A NEXUS BETWEEN HOUSEHOLD CHARACTERISTICS AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT: A CASE STUDY OF PUNJAB, PAKISTAN

Purpose of the study: The empowerment of women is an important aim for them to be fully engaged in economic life and to achieve sustainable growth worldwide. One form of empowerment is to provide women with basic facilities. Methodology: The study also analyzed the impact on women's empowerment by primary data taken via multi-phase cluster sampling methods of household socio-economic and cultural characteristics in Punjab. Given the diversity of nature and context, the 6-dimensional empirical polychoric principles of empowering women generate a stringent cumulative index of women's autonomy. Main Findings: The empirical findings show that empowering women and their six-dimensional effects are positive for women's years and jobs, legal advertisements, health care institutions, social participation, safe, smooth surroundings, communication, politics and residential negative participation, unpaid housekeeping, and the fear of violence. The results show that women's empowerment is positive. Applications of this study: This study can be more effective in the manner that to offer women free advice about their rights through electronic media, the government should establish an integrated legal cell with the local government. Novelty/Originality of this study: This research contribution in the field of women empowerment that how women can deal with legal advisory, to get jobs, protection in health and institutions.


INTRODUCTION
The empowerment of women is one of the main focuses of the international agenda for growth. Studies showed that social inequalities between men and women are caused by various aspects, including poverty, healthcare, job opportunities, and literacy. (Amnesty International, 2008). Widespread awareness of the importance for national socio-economic development of women's contributions to the labor market (Grigoleit, 2017). Nevertheless, women still suffer from fewer rights and benefits, especially in developing countries, than their male counterparts and face inequality in any area of life (Czymara et al., 2021). The empowerment of women is based on social equity. Every citizen has the right to education (Awan and Iqbal, 2015;Shahbaz et al., 2017), and social change in social groups (Baker & Fang, 2021). Feminist scholars and authors have therefore called for performance measurement frameworks to increase gender equality and make it possible for women to join the official workforce (Lahoti and Swaminathan, 2016).
Empowerment needs training in the society which is responsible for transformation, and the position of women should be transformed with government support by achieving sustainability. The role of women includes enhancing the work of women in order to increase their well-being and recognition by privileges related to social aspects, such as norms, culture, and traditions (Cislaghi & Heise 2020).
Women cannot fulfill their rights and actively participate in behavioural life in Pakistan, especially because they are generally not allowed to play political roles or make decisions (Abrar-ul-haq et al., 2017). For example, in 2010 Pakistan had a Gender Efficiency Measurement (GEM) status of 92 out of 94 countries, while Gender Development (GDI) ranking 120 out of 146 (UNDP, 2010). Many socio-economic problems in Pakistan are aggravated as Pakistani women are faced with birth barriers and cannot achieve equality of access to resources, such as food, education, and healthcare (Downer et al., 2020). In 2004, the Pakistani government adopted many policies for improving education and gender equality for women.
The issues for women have been linked to socioeconomic phenomena and are related to migration into urban areas linked to increasing levels of education and changing women's priorities. The lowest poverty rate in the country and higher levels of education is the Punjab province, for example. It is generally regarded as Pakistan's richest and most populous province, contributing nearly 24% of the national GDP. Despite this relatively optimistic profile, the mainly under-related South Pun-Jab and more urban and affluent North Punjab with numerous social and economic issues differ enormously.
The possibilities, education, and family structures for women play an important role in women's empowerment in the case of southern Punjab. Academic levels are the main contributors to increased freedom of movement and empowerment of women (Baig et al., 2018;Abrar-ul-haq et al., 2017). Women in northern Punjab still face many aspects of the problem but to a smaller extent than in southern Punjab, including gender discrimination, wage differential, harassment, and social threats. Sustainable economic Cultures can also be threatened from within in relation to the empowerment of women, drawing on broad precedents of Islamic values and its specific emphasis on women's property rights (Chaudhry and Nosheen, 2012).
The existing research examines the between relationship among household and women's empowerment in Punjab by examining the impacts on the empowerment of women in Punjab of social and economic factors. Its factions also provide empirical proof in terms of three aspects to the existing feminist empowerment literature. First of all, this is the first study that uses a six-dimensional approach and checks the impact on femininity in Punjab using the main data obtained through the multi-phase sampling of clusters, in particular in the Covid-19 method to maximize our knowledge of women's empowerment. Secondly, Punjab is special and experiences a diverse variety of convenience sampling since it is the largest GDP province in Pakistan. Third, to examine the effects of social, economic, and household variables on women's empowerment, we use oligomeric components analysis. The paper also examines the impact of hygiene installations on the empowerment of women in Punjab as a whole.

LITERATURE REVIEW
The idea of empowerment is to recognise who can decide (Naz, 2006) to manage your own life through your strategy (Lewellyn & Muller, 2020), to have the freedom to decide on your own and take on the different issues of life (Yount et al., 2018). Murphy 2008, identifies three components of empowering women: self-consciousness, knowledge, and recognition. These components are the result of educational processes that make women more self-confident (Maslak and Singhal, 2008). Similarly, the index of women's empowerment, with five dimensions in focus: output, decisionmaking, income control, leadership, and time allocation, is measured by Alkire et al. (2013). Four factors in women's independence and empowerment are also identified by UNICEF (1994a) and UNICEF (1994b): power, wellbeing, the law of resources, and motivation.
Higher education has played a major role in fostering women's workforce representation which influences their economic participation. Trained women have greater trust in themselves, build capacity and increase participation in socio-economic changes (Mosedale, 2005;Sharma, 2003). Understanding social problems, rights, social standards, and values allow them to keep their thinking differing and to become the basis for social peace and connectivity (Acker and Gasperini, 2009). Subsequently, skilled working women play an important role in economic growth (Tsani et al., 2013). Swain (2006) has revealed that women are linked to economic development by means of education and decision-making. Nevertheless, in developing and developed economies, there are certain anomalies and specific features in this respect.
Women are much more likely than men to earn if well educated in the beginning. Educated women play an important role in social and economic development through the achievement of their civil rights (Yamauchi and Liu, 2018). In this respect, gender inequalities affect their financial sector involvement. In both advanced and developed countries, there is an impact on gender inequalities and differential gains by gender (Figlio et al., 2019). In rural regions, women implicitly lead to the family income by helping their men in agriculture and housing. In general, they are not paid as much as men due to ignorance and financial crises (Mohyuddin et al., 2012).
Women are mainly driven by economic pressure on their families informal employment in developing economies (Eberharter, 2001). Public policies, direct aid, and support for women (e.g. employment legislation), including the elimination of the sex wage discrimination and the promotion of daycare in the workplace, support the increasing participation of women in the workforce. In the absence of supportive legislation and cultural norms, economic growth itself does not empower women (Lahoti and Swaminathan, 2016).
Liberalisation has altered traditional views on women's social roles (Townsend et al., 2020). In women, there has been tentative progress and the critical economic importance in motherly and household roles they usually play (Ashfaq et al., 2008). Women can play a variety of roles in life, including housewives or senior management and the head of state. Enhancing women's access to necessary resources such as health, services, work, and education (Angelucci & Heath, 2020). Facilitating women's access to necessary resources like health, services, employment, and education helps their empowerment (Shah, 2002). The present study explores the capacity of women to understand the profound phenomena based on six main dimensions and analyses the impact of household features on empowering women.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The present study is based on the primary source of data. A detailed questionnaire was developed for data collection. This study's targeted respondents are only married women of age (17-50) years (Mean = 32.840, SD= 8.326). The Cronbach alpha value of the questionnaire was (0.727). A multi-stage cluster sampling technique has been used for data collection. The total sample of 950 is determined by the following statistical formula, Z2∂2∕ è 2 Where ∂2 = Q (1-Q) 1 Where Q shows the value of prevalence rate (female literacy rate), several households selected from clusters proportionate to the rural-urban proportion of 2017 census i. e is 37% and 63% for urban and rural areas respectively.
The issue under evaluation involves an exclusive attempt to examine the scope of the empowerment of women in Punjab by using many indicators with a strong theoretical history as dimensions. As already explained, existing studies explore feminist empowerment in terms of the ability to take life decisions, the ability to make economic decisions, and mobility (Varghese, 2011). Alkire et al (2013) build on previous work in five dimensions for the measurement of women's empowerment in agriculture: production and decision-making, revenue control, leadership, and time allocation. This study also examines the rights of women in Punjab, and reflective sections, and rural-town variables, regarding the theoretical context and using basic data from a multi-stage sampling technique for clusters (Rizvi, 1980). The cumulative women empowerment index (CWEI) was constructed by combining six dimensions, i.e. decisions making, socio-cultural mobility, familial/interpersonal empowerment, economic empowerment, political empowerment, and psychological empowerment with 28 variables a comprehensive and complete idea of women empowerment. The selected dimensions for the current study are described in Table 1. Women's participation in ordinary and major household economic and non-economic actions.
ii Economic empowerment (EEM) Obtain, sparing mechanism, and control over the use of personal income to formal financial institutions. The six elements preserved are an independent study of each women's empowerment by extracting common data collected by single indicators, avoiding redundancies, and reducing statistical distortions. The cumulative index on women's empowerment Punjab has been considered to represent a weighted sum of the components in which weight is obtained by the separating loadings with a square root of their own value, i.e. variance explained by each member in the principal polychoric parts analysis. Scores are calculated for each component by multiplying the variables using psychogenic PCA by corresponding weights.

CWEI = HHD + SEM + EEM + POLEM + FAMEM + PSYEM 2
There is various socio-economic, demographic and political characteristic of the household that explain changes in response variable women empowerment. The present study also aims to identify the critical determinants at the household level for empowering women. The selected characteristic description is given below. The usual least square regression model is applied in this study to determine the socio-economic and demographic, political, and individual characteristics of women's empowerment.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In that same portion, we have reported significant results for female empowerment at the household level of polychoric PCA before having descriptive statistics and regression estimates. Variance is explained by women's empowerment components at the initial situation after mining and after rotation and rotations.
In the study, women's empowerment in Punjab Pakistan was identified. The univariate analysis examines the research of one variable (Allendorf, 2007). An elementary data examination was needed in the preliminary stage to explain and interpret the data collected using the field survey of this study. After the data collection, the initial stage provides data to easily understand the facts and figures of the socio-cultural organisation of the respondents. A descriptive analysis was conducted to achieve the objective of the study, which affects the empowerment of women. The qualitative study systematically sums up and organises information collected understandably (Asterious & Hall, 2011). This qualitative research shall be based on the mechanisms and default deviations of the data in Table 3.
The estimate is the average of data while the default is the data dispersal. When the average value is larger than the standard deviation, data about the average are dispersed. Standard deviation measures the distribution of data. The more space a data distribution has, the higher the standard difference between them. The standard deviation cannot, interestingly, be negative. A standard 0 deviation indicates that the data points are generally related to the average. In addition, the more standard deviations the data dots are from the standard.

Correlation Analysis of Cumulative Women Empowerment of Punjab
The study used correlation analysis to check the degree of variable interaction. Assessing coefficient values, the positive interdependence between age and empowerment of women was investigated; soap and water washing facilities; access to health care facilities for personal health issues; access to financial institutions on personal and family financial issues; participation in social gatherings; access to media; the status of respondents and the status of respondents, and parents' work status and property, respondents' work quality and cosmopolitan attitudes, work rate, and bank lending, work condition and information about Nikah Nama's written content, status, and knowledge regarding the women's protection legislation. Their work is done by parents and respondents. Women's employment status is also significantly positive in terms of access to medical equipment, access to financial institutions for personal and family finance, participation in social assemblies, and access to the media and to education for women. The status of women in the workplace is negative for the family structure and the domain. The report shows that the cumulative index of empowerment of women, the age for respondents, status at work of women, the knowledge on women's protection bills, access to medical facilities in the event of personal health problems, and a variable that indicates whether a woman received the loan from a banking institution are negative and important. A significant positive connection between the family structure and unpaid care work. It supports the fact that women who live in a common family system are working more unpaid than the nuclear family system.
When more than control indicators are entered into the analysis, multivariate analysis is commonly known as (Kang, 2017). Socioeconomic, demographic, and political factors that influence women's empowerment in Punjab are developed in this section. The cumulative women's empowerment index (0,512) for the value of R2 in Table 5.3 shows a 52% variation from these factors. As the significant F-value suggests, this systematic variation is substantially more important. Thus, in general, the study revealed the main factors predicting female empowerment as a whole.
Another decisive factor in women's empowerment is a greater chronological age (Qamar, 2005;Khan et al., 2011). Younger women often participate less in decision-making or in other family issues. But when women get older and children are growing up, their communities become more empowered. This research shows similar significant results.
The women in the joint family have to be exclusively involved in family affairs with other family members. Decisionmaking power is shared equally with every other family member and husband while reasonably cooperating with his wife cannot intervene in this matter in the interests of family peace (Rowland, 1997). Women living in a joint family system or having a large household size are less motivated. Ironically, this study also supports similar results. The family structure component has a negative coefficient. It is more likely for women to be in the 0.33 points higher family empowerment category by changing from a common family system to that of a nuclear family system. We have reasonably conclusive conclusions regarding the effect of the family type on women's empowerment at the household level.
Urban women are considerably more empowered than rural women Women (Asterious & Hall, 2011). The authority of women varies from setting to place, Kabeer (2001) claimed. Empirical results indicate a less empowered rural population than urban ones. The regression coefficient value (-0.477) at (P<0.000) shows that the CWEI is less than 0.477 points for rural women than for urban respondents. It strongly supports the fact that the area where women are empowered is a substantial explanatory variable. The present situation has shown that women in urban areas are improving their socio-economic and political status. Better education facilities, better knowledge and skills, and facilities in other cities act as a response to these differences.
A soap and water hand washing machine indicates a better, safer, and cleaner environment. Access to a fundamental hand washing facility at home is an essential indicator of sustainable development. The value (0.406) at (p <0.006) shows that women are empowered more in a safe and clean environment.
Cosmopolite relates to the quantity of openness from outside its social system to ideas, knowledge, and information (Rogers, 1995). The value (0.44) at (P<.000) of the regression coefficient is a change in the response pattern from '0'(no) to '1'(yes). Women are empowered by a more cosmopolitan attitude. Women are more aware and informative of what happens around the world than concentrated on domestic issues. The achievement of empowerment objectives depends on attitude, however (Asterious & Hall, 2011). Changing the attitudes of women is essential before demanding changes in society's structure. A community's empowerment can be linked to communication (Townsend et al., 2020). The contribution of our study is that women's empowerment has empirically proved to play the role of communication (cosmopolitan attitude). There are therefore reasonably conclusive results in terms of empirical consequences for the household level of women's empowerment.
Women's participation in paid work is limited in Pakistan's contemporary social and cultural scenario. In the current study, however, women's jobs have a positive impact in different dimensions on the empowerment of women. The empowerment of women improves when they work for cash (Mohyuddin et al., 2012). There is a significant regression coefficient (0.12) (p<0.056). That finding shows that the 0,12 point increase in the cumulative women empowerment index is due to a shift in the 0 to 1 independent variable (as '0' for housewives and '1' for working women). This evidential finding is in line with various other studies, including Mohyuddin et al. (2012), which have also demonstrated that household decisions involve women in paid positions more likely than non-working or non-cash-related women.
The study showed that women are more resource-friendly, more resource-friendly, and more profitable, and economic independence is an essential factor to reduce gender inequality. The lower dependence on the economy improves women's self-confidence and ultimately their capacity to make decisions. They all lead to a greater capacity.
The current study shows the significant and positive impact on the empowerment of women on property received or inherited through parents. The current findings of the research correspond to earlier empirical estimates of (Abrar-ul-haq et al., 2017). The link between property ownership and the empowerment of women is simple. This property ownership decreases the dependence of women against men, and therefore is better suited to choose their own lives. Property ownership and wage participation prove that the economic condition of women in the household is a fundamental predictor of the empowerment of women.
Women's availability of financial institutions has a positive and statistically significant impact on the empowerment of women at the household level in personal and family financial matters. The coefficient refers to better access for women in the case of personal and family issues to financial institutions and increases their empowerment at the household level by (0.14) points (p<0.003). It is not difficult to explain the logic behind this relationship. Better access shows she's powerful in the various family decisions. Women can save credit decisions and children's education if they have better access to financial institutions. Women should increase their domestic empowerment better access to financial institutions. Access to financial institutions thus increases the economic status of the household and child welfare by empowering women in the household. In the case of problems of personal health, hospital visits have a positive impact on women's empowerment with coefficients of the statistically significant value of 1 percent. In the event of personal health problems, women are on average empowered by 1.289 points if they can visit a hospital.
Unpaid household work shows a negative and significant impact on women's empowerment and the coefficient value (-0.625) (P<0.022) shows that female participation in unpaid care reduces and reduces their empowerment (Abrar-ul-haq . Each minute a woman consumes more than out-of-pocket work, a minute less than she might spend on market-related activities or invest in her education and training. Women are less empowered to participate in social assemblies. Women participate more in social activities to help them discuss opinions, share difficulties, and achieve an enhanced supportive atmosphere (Yamauchi and Liu, 2018). Table 5.3 shown; with a rise in female participation in social activities, the mean empowerment score is rising from 22.6 to 29.1. Chi-square statistics have also shown that social networking is a positive link to empowerment. The particularly significant value of (p<.000) regression (4.230) showed that a single unit increase in social network variable indexes resulted in 4.23 units increasing female empowerment.
The rights and development of women are positively linked (Shah, 2002). Legal advice is a new variable tested for its role in the empowerment of women. To this end, two variables were tested, knowledge of Nikah Nama's written contents and awareness of the bill of protection. Both variables are very important and related positively to the empowerment of women. In addition, Chi-Square statistics found the association between the advertisement of law and women's empowerment to be extremely important. In P <.001) and in (P <.003) of knowledge on the written contents of Nikah Nama, the highly important value of the regression coefficient (1.651) for women protection bill indicates that women from Punjab with more knowledge and advertising about the law are enabled more to do it.
In terms of awareness of their rights and update them according to the current world of dynamism, access to the media, and the window into the world (both the electronic and the print

CONCLUSION
Special attention to human rights and sustainable development is given by empowerment. The empowerment of women is essential for sustainable economic growth in Pakistan. In this study, data were collected from 950 intervals in rural and urban areas of Punjab using multi-stage sampling. Interviewees gathered the response through face-to-face interviews. A comprehensive cumulative female empowerment index (CWEI) was constructed in the present study in six dimensions using polychoric primary analysis.
Twenty independent variables were tested to identify critical determinants of the empowerment of women, including 12 dominating variables that influence the CWEI. The cumulative women's empowerment index has a positive relationship to women's age, female employment status, advertising of legal rights, cosmopolitan attitude, access to medical facilities, and participation in social meetings. However, the different dimensions of women's empowerment are not reflected in household work, fear of violence from a close partner, and the place of residence.
A study showed that most of the women in the sample do not know about their legal rights and government initiatives. This is the reason for the low empowerment of women in the studied region. To provide women free advice on their rights, the government should set up a legal cell integrated with local governments. Utilizing electronic media, different programs and meetings could be useful tools to increase women's awareness and thus to support women's empowerment, especially in rural areas. The economic and social infrastructure of society in southern Punjab should also be improved and women can form social networks to share experiences and feelings.

LIMITATION OF THE STUDY
The most serious limitations of the study were a lack of time and resources, in particular in relation to the number of interviews and the inability to access various social groups. Because of the lack of language skills in Assamese and Hindi, the choice of respondents was limited to business people and experts fluent in English. The interviews were partly conducted in two instances via a translator to bridge the language barrier. This allowed me to interview only women of a high level of education, most of whom received tertiary education, excluding the prospects of less privileged empowerment. Moreover, I sometimes felt that recording prevented entrepreneurs from talking about certain subjects freely, of which they would speak as soon as I turned the recording off. This could have resulted in an optimistic view within the interviews, but my personal observations, which supplement the interviews as data sources, included everything.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE STUDY
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