Autonomy - coming from Greek terms ‘autos’ (meaning self) and ‘nomos’ (meaning custom, or law) - quite literally translates to self-governance. In psychology, it is operationalised similarly, even being synonymised with self-regulation, or self-altering of one’s own responses and inner states. For a woman, it asks variants of the following questions: can she decide, on her own, what to do? Is she responsible for the different choices she makes? Autonomy is considered almost a private attribute; each of us wields control over our own actions, displaying independence or lacking autonomy. Measures describing autonomy ask questions using Likert scales, rating frequencies of certain behaviours and ideas; thus, ‘binary’ is not the right term for the items themselves. However, research within national health systems, such as Senegal, collapses multi-category responses regarding autonomy into a single dichotomous variable (here, regarding contraceptive use, decisions made by the respondent alone, along with husband, husband alone, or another family member were all broken into two final lists: has autonomy/ does not). The granularity of relational dynamics and other factors is cancelled out as noise to ensure this operationalisation holds, neatly, across different tools as a binary, to build a theory that can be universalised.
For instance, Self-determination theory (SDT) claims that autonomy serves as a ‘basic need’ for motivation and self-growth alongside competence and connection, influencing all beings regardless of their social position. All of us strive to feel as though we are the masters of our destiny, controlling our responses to everyday situations, just as we seek feeling capable and cared for. Coupled with data treated as black-or-white, this reinforces construct definitions as ‘facts’ across cultural boundaries.
However, generalisation across cultures does not necessarily mean the construct itself is observed similarly in an individualistic sample against a collectivist one. A 2018 study contrasting American and Indian corporate workers found that autonomy-supportive instructions increased motivation differently among the two cultures; with the former demonstrating increased motivation and the latter decreased motivation. Earlier research by Iyengar and Leppar displays something structurally similar in children: personal choice boosted motivation in children with independent self-construals (as in Western countries) compared to those with interdependent self-construals (Asian countries), who demonstrate higher motivation when instructed by a trusted authority figure. This demonstrates that SDT’s idea that there is a relationship between autonomy and motivation is true; however, the direction of that relationship is shaped by the interpretation of cultural cues.
Carol Ryff’s six-factor model of psychological well-being displays the same tension in a single scale - its autonomy scale is defined as self-determination and independence, where behaviour is regulated by internal standards over external ones. However, a review of Ryff’s subscales in India found cultural friction across several subscales, pushing the researchers to come up with a different, three-factor model encompassing Personal Growth and Satisfying Self-Concept, Purpose and Development in Life and Continuous Learning and Growth in Life (CLGL), retaining values of familial interconnectedness over treating it as a deviation.
Construct Universality: Does Translation Imply Equal Relevance?
Measurement often idealises constructs via assumption. A 2025 methodological critique in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin explains how this occurs: cross-cultural comparisons assume ‘measurement invariance,’ or the idea that a scale accurately captures the same underlying phenomena, with the same precision - regardless of where it is administered. Empirically, this is seldom true. Forcing invariance through statistical alignment techniques suppresses an important realisation, obscuring real between-group differences that hint at richer theoretical conceptualisations across cultures.
The WEIRD sampling critique sits alongside this: data from White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic populations do not echo universal ideas; they merely reflect a subset of opinions. Simple translation of scales developed among Western populations cannot be implemented in Asian nations as ‘culturally neutral’. They carry with them an implicit theory of an individualistic self over the collectivist, family-oriented norm within these communities.
The dominant autonomy definitions remain self-directed, individually held, and externally independent of others; they sit at broader theoretical concepts of self-determination controlling motivation. They remain incomplete, however, in cases where interests are not purely self-driven, as in cases of Indian women, whose needs often echo their families. The self becomes a struggle: constantly weighed against one’s desires and one’s relational responsibilities.
Choice as a Negotiation: Reframing Autonomy and Independence
A 2025 study using the National Family Health Survey data demonstrates how this exists in practice: across about 38,000 families, researchers found that a woman’s contraceptive decision-making was decided less by her alone, but more by a relational bargaining point within her family: how her income compared to her husband’s, or how far his gender role beliefs constrained/ enabled her agency. Even women with substantial personal resources saw their agency narrow when their husbands held traditional views. Autonomy, then, is not a fixed personal trait to be detected, but rather a shifting outcome of a relational negotiation, reassessed with every decision.
A companion 2025 PLOS ONE study on men’s gender attitudes and women’s sexual autonomy demonstrates the same pattern from the other end of the dyad: women’s reported autonomy shifted as much with their partner’s attitudes as it did with their own access to resources and educational background. An autonomy inventory would merely capture a number for this expression - rather than the structural conditions that allow for it to exist at all.
Indian Women Themselves are not a Homogeneous Category
It is important to note that these studies do not capture all Indian women’s experiences; each experience is shaped by socioeconomic positioning as well as gender. Uma Chakravarty’s concept of ‘Brahmanical patriarchy’ describes how Savarna women’s autonomy is restrained mainly through sexual purity, aimed at protecting caste lineage - surveillance that is exercised within families. In contrast, Dalit women face control across dual social levels - gender and caste, coupled with political and economic exclusion. A 2025 report on Dalit women in India found continued exposure to such autonomy-limiting practices, alongside lower representation in politics compared to upper-caste women, taking away their voice and representation. Simple ideas of negotiations fall short in capturing the experiences of Dalit and Adivasi women - questions about negotiations within families do not explore suppression of autonomy via larger, external sociopolitical structures.
It becomes clear that cultural values, casteist beliefs and age-old customs carry the nuance that dominant, Western autonomy definitions lack within India; they shape the experience of autonomy and agency themselves. Instruments that explore how this autonomy is understood must take into consideration the different levels and spheres within which it is negotiated.
Redefining Autonomy: Building better instruments and their limits
Some psychometricians are attempting to close this gap entirely: a 2025 BMC Psychology paper introduced a new Women's Autonomy Scale, designed specifically to capture psychosocial freedom within conventional gender roles rather than viewing it as her decision-making alone. This acknowledges that autonomy is entangled with norms: co-existing with them and, to some extent, shaped by them. Even this instrument carries the measurement-invariance critique: what population is this validated for, against what criterion, and is this still true to the construct of autonomy and not moving into independence within relationships instead (a facet of relational identity)?
Within developmental economics, Kabeer’s (1999) empowerment framework poses a different idea: replacing empowerment of women as an expanded substantive freedom over a stand-alone trait (autonomy). Among Assamese married women studied in a 2024 capability index, autonomy was constructed as an output resulting from multiple enabling conditions - reflecting relational aspects, morality, and ethical values that Indian women navigate every day.
Feminist philosopher Catriona Mackenzie takes this one step further, splitting autonomy into three strands: the freedom and opportunity to make choices, the skill to reflect on them, and the belief that one is entitled to them. Relational autonomy, then, does not entail lesser power: it means that autonomy is built around one’s social setup.
The stakes of getting this wrong or missing this consideration impact policies on maternal health, financial systems, and gender-based violence in India. A woman negotiating skillfully within relationships may score ‘low autonomy’ on a scale determining if she chooses alone, but could possess great bargaining power that guards her wellbeing. Conversely, a woman who scores high on autonomy could be doing so because no one within her family has opposing views. Such measurement errors push the policies built on them in the wrong direction.
None of this means autonomy is the wrong thing to study, or that Indian women’s autonomy is lesser than that of Western women. It means that we need psychological instruments that consider relational negotiation as a primary unit of analysis rather than an extraneous variable that needs to be eliminated. Until then, research about Indian women may just demonstrate the limits of the metric used to judge them.
Mihika Sangtani
