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

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 women with different knowledge, attitudes, and agency related to family planning (e.g., women from rural vs. urban areas, or from different ethnic groups) can meet and influence each other—with potentially lasting consequences for their economic agency and family planning.

This project aims to (i) test the empirical relevance of these ideas and (ii) evaluate an intervention that leverages workers’ diversity to affect family planning. Researchers will partner with a major industrial park in Ethiopia, which provides jobs to both women from distant rural villages and from the nearby large city. First, researchers intend to survey workers to elicit their interactions with co-workers, as well as their attitudes, aspirations, and decisions related to family planning. They will match survey responses to personnel records and leverage quasi-random variation in rural workers’ exposure to urban workers to test whether workers from different backgrounds do interact and how, and measure the effects of these interactions on family planning outcomes. Second, researchers will pilot matchmaking workshops aimed at facilitating interactions between workers from different backgrounds, with a specific focus on family planning-related interactions. The workshops will be designed to identify key mechanisms. Together, these piloting activities will provide critical inputs to optimize both the design and the evaluation of the matchmaking intervention, to be later evaluated at scale.