Bringing latent female workers into job search: evidence from a job search platform in Pakistan

Women in South Asian cities are less likely than men to participate in the labor market, even at high levels of education. Some women are deeply detached from the labor market but some are "latent jobseekers," who are at the margin of participation. They report in surveys that they want to work but are neither working nor actively searching for work. In this project, we incorporate randomized experiments into a high-frequency job matching service to identify and alleviate gendered constraints to labor force entry for these women. Our results to date show that two interventions, encouragement to search and offering safe transport to and from work, increased women's application rates and brought economically inactive women into search. In the proposed project, we will introduce additional interventions that respectively make it easier for women to attend job interviews and assess if firms reject some applicants due to concerns about transport barriers.