The role of gender inequality in the obesity epidemic: a case study from India using IHDS panel data (2005-2011/12)

Recent empirical evidence emphasizes the higher prevalence of overweight and obesity for women, especially in developing countries. However, the potential link between gender inequality and obesity has rarely been investigated. Using longitudinal data from India (IHDS 2005-11), we implement Hausman-Taylor and fixed-effect models to estimate the effect of different dimensions of gender inequalities on female overweight. This study demonstrates that the form of gender inequality or women’s mistreatment differently affects female bodyweight. Indeed, we show that some forms of women’s mistreatments (such as perceived community violence and age difference with husband) increase the risk of female overweight, whereas more severe forms of abuse such as child marriage increase the risk of underweight. Moreover, we also find that higher decision-making power and autonomy about outings are risk factors of weight gain and obesity, especially in urban settings, perhaps indicating a higher exposure to urban obesogenic lifestyles. To conclude, our results suggest that, although improving women’s status in society may be a key action to address the epidemic of obesity, policies must also target hazardous habits that emancipation may imply in urban (obesogenic) environments. These meta-data include: (i) the merged database from the two waves of IHDS we used in the study (.dta in Stata format); (ii) the codes used for data treatment and analysis (.do in Stata format). Original IHDS data are freely available on: https://ihds.umd.edu. Further details about our methods and results will be published soon in a scientific journal and will reference these meta-data.

Keywords: India; Gender inequality; Obesity; Hausman-Taylor estimations; Fixed effects estimations.
JEL codes: I14 I15 J16

近期实证研究表明，肥胖和超重现象在女性中尤为普遍，尤其在发展中国家。然而，性别不平等与肥胖之间的潜在联系却鲜有被深入探究。本研究采用印度（IHDS 2005-11）的纵向数据，运用 Hausman-Taylor 和固定效应模型来估算不同维度性别不平等对女性超重的影响。研究表明，性别不平等的形式或女性遭受的虐待方式不同，对女性体重的影响亦各异。事实上，我们发现某些形式的女性行为虐待（如感知到的社区暴力及与丈夫的年龄差异）增加了女性肥胖的风险，而更为严重的虐待形式，如童婚，则增加了体重不足的风险。此外，我们还发现，较高的决策权和关于外出的自主权是体重增加和肥胖的风险因素，尤其是在城市环境中，这可能表明对城市肥胖生活方式的暴露程度更高。综上所述，我们的研究结果表明，尽管提高女性在社会中的地位可能是应对肥胖流行病的关键举措，但政策也必须针对城市化（肥胖）环境中可能带来的有害习惯。这些元数据包括：（i）本研究中使用的IHDS两波数据的合并数据库（Stata格式的.dta文件）；（ii）用于数据处理和分析的代码（Stata格式的.do文件）。原始的IHDS数据可在以下网址免费获取：https://ihds.umd.edu。关于我们的方法和结果的更多详细信息将在不久的将来发表在科学期刊上，并将引用这些元数据。关键词：印度；性别不平等；肥胖；Hausman-Taylor估计；固定效应估计。JEL代码：I14 I15 J16