What Women Do, Believe in, and Financially Contribute—What Matters More in Couples' Decision Making? Gender Inequality in Ghana's Small‐Scale Fisheries☆

Abstract

AbstractStudies of couple's decision‐making power consistently show that women disproportionately occupy subordinate positions. Using survey data (N = 400) from an ethnographic study on Ghanaian female fisherfolk, we examine the influences of women's financial contributions, ownership of production assets and gender role attitudes, and how they interact with the bodily capacities required to perform different fishery tasks to shape women's decision‐making power. Findings show that financial contributions and ownership of production assets remain salient determinants of women's fishery decision‐making power. However, their participation in strenuous tasks dampens the positive relationship between their financial contributions, gender role attitudes and decision‐making power, such that financial contributions become insignificant. Women's decision‐making power varies according to the sex‐typed division of labor in small‐scale fishing, and those who violate it are ‘punished’—as evident in their decreased decision‐making power. Attention to the co‐implications of socio‐economic forces and material factors such as women's embodied experiences highlights (1) the specificities of occupational sex segregation and decision‐making in agricultural sectors of developing economies and (2) how such entanglements can be reconfigured to enhance women's decision‐making power in such contexts.