Improving Women’s Safety at Work in the Urban Retail Sector in India

This study evaluates the impact of a targeted sexual harassment (SH) training program on workplace safety and climate within small urban firms in India. The project examines whether structured training sessions can mitigate workplace harassment, improve employer and employee safety practices, and improve workplace dynamics, with a specifc focus on urban settings where gender-based safety issues pose signifcant barriers to equitable work environments. The project design will also help to understand the characteristics of frms/frm owners that can be induced to take up such training successfully in a context when there is no monitoring of workplace practices of such frms and where rights of workers are extremely limited. The intervention includes a comprehensive SH training program tailored to meet the needs of small and, informal frms in densely populated areas. This randomized controlled trial (RCT) will be conducted across 236 urban markets in Delhi, with frms randomly assigned to treatment and control groups to measure both direct and spillover effects. The experimental design incorporates a combination of employee and employer surveys and incentivized hiring decisions.

This project offers a replicable model for promoting safe, inclusive workplaces in low-resource settings, with broader implications for violence prevention and gender rights. The project also offers crucial insights into the most successful ways to induce firms to take up such a training when voluntary private provision of such mandated training might be very low due to zero monitoring. The study timeline is from March 2025 to March 2027."