Register now for our upcoming online policy event on April 18 on women’s labour force participation in Western and Sub-Saharan Africa here.
Latest News
New synthesis paper published!
A new G²LM|LIC synthesis paper by Michelle Rao and Gabríela Diaz-Pardo (both LSE) systematically reviews the literature on the impact of cash transfers on women’s employment and empowerment, covering 30 cash transfer programs on adult women across 19 lower and middle-income countries, using data from the G²LM|LIC Jobs of the World database. Find the paper for download here.
G²LM|LIC Mentoring/H.E.R. – Career Structures in Economics
On March 6 and 7, a joint workshop of G²LM|LIC and LSE’s Hub for Equal Representation in the Economy (H.E.R.) took place at LSE in London. Eight mentees from the G²LM|LIC Mentoring Programme were selected to join a conference on Career Structures in Economics, to present their mentored paper and attend a session on research skills held by G²LM|LIC’s programme director Oriana Bandiera. A big thanks to everybody who was involved in organizing and setting up the event, to the LSE Econ PhD students for their excellent feedback and last, but not least, to the mentees for their wonderful presentations. We hope that everybody is going home feeling they benefited from having participated in the event, in one way or the other.
Please find the detailed programme here.
Our newest publications
What Works to Close Digital Gender Gaps?
Mobile phones can help individuals access information, networks, and resources, allowing them to benefit both socially and economically. Yet in many lower-income countries, women lag men in phone ownership and usage for a variety of economic and normative reasons. We investigate two approaches to closing digital gender gaps. The first is a statewide program, which distributed millions of smartphones, along with free data, to women across the state of Chhattisgarh in central India. In the second study, we layered digital literacy training on top of the smartphone distribution program. Despite initially reversing the gender gap in smartphone ownership, the smartphone distribution program had no long-term impact on digital gender gaps. In contrast, low-cost digital literacy training had lasting impacts, reducing digital gender gaps and increasing women’s smartphone use. Digital literacy training also improved women’s connection with others and mental health, highlighting important areas that phones can improve women’s well-being in settings where their mobility and networks are limited.
Women and Cash Transfers
In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of the literature on the impact of cash transfers on women’s employment and empowerment. We construct a dataset of 265 impacts of cash transfers on adult women across 56 studies and 30 programs in Lower and Middle-income countries. Our dataset is the first that matches estimated treatment effects with harmonised information on the design of cash transfer programs, including the transfer size, payment methods and frequencies, and program conditionalities. Across studies, we find that cash transfers have a positive and insignificant impact on women’s employment and empowerment. We use our data to explore how the impact of cash transfers differs by program design features and baseline country conditions, including local labor market structures and gender social norms. We find that cash transfers have a larger impact on women’s labor force participation when they are larger in size, and when there is a higher proportion of women who work in formal employment before the program evaluation. Overall, our results suggest that cash transfers have more meaningful impacts on women’s employment and empowerment when pre-existing gender constraints are low. Our findings highlight the importance of interpreting estimated program impacts in the context of country-level conditions and program design.
Retention Incentives and Mental Health
This project studies the effectiveness of financial incentives for worker retention in a large ready-made garment factory in the Hawassa Industrial Park, Ethiopia. We collaborate with a large company that faces very high levels of turnover among new staff. We report the results of an RCT testing whether a generous eight-month retention bonus outperforms a smaller short-term retention bonus in inducing long-term retention. We find that the more generous, longer-term bonus does not induce additional retention. However, we show that this bonus increases retention for two pre-specified groups: workers who are particularly patient and those with better mental health at baseline. Our results suggest that financial incentives for retention (i) can have unexpected consequences on the composition of the workforce of a firm and (ii) need to be complemented by other retention policies more appealing to impatient and stressed workers to impact overall retention rates. Designing a mechanism whereby different workers can select into different types of retention policies is a fruitful avenue for future research.
Labor Supply Complementarities in Urban Côte d‘Ivoire
In lower-income countries, women tend to have lower labor supply and are more likely to work in informal jobs compared to men. To address this issue, it is not enough to simply improve women’s
access to formal wage employment, since this type of employment is often characterized by low take-up and high turnover rates—perhaps because wage jobs are less easily coordinated within social networks. Our project examines whether social networks—and in particular, the ability to commute together—can improve these employment outcomes. In two field experiments in urban Côte d’Ivoire, we offered jobs to prospective workers, varying whether their network members would also receive a job, and whether this job would allow them to work and commute together. Both jobs paid roughly twice the amount focal workers were earning at baseline. Our experimental design, supplemented by additional heterogeneity and network analysis as well as qualitative work, allows us to pinpoint the primary mechanism behind these effects and to identify any gender differences.
Child Care Subsidies and Employment Services in Egypt
Globally, as of 2023, only 45% of women were employed, compared to 68% of men (International Labour Organization 2023). Gender gaps in employment are even starker in the Middle East and North Africa. In Egypt, as of 2022, while 66% of men were employed, only 13% of women were employed (CAPMAS 2022). Women in Egypt have even lower rates of employment when they marry and form families (Krafft, Assaad, and Keo 2022; Selwaness and Krafft 2021; Assaad, Krafft, and Selwaness 2022). A randomized controlled trial in low-income areas of Greater Cairo, Egypt, tested whether helping women with young children with care-giving and finding jobs could increase their employment. The experiment randomized 25% and 75% child-care subsidies (vouchers, subsequently raised to 100% subsidies) for registered NGO nurseries. The experiment also cross-randomized employment services to help women find and apply for jobs. While only 11% of the women were working at baseline, among the non-employed, 40% wanted to work, and 46% of the women wanting to work reported child care as the primary barrier to employment.