this adaptation of practices happens will depend very much on decision-making and gender roles within the family.
While it may seem intuitive to include and explore how culture influences sexual decision-making by gender, racial/ethnic group, sexual orientation and/or identification, and sexual-risk and drug-risk behaviors, there is no consensus on how to incorporate it or integrate it as a moderating or mediating variable within HIV prevention models [ 16].
One relates to the variation in decision-making due to gender differences in socialization, based on sex role theory.
Strengthened self-esteem, access to information to support their decision-making, and broadly, gender equality by leveling access between men and women are all benefits.
However, household decision-making processes and gender differences in attitudes towards health research mean that researcher decisions about which parent to approach for consent can have implications for the process of informed consent in terms of the amount of information requested by potential research subjects, as well as ultimate decisions about whether or not to participate [ 5- 8].
When we look at the effect of women's decision-making autonomy by gender (Models B.2 and C.2) we can see that it has a positive and significant effect on daughters' chances of being enrolled in school but has no effect on sons' enrollment.
Efforts to build democracies that include groups historically excluded from decision-making are making progress and gender based quotas are part of the reason.
Results from the factor analyses identified and confirmed three underlying factors from the ten indicators related to household decision-making and perceptions of gender norms – household decision-making power, perceptions of gender norms against violence, and perceptions for sex negotiation (Table 2) (Eigenvalues >1.0).
Women's Empowerment is operationalized through four dimensions, as determined by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (see below): Household decision-making power, perceptions of gender norms against violence, perceptions of sex negotiation, and age at first marriage.
