Women’s empowerment and intra-household diet diversity across the urban continuum: Evidence from India’s DHS

•Nightlights proxying the urban continuum are linked with improved diet diversity for both genders.•Women’s nutritional empowerment is significant for women’s diet diversity.•The empowerment – diets pathway is stronger for households at lower income levels.•Urbanization is significant for diet diversity at higher income levels for both genders.•Heterogeneity in level of urbanization & empowerment should inform policy responses. Women’s empowerment has been associated with improved nutritional outcomes in various settings. However, the gains from empowerment do not necessarily accrue to different members of the same household in the same manner. Furthermore, the relationship between empowerment and nutrition itself is likely to be shaped by the overall level of development in a given region. This paper investigates the heterogeneity in the association between women’s empowerment in nutrition index (WENI) and quality of intra-household diets between men and women when spatial variations in the levels of urbanization are accounted for, in India. We use intrahousehold dietary intake data for 60,000 men and women from the fourth round of India’s National Family Health Survey and conceptualize women’s empowerment using the women’s empowerment in nutrition index (WENI). We use geospatial data on nightlights as a proxy for the urban continuum. Nightlights intensity (NTL) captures the growth of smaller towns (between large urban cities and rural areas) that has characterized urbanization in India. A multilevel modeling approach indicates that a unit increase in WENI scores is associated with an improvement in women’s diet diversity scores by 0.19 units, with no significant association for men’s diet diversity. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that this finding holds at all NTL terciles. Alongside the role of WENI, we find that a doubling of NTL is associated with an increase in diet diversity scores by atleast 7–8% for both men and women, across wealth quintiles. These results emphasize the need for targeted approaches based on spatial heterogeneity in growth and development within a country when investing in the empowerment-nutrition pathway.