FACTORS AFFECTING DECISION

MAKING BY WOMEN
PROPERTY RIGHTS, ACCESS TO
ECONOMIC RESOURCES, ASSETS ect.
• The process of decision making is one of the
most complex mechanisms of human
thinking, as various factors and courses of
action intervene in it, with different results. It
can be considered as the interaction between
a problem that needs to be solved and a
person who wishes to solve it within a
specific environment.
• There are several steps that must be followed to arrive
at decision:
• One must realize that it is going to be necessary to
make a decision, determine the goals to be achieved,
generate alternatives that lead to attaining the
proposed goals, evaluate whether these alternatives
meet one’s expectations and lastly select the best
alternative, the one that implies an efficient global
result (Halpern, 1997).
• This entire process is affected by personal and
environmental variables. In effect, individuals may make
different decisions depending on whether they feel their
boss is observing them, on the amount of information
they have, or if certain motivations play a relevant role
in their lives.
Normative & Descriptive Approach of DM

• The normative perspective explains the choice

of individuals who are behaving rationally in a
task that requires decision making and -using
statistical models- predicts the subjects’
responses from the information provided
about each alternative.
• The descriptive perspective explains how
individuals actually choose, that is, the
psychological processes and the task and
environmental characteristics that underlie
judgments and choices.
• one of the basic differences between these
viewpoints is the way they consider the
decision maker. The normative viewpoint
confers an “unlimited” processing capacity on
decision makers that allows them to examine
exhaustively all the possible alternatives and
choose the best.
• The descriptive perspective grants a “limited”
processing capacity that often leads decision
makers to make mistakes when considering
complex and dynamic tasks, although they
tend to choose options that satisfy them.
• One of the most important descriptive
theories is the naturalistic theory, which
investigates decisions that concern people in
the real world and the factors that affect
them.
• The naturalists attribute eight factors to any important decision in
one’s personal, academic, professional, or social life: the decision
involves relevant and ill-structured problems; it occurs in uncertain
and dynamic environments it proposes shifting, ill-defined, or
competing goals; it generates multiple event-feedback loops; it is
performed with time constraints; it involves high stakes; it allows the
participation of multiple players; and, lastly, there are organizational
norms and goals that must be balanced against the decision makers´
personal choice (Orasanu & Connolly,1993). In general, the
naturalistic approach to decisions tries to show that people can
make the right decision without having to perform sophisticated
calculations.

• They only need to use their experience to recognize the decision

problem as similar to other previous ones and to evaluate all the
variables that affect each one of its phases.
• With regard to age, the youths felt significant
pressure from emotional and social aspects
in their decisions, and the adults and the
retired persons to a lesser extent.
• women are more concerned with
uncertainty, doubts, and the dynamism that
are involved in the decision. They place more
value on time and money; they are more
concerned about the consequences that may
derive from the decision, no matter whether
these affect them or other people.
• Conversely, men assign more importance to
the analysis of the information required to
carry out the decision and to the definition of
the goals or purposes of the decision. They
are more motivated during the process and
also feel more intensely the pressure from all
the work-related aspects.
 Factors?
• Education
• Male attitude towards female
• Age
• Occupation/income/freedom to work
• Male literacy
• Participation in SHGs
• The 73rd & 74th Constitutional Amendments
bought 10 lakhs women as elected
representatives in local self government
bodies due to reservation of seats.
 Property Rights
• Women's property rights are property
and inheritance rights enjoyed by women as a
category within society at any point in time.
The patterns and rights of property ownership
vary between societies and are influenced by
cultural, racial, political, and legal factors.
• The lack of control over both productive and
non-productive resources that is apparent in
both rural and urban settings places women at
a reduced level of advantage in areas of
security of home, maintaining a basis for
survival, and accessing economic
opportunities.
• Development-related problems faced across
the globe have been increasingly linked to
women’s lack of property and inheritance
rights, especially in regards to land and
property ownership, encompassing areas such
as low levels of education, hunger, and poor
health.
• Thus land property rights, through their
impact on patterns of production, distribution
of wealth, as well as market development, has
evolved as one of the prerequisites of
economic growth and poverty reduction.
• Women who are potentially able to meet their
subsistence needs on their own may threaten
to leave the household if they are not given a
large share of the surplus. However, due to
patriarchal property rights, husbands control
over the allocation of resources.
• Both the right to manage land and control the
income from production, encompassing
secure rights to land access, have much
deeper implications than mere access. For
many women, access to land and property are
essential to the production of food as well as
sustainable livelihoods, but are dependent on
natal and marital affiliations.
• Because of the worldwide prevalence of
patrilineal inheritance customs, both
productive resources and property such as
household goods have ended up in the hands
of men and not women. When only men have
rights of inheritance or family succession,
women have little opportunity to improve
their status or living conditions within the
family and community.
• Consequently, they are rendered dependent
on male relatives for survival and have little
say over how property is used to generate
income or to support families. Additionally,
within patrilineal communities, there is a
strong resistance by men towards endowing
women, especially daughters, with rights to
land access.
• Thus, there remains a mismatch between
marriage practices and inheritance laws, with
the strength and biases of the marriage
practice often overriding inheritance laws.
• Gender ideologies, or beliefs and stereotypes
of the expected characteristics of a particular
gender, provide a barrier for women to gain
property rights and enhance status. These
ideologies may take the form of assumptions
of the role that a woman plays in society, her
needs or capabilities, which thus affect the
way that an issue is framed and implemented.
 WOMEN ACCESS TO AND CONTROL OVER
ECONOMIC RESOURCES
• Resources refers to household income, land, equipment,
tools, work, credit.
• Access refers to the ability to use and benefit from
specific resources whereas control over resources also
entails being able to make decisions over the use of that
resources.
• For example, women’s control over land means that they
can access land(use it), own land (can be the legal title-
holders), and make decisions about whether to sell or
rent the land.
• Access and control over resources is a key element of
women’s empowerment, and by extension, the
achievement of gender equality.
 WOMEN’S ACCESS TO LAND, FOREST AND
WATER RESOURCES.
• There is gender inequality in accession and control
over economic resources especially land, forest and
water resources.
• Women play the key role in land and water
management in all developing countries. The
important role played by women in agriculture was in
the past largely ignored by Government Statistics and
Decision-making.
• Over the last two or three decades women are now
receiving some recognition in agriculture sector. The
Gender-blind policies and programmes fail to address
the needs of women farmers.
• There remain a number of areas where
progress in gender equality has not been
significant and which represents challenges
for the future.
• These includes women’s lack of access to
economic resources, inputs like credit and
technology and the limited role played by
women in planning and the formation of
policy in the sector.
• Generally, women use lower levels of technology
because of problem of access, cultural
restrictions on use or lesser interest in doing
research on women’s crops and livestock.
• Women have traditionally earned valuable
income through the processing of foods bur there
are constraints on the expansion of this due to a
lack of information about markets, absence of
cold storage facilities and packaging technology
and inability to obtain credit.
 WOMEN’S ACCESS TO LAND, FOREST AND
WATER RESOURCES.
• Most often women are increasingly pushed to
cultivating plots that are dispersed, remote
and usually less fertile.
• Insecure land tenure reduces the incentive to
make improvements on land or undertake
activities such as tree planting or terracing. It
also offers little incentive for investing in
permanent crops. Further, this implies a lack
of ability to seek credit.
• Women’s access to land and ownership rights
remain a critical problem even in such cases
where there is no legal restriction on their owing
and holding land.
• The need for women to secure full land right
without mediation by men is required on the
ground of welfare, efficiency and gender equality.
• Political will is needed to ensure gender-equality.