Women’s employment and its association with physical intimate partner violence during pregnancy in India

Pregnancy increases a woman’s vulnerability to intimate partner violence (IPV) due to stressors like son preference, unintended pregnancy, women’s acceptance of IPV and partner’s alcohol abuse. While women’s employment is widely viewed as a pathway to greater empowerment, it may contradict normative gender expectations, provoking male backlash in India. Our study uses a sample of 58,993 ever-pregnant women from the National Family Health Survey data (NFHS-5,2019–21) to examine the nature of the association between a woman’s employment status and the experience of physical IPV during pregnancy in India. We used linear probability model (LPM) to assess the linear association. To address reverse causality, we employed a two-stage residual inclusion (2SRI) model, instrumenting women’s employment with the cluster average female employment status. LPM estimates indicated a modest positive relationship ( β = 0.013, CI 0.007–0.019, p < 0.001), but women’s employment was endogenous. After accounting for endogeneity, our findings revealed that employed women had a higher probability of reporting IPV during pregnancy in India (M.E. = 0.033, CI 0.012–0.053, p < 0.001), supporting the male backlash theory. Affluence (M.E.= -0.011, CI -0.020–0.002, p < 0.05) and higher household decision-making agency (M.E.=-0.024, CI -0.032–0.016, p < 0.001) were among the protective factors. Hence, considering employment as having a non-unidirectional relationship with IPV during pregnancy would improve the predictive power of the factors associated with the reproductive health of women in India.