Our newest publications
Making Work Accessible: Mobility, Social Networks and Women’s Employment
By Andrea Smurra
This brief summarises evidence from G²LM|LIC-funded research on barriers to women’s employment in Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and India. The studies show that women’s access to work is shaped not only by skills and labour demand, but also by mobility constraints, safety concerns, social networks, and workplace conditions. Policies that make jobs more reachable,...
Fertility and Women’s Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence on the role of economic opportunities and childcare services
By Andrea Smurra
This brief summarises evidence from six G²LM|LIC-funded research projects on the two-way relationship between fertility and women’s economic opportunities in low-income settings. The studies show that childbearing can have lasting consequences for women’s labour market trajectories, especially when it occurs early in life, but also that marriage and fertility decisions respond to the economic...
Does the Firm Matter More than the Job? Unpacking the Gender Wage Gap in Nairobi, Kenya
By Alison Andrew, Inbar Amit, Nathan Barker, Robert Garlick, Carolyne Nekesa, and Kate Orkin
Gender wage gaps persists across low-income labor markets, but the source of these gaps is not well understood. Is the gap driven by women working at lower-paying firms, or by firms paying women less from the same job? We use a combination of firm-level data and a resume rating exercise to test this question....
The Female Urban Mobility Advantage in South Asia
By Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, Paul Novosad, Maurizio Bussolo, Jonah Rexer , and Sara Sethia
Over the past two decades, South Asia has experienced rapid economic growth and urbanisation, expanding the range of economic opportunities in the region. How strongly is access to new opportunities shaped by family background? And does growing up in a city rather than a village change a child’s prospects? Our paper studies these questions...
Where Do Women Work? Public Sector Employment, Gender, and Development
By Ahu Gemici, Juan Pablo Rud, Ija Trapeznikova, Pengzhan Qian, and Juan Sebastián Cifuentes Troncoso
As countries develop, workers move out of self-employment and subsistence farming into wage jobs. Around the world, women increasingly benefit from this shift by moving disproportionately into public sector employment, which typically pays them higher wages relative to men than private jobs do. Sub-Saharan Africa is a striking exception: self-employment remains stubbornly high even...
