Our newest publications
Breaking the Career Ceiling for Women in South Asia’s Garment Industry
A Study of Working Women in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan
By Farzana Afridi, Raymond Robertson, Danila Serra, and Vrinda V Chandra
Getting women into formal employment is only the first step. Our evidence from over 6,000 sewing machine operators in 103 garment factories across Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan shows that substantial gender gaps persist even among men and women doing the same jobs in the same workplaces. While men and women are equally confident in...
The Price of Flexibility: Revealing Salaries in Job Postings
How Pay Transparency Reshapes Women’s Job Search: Evidence from a Field Experiment
By Amen Jalal
Up to 3/4ths of the gender pay gap stems from women’s sorting into low-wage firms. Do women prefer amenities to wages, or face barriers to search? I answer this using 29 million job applications from Pakistan’s largest job search platform, firm and worker surveys, and an experiment mandating pay transparency. I document that large,...
The Intergenerational Transmission of the Child Penalty, Socioeconomic Heterogeneity and Educational Outcomes:
Evidence from Denmark, Italy, Indonesia, and South Africa
By Beatrice Mbinya
Literature defines child penalty as the sustained decline in women’s earnings after childbirth, which has been widely studied. However, its consequences for the next generation remain least known. This paper examines whether maternal earnings losses transmit to children especially their educational attainment across four countries with distinct institutional settings: Denmark, Italy, Indonesia, and South...
Trade and the Gender Wage Gap in South Africa: A Comparative Analysis of Cape Town and eThekwini
By Valentine Madzudzo, Dieter von Fintel, and Mamello Nchake
This study examines the relationship between trade, measured by export propensity, and the gender wage gap in two major South African cities with contrasting industrial structures: Cape Town and eThekwini. Using spatially disaggregated administrative data from the Cities Support Programme (CSP) and applying the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, we quantify how trade influences wage disparities between...
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,...
