This project studies a specific policy intended to make workplaces more supportive of women’s needs, which in turn may increase women’s labor force participation, productivity and well-being: the creation of lactation rooms in the workplace to allow women to...

With its key role in economic agency and empowerment, employment can provide women with more control over their lives. Yet this potential is only realized when women can find and obtain quality jobs with features that fit their preferences. In this project, I...

Women continue to struggle to have strong job market attachment in many countries in the developing world due to challenges in managing the transitions related to major events in their life cycle. Women are more likely than men to exit the labor market or join...

Women’s labor market aspirations and decisions are often shaped by their marital status and quality of their spouse and relationship. We study how a pre-marital counseling program in Indonesia impacts marital matching, female wellbeing within the marriage, and...

This project involves understanding both, supply constraints to women's participation in the labor market – financial, family, social norms– and demand constraints –flexibility of work contracts. We aim at studying how gender norms – tasks sharing, gender...

The services sector in Latin America has emerged as a major employer of female labor: nearly 50% of women in the workforce are either directly or indirectly employed in this sector. However, these numbers belie the fact that women occupy mostly low-wage...

Traditional business training interventions have been widely implemented but offered mixed results, especially for women (McKenzie and Woodruff, 2013; Blattman and Ralston, 2015; McKenzie and Woodruff, 2021). Since 2018, our interdisciplinary team, including...

Youth unemployment is a major concern in developing countries around the world. In Bangladesh, where a fifth of the population is 15-24 years of age, underemployment is common and female economic participation is hindered by social and cultural barriers. Save...

The objective of this project is to conduct exploratory work for designing an intervention aiming at modifying men’s gender norms. Research shows that having daughters rather than sons may alter attitudes towards gender roles. We would like to understand if...

In developing countries like Pakistan, with deeply entrenched patriarchal norms, self-employed women face multiple challenges, including unprogressive social norms, lack of mobility, capital, skills, social networks, etc. Hence, women-run businesses are...

I study whether enabling women to commute to work with other women (“travel buddies”) from their neighborhoods increases their employment. Data and anecdotal evidence suggest that social norms and safety concerns make it impossible for many women to travel...

Preventing gender-based violence (GBV) and addressing institutional service-delivery related to GBV is one of the most important challenges to encouraging women's mobility and economic participation. Using a clustered RCT, we evaluate a gender and GBV...

Gender gaps in labor market outcomes are well documented empirically across a variety of contexts and time periods. Tanzania is no exception: while 79% of women participate in the labor force, only 10% of women are employed in the formal sector, and there is a...

In Uganda, the persistence of gender segregated labor markets result in the clustering of women within the least lucrative sectors. The proposed project examines the extent of gender bias perpetuated by employees through the referral system, which is a...

Muslim women are underrepresented in management positions in India and often lack role models and networks needed to succeed in the professional world after college. The non-profit LedBy aims to fill this gap through its Accelerator program for Muslim women...

This project studies a specific policy intended to make workplaces more supportive of women's needs, which in turn may increase women's labor force participation and performance on the job: the creation of lactation rooms in the workplace to allow women better...

A son is considered important in India, as is evidenced by the skewed sex ratios in favor of the male child, in urban and rural areas of the country. Many women are abused and abandoned if they are not able to give birth to a son. Our intervention educates men...

We seek to develop a proposal to explore the effects of child care responsibility on higher educated women's labour market behavior in Kerala which could lead to a child care intervention. With the relatively large base of women with higher education not...

How (un)comfortable are inter-gender interactions in Muslim societies? A gender gap in economic and political integration persists in many parts of the Muslim world, yet interpersonal contact across gender lines as a driver of these gaps (as well as a...

Collaborating with an online job portal serving jobseekers from India and other target countries, we will investigate how to expand the breadth of job search for women and ultimately improve female jobseekers' job-finding success and resulting wages...

Despite high rates of familial poverty in Pakistan, the country has low rates of women's LFP compared to countries with similar GDPs. These low rates of LFP can contribute to low levels of women's economic agency. This project uses an experiment to alleviate a...

Adding pro-gender-equality discussion and messaging to the school curriculum is one approach to eroding restrictive gender norms. This study is a randomized evaluation of one such intervention in India, designed and delivered by the non-profit Breakthrough...

In many developing countries, misbehavior within organizations often goes unpunished due to weak governance. Employees whose livelihoods are precarious - who have few alternative job opportunities and little recourse to legal institutions - are especially...

This project uses a large-scale cluster-randomized control trial to evaluate the impacts of industrial employment opportunities on the economic, physical, and social well-being of female rural-to-urban migrant workers and the largely agricultural communities...

The characteristics of internet-mediated gig work -- the ability to work from home at flexible hours, combined with relatively simple-to-acquire skills -- suggest it may be well-suited to facilitate labor force participation for women who would otherwise be...

We study whether community agreements to share unpaid labor could promote women's employment. We partner with one of India's largest carpet producers, a firm that employs women as weavers. The firm faces low attendance and retention of female weavers, and data...

In this project, we aim to test whether gender norms, in particular norms around communication between men and women, hinders information transmission inside the firm. Particularly, we argue that in certain settings, men are unwilling to receive productivity...

Adolescent girls in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are at an elevated risk of depression, anxiety, and other forms of psychological distress, which has negative consequences for a range of future outcomes, including economic productivity. Yet, there...

In Ethiopia, entrenched gender norms continue to prescribe the burden of domestic duties to women, even as many women run their own business. This project studies to what extent the norm that women do the bulk of housework and childcare constrains female-owned...

The Kenya Youth Employment and Opportunities Project (KYEOP) is a large program led by the Government of Kenya (GoK) and the World Bank (WB), targeting young women and men with no more than a secondary education who are unemployed or working vulnerable jobs...

We seek to ask the extent to which having regular interaction (both in-person at the start of the study and via phone afterward) with a successful, female business owner from the same community impacts economic agency and empowerment within the household.

This project aims at promoting female entrepreneurship in male-dominated sectors in Uganda's main cities (Kampala, Masaka and Jinja). In order to better understand how important information is and how it should be delivered to be effective, we plan to conduct...

In this project, we want to explore whether improving public primary healthcare increases female labor force participation (FLP) and women's economic agency in rural Rajasthan. We will collaborate with the Government of Rajasthan to investigate the effects of...

One potential explanation for the source of gender norms that discourage women from participating in the labor force is that men feel threatened by the status and resources that working women obtain. This project proposes a way to change prevailing norms...

Machine-harvestable chickpea (MHCP) varieties are an innovative agricultural technology that increases farmer profits by reducing harvesting costs and post-harvest yield losses. We have received funding (from SPIA-CGIAR) to design a pilot RCT (in collaboration...

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...

First, this study tests how childcare obligations affect profits, the likelihood of business closures, and ultimately the male-female profit gap among microenterprises. To do this, we add a childcare and fertility module to an ongoing large-scale survey of a...

In this survey-based field experiment, we will first measure whether men in India 1) have inaccurate beliefs about what other men around them view as appropriate or status-enhancing when it comes to women's engagement with labor market work; 2) have inaccurate...

Pakistan has a particularly low female labor force participation rate. Public transport is often unsafe for women, adding further constraints to female employment opportunities. We collaborate with the largest transportation network company in the region...

Migration is central to economic opportunity for many of the world's poor, allowing individuals to build skill, increase their incomes, and help their families via remittances. Given large urban-rural wage differences, relatively low rates of migration and...

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated labor markets, reducing employment and increasing reliance on social protection. India's workfare program (MGNREGS) has seen record participation during the pandemic, while economic gender gaps have increased (Deshpande...

The economic crisis resulting from COVID-19 is expected to affect women disproportionately (International Labour Organization 2020). In the proposed project, we will build on an existing program studying job search and employment in Pakistan to address three...

Manufacturing jobs can improve women’s economic empowerment, but health issues or caretaking often drive women out of the labor force. Paid sick leave can prevent the spread of disease and keep workers in the workforce, but workers often fear retribution for...