This paper analyzes the impact of women’s empowerment on two aspects of food security—calorie and protein intake of children—using data on agricultural households from the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey. We are interested both in the differential impact of mother’s empowerment on the food security of boys and girls as well as in whether different aspects of empowerment have different effects. There are 10 different aspects of empowerment including making production decisions, owning and selling assets, being a member of a group and so on. Our estimates suggest that, in households with more empowered women, children enjoy higher calorie and protein intake but that daughters are disadvantaged relative to sons. Most importantly, mother’s empowerment is an important source of gender discrimination. When considering the sub-components of empowerment, we find that input into production decisions are important for both calorie consumption and protein. These findings are robust to a host of controls including household poverty, sibling composition, community social norms and individual characteristics.

本文使用孟加拉国综合家庭调查中有关农业家庭的数据，分析了增强妇女权能对粮食安全两个方面的影响-儿童的热量和蛋白质摄入量。我们既对增强母亲能力对男孩和女孩的粮食安全的不同影响，也对增强能力的不同方面是否产生不同的影响感兴趣。赋权有10个不同方面，包括制定生产决策，拥有和出售资产，成为团队成员等等。我们的估计表明，在拥有更多权能的妇女的家庭中，孩子的卡路里和蛋白质摄入量较高，但女儿相对于儿子而言处于不利地位。最重要的是，赋予母亲权力是性别歧视的重要来源。在考虑赋权的各个组成部分时，我们发现生产决策中的输入对于卡路里消耗和蛋白质均很重要。这些发现对包括家庭贫困，兄弟姐妹组成，社区社会规范和个人特征在内的许多控制措施都是有力的。