Empowering women is considered to affect households livelihood outcomes both directly through emphasizing expenditure for food or social aspects (health, education), and indirectly through higher adoption rates of agricultural technologies increasing productivity, thus raising on-farm food availability and agricultural income. Drawing on women s intra-household decision-making power, the possibility of all (adolescent) household members actively participating in family decisions is widely ignored or undervalued in the literature. Therefore, this article applies a new decision-making index that allows all household members to be considered in decision-making processes. It investigates how women s bargaining power influences livelihood outcomes through different pathways: (i) the direct effect is measured as impact on social expenditures; (ii) the indirect effect is measured as impact on adopting crop rotation leading to higher agricultural productivity. Using data of 378 farming households living in a 200 km radius around Hawassa town, we estimate the effects by employing Tobit and log-linear regression models. Our findings suggest that women s participation in decision-making positively influences livelihood outcomes directly, reflected in higher social expenditures; and indirectly through increasing the adoption of crop rotation practices, thus improving farm productivity. Therefore, we conclude that households with higher women empowerment are likely to achieve higher livelihood outcomes. Acknowledgement : The financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) is kindly acknowledged.