Re-examining the links between women's work and household power dynamics: Insights from rural and urban Ghana

Abstract

The global debate about women's productive work and its impact on household decision-making power is ongoing. In Ghana, women are involved in various productive activities alongside unpaid care work, yet their participation in household decision-making remains low. This paper emphasizes the need to unpack the household bargaining outcomes by re-evaluating the role of women's paid and unpaid care work in rural and urban contexts in Ghana. To do so, we used Amartya Sen's model of cooperative conflict and a mixed method approach, involving the administration of questionnaires to targeted households together with in-depth interviews and focus group discussions in rural and urban Ghana. The findings show that the perception of the monetary contribution of women to the household (in the form of paid work) gives them more substantial intra-household bargaining power, enabling them to contribute to household and community decision-making processes. The article further highlights the importance of addressing the underlying perceptions attached to women's roles in the household because in the real sense, what is classified as “unproductive labor” are the social arrangements that permit the so-called productive processes to be carried on.