LAUSR

Gender norms in South Asia often lead women, especially younger newly married women, to eat last in the household, not eat enough food and/or have poor diet quality. Low BMI and poor nutritional intake among preconception and pregnant women, and subsequent adverse birth and growth outcomes, are still common. We hypothesize that factors that increase women's status in the household, including becoming pregnant, giving birth, being in school and paid work, might lead to improvements in food consumption and quality. This should especially be true for pregnancy and childbirth given decades of programs and policies aiming to improve nutrition pre-pregnancy. Our objective is to explore how the change in four factors associated with women's status are associated with changes in newly married women's eating practices. We collected 4 rounds of panel data over 18 months from 200 newly married women (married in the last 3 months) living in 2 municipalities of Nepal in 2018–2019. Using mixed effects models, we explored the impact of (1) becoming pregnant, (2) giving birth, (3) being in school and (4) paid work outside the home, on women reporting that she ate last in the household always/most of the time; ate 3 or more meals a day; ate iron rich foods all/most days; and a higher dietary diversity. Controlling for other socio-economic demographics, pregnancy or giving birth was not associated with improvement in any eating practices. An individual woman starting to work outside the home was associated with her having a lower odds of eating last. A woman dropping out of school was associated with a reduced odds of eating iron rich foods most days and eating 3 + meals a day. Programs and policies aiming to improve women's access to high quality and quantity of food when they become pregnant or give birth do not seem to be leading to desired improvements in this setting—other approaches are needed to encourage families to give high-risk women more and higher quality food. Other factors associated with women's status and empowerment do appear to increase women's access to food and nutrition related resources. Families thus appear to value investing in women when they are contributing to household resources or appear to have future potential to do so, which may contribute to higher negotiating power for women. National Institute of Child Health and Development.