2025

It’s the Co-Workers: Formal Female Employment, Network Formation, and Family Planning

Researchers:
  • Samia Brisson
  • Florian Grosset-Touba
  • David Qihang Wu
Location:
Ethiopia
Type:
  • Pilot project
Factories are melting pots. Their employment opportunities attract workers from very different backgrounds who get to interact, form relationships, and influence each other. In women-dominated industries, such as garment or agri-processing, this means that...
Gender Labor Markets Health

Empowerment, Wellbeing, and Fertility through STEM Careers

Researchers:
Location:
Delhi, India and Maharashtra, India
Type:
  • Full project
Does women empowerment, caused by STEM human capital and employment, improve low-income Indian women’s health, wellbeing, and fertility choices? Researchers hypothesize that low empowerment may limit women’s health, well-being, and reproductive autonomy. STEM...
Gender Health Labor Markets

Female Micro-Entrepreneurship and Child Development

Researchers:
  • Moritz Poll
  • Hyun Soo Suh
Location:
Malawi
Type:
  • Full project
How far can a large economic push shift the power balance inside a household? Does it lower or perhaps increase women’s ideal number of children, and does this translate into actual fertility? This study expands data collection on an existing randomized...
Gender Labor Markets Health

General Equilibrium Effects of Increasing Women's Economic Engagement

Researchers:
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
Despite rising education levels, women’s labor force participation in India remains low. Understanding how scalable policy can increase women’s labor force participation, and assessing the downstream consequences of this change, is key to supporting women’s...
Gender Labor Markets

The Impact of Pre-marital Counseling on Women's Empowerment and Couples' Wellbeing: A Field Experiment in Indonesia

Researchers:
Location:
Semarang City, Indonesia
Type:
  • Full project
A key challenge in the developing world is raising female labor force participation (FLFP), as many women drop out of the labor force upon marriage or childbirth. A parallel challenge, increasingly clear through new literature demonstrating backlash by...
Gender Labor Markets

Jobs of the Future and Gender Norms in India

Researchers:
  • Aditi Bhowmick
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
This project will evaluate whether digital persuasion can shift entrenched gender and masculinity norms among adult men and women in India. The experiment is embedded within jobs provided by Karya, a digital labor firm offering supplementary employment to...
Gender Labor Markets Firms

2022

Friendly workplaces for working mothers

Location:
Kenya
Type:
  • Full project
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...

Information Frictions on Job Descriptions

Researchers:
  • Andelyn Russell
Location:
India
Type:
  • Pilot project
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...

The Impact of Pre-marital Counseling on Economic and Psychosocial Wellbeing of Women: A Field Experiment in Indonesia

Researchers:
Location:
Indonesia
Type:
  • Pilot project
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...

Learning to see a World of Opportunities: Unpacking Gender Effects

Researchers:
Location:
Colombia
Type:
  • Full project
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...

When men raise daughters: changing gender norms through fatherhood.

Researchers:
  • Karina Paola Colombo
  • Elisa Failache
  • Virginia Lorenzo
  • Martina Querejeta
Location:
Mexico
Type:
  • Project development grant
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...

Together to Work? Role of Kith and Kin on Women's Employment and Mobility

Researchers:
  • Rolly Kapoor
Location:
Dehradun, Uttar Pradesh, India
Type:
  • Project development grant
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...

2021

Debiasing Law Enforcement: Effects of an Expressive Arts Intervention in India

Researchers:
  • Sofia Amaral
  • Girija Borker
  • Nishith Prakash
  • Helmut Rainer
  • Maria Micaela Sviatschi
Location:
Bihar, India
Type:
  • Full project
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...

A new coworker: better a male, a female or a friend?

Researchers:
  • Livia Alfonsi
  • Pedro De Souza
Type:
  • Project development grant
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...

Child care and educated women's labour market behaviour: Evidence from Kerala

Researchers:
  • Tirtha Chatterjee
Location:
Kerala, India
Type:
  • Project development grant
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...

A Field Experiment to Improve Women's Mobility in Pakistan

Researchers:
  • Soledad Artiz Prillaman
  • Natalya Rahman
  • Sarah Thompson
Location:
Lahore, Pakistan
Type:
  • Full project
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...

Bringing Work Home: Internet-Mediated Gig Work & Women's Employment

Researchers:
  • Lisa Ho
  • Anahit Karandikar
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
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...

The Impact of Gender Norms on Female-owned Enterprises

Researchers:
  • Eyoual Demeke
  • Isabelle Salcher
Location:
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Type:
  • Pilot project
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...

Yes, women can. Is information provision effective in encouraging women to enter more profitable male-dominated sectors?

Researchers:
  • Iacopo Bianchi
  • Dominik Biesalski
  • Cristina Clerici
Location:
Uganda
Type:
  • Project development grant
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...

Impact of Mechanization in Agriculture on Female Labor Force

Researchers:
Location:
Andhra Pradesh, India
Type:
  • Other
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...

Addressing the "Baby-Profit Gap": Testing interventions to boost profits for female-owned businesses

Researchers:
  • Laura Basara
  • Solene Delecourt
  • Anne Fitzpatrick
  • Layna Lowe
  • Anya Marchenko
  • Michael Walker
Location:
Siaya County, Kenya
Type:
  • Pilot project
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...

Increasing female employment in the transportation sector in Pakistan

Researchers:
Location:
Lahore, Pakistan
Type:
  • Pilot project
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...

Can Workfare Keep Women Working During a Crisis? The Long-Term Effects of Female-Friendly MGNREGS Reform During COVID-19

Researchers:
Location:
Madhya Pradesh, India
Type:
  • Full project
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...

2020

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