Measurements of Media Exposure, Women Empowerment and Descriptive Analysis

Abstract

The deregulation of media in 2002, resulted in a proliferation of private cable and satellite TV outlets in Pakistan. We take media exposure as TV viewership, listening to radio, and exposure to print media i.e. newspaper and magazines. In this paper we analyze the descriptive statistics of media exposure; women empowerment and a crosstab of media exposure and women empowerment by using the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) data for the year 2017-2018. The data reveals that 35.7 percent of all ever married woman aged 15-19, are not exposed to any source of media. The data further reveals that only 1.9 percent of the women read newspaper or magazine and 2.5 percent the women listen to the radio. Furthermore, the data reveals that 40.5 percent women watch Television only. Moreover, only 2.8 percent of women are exposed to all the three sources of media, i.e. women who read the newspaper; listen to the radio and watch television. The data reveals that 50 percent of the women have very low empowerment, half of our respondents fall in this range, whereas almost 30 percent of the women are moderately empowered and make decisions jointly with their husbands and 7.1 percent of women have high empowerment and only 4 percent women are fully autonomous in their decision making. The cross-tabulation analysis between women empowerment and media exposure reveals a positive association between media exposure and women’s empowerment. Women with no media exposure are predominantly clustered in the lowest empowerment group, whereas those with moderate and higher exposure show a noticeable shift toward middle empowerment categories. However, despite this positive relationship, the proportion of women in the highest empowerment categories remains very small across all media exposure levels.