Marriage Migration and Women’s Landholding and Household Ownership in India

Shubhra Kriti, International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai

Despite several legislative reforms, such as the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act of 2005, to ensure gender equality in property inheritance rights, the socio-cultural enforcement of patrilocality traits continues to annihilate women’s landholding and household ownership rights. This study investigates the impact of female marriage migration, a distinct feature of patrilocal societies, on women’s status of landholding and household ownership across India and its districts. Utilising relevant information from multiple data sources, we constructed a district-level household panel data comprising two-time points and employed robust econometric strategies, such as panel regression models with random effects, that consider unobserved heterogeneity and omitted variable bias, allowing for the inclusion of time-invariant characteristics to investigate the afore-mentioned research question. Additionally, we performed robustness checks using sub-sample analyses and the endogenous relationship of the land and household ownership rights to the marriage migration. Our findings suggest a strong negative association of women’s landholding and household ownership status with marriage migration/patrilocality. This asserts that the “patriarchy-landholding hypothesis” holds true in this case. The study thus makes a significant contribution by filling the research gap persisting in understanding the gender gap in property ownership from a socio-cultural lens of marriage migration/patrilocality viewpoint.

Keywords: Gender Dynamics, Internal Migration and Urbanization, Families, Unions and Households, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination

See extended abstract.