Empowering Women in Pakistan's Agriculture: Rethinking Sharecropping, Education, and Rural Dynamics

This study examines the impact of sharecropping agricultural structures on women's empowerment in Pakistan, utilizing data from the Pakistan Social and Living Standard Survey (PSLM) across three-time cohorts: 2010-2011, 2014-2015, and 2019-2020. Employing a comprehensive empirical model and the Heckman two-step approach to address potential sample selection bias, we analyze a sample of 315,835 respondents. Contrary to initial expectations, our findings reveal that participation in sharecropping does not have a statistically significant impact on women's empowerment, as measured by female employment. However, the study identifies several other crucial determinants of empowerment. Education consistently demonstrates a positive and significant relationship with empowerment, reinforcing its vital role in enhancing women's status. Surprisingly, rural residence shows a strong positive effect on empowerment, challenging assumptions about urban areas offering more opportunities for women. Ethnicity emerges as a significant factor, with non-minority (Punjabi) women showing higher levels of empowerment. An unexpected finding is the positive association between being female and empowerment in the combined model of both genders, suggesting potential gains for women who overcome barriers to economic participation. These results have important implications for policy, highlighting the need for continued focus on education, targeted rural development programs, and interventions that increase women's control over resources in the agricultural sector. The study contributes to the broader understanding of the complex interplay between agricultural practices, socio-economic factors, and women's empowerment in developing nations, while also identifying areas for future research, including the need for more nuanced, multidimensional measures of empowerment and longitudinal studies to establish causal relationships.