Some Like It Hot: Household Disagreement and Productivity in Smallholder Chilli Production in Indonesia

Women’s participation as leaders in decision-making within smallholder households is a major component of women’s empowerment. However, as Southeast Asia lacks plots of land independently managed by a male or female spouse, approaches to understanding women’s empowerment in the region require a more nuanced approach than taken in the examination of Africa, which is the focus of most studies on gender empowerment. We present an approach that provides detailed insights into women’s leadership in agricultural activities in the household and the extent to which male and female spouses disagree about who leads decision-making for these activities. By combining a confirmatory factor analysis and a revenue function regression, we show that female leadership and implicit disagreement between spouses both significantly affect household revenue from chilli farming in rural Indonesia. In particular, disagreements can diminish chilli revenue and act to reverse gains from female leadership. Our results indicate that women’s empowerment in these regions is strongly affected by the extent to which households can agree on the importance of women’s leadership. The results indicate a need to consider interventions that support building communication between the spouses and that reinforce the importance of acknowledging women’s roles as leaders in decision-making in the household.