India’s female labour force participation (FLFP) is abnormally low at 20% and further decreasing. While social norms against women working might be at play, these do not explain the variation in FLFP noticed across nearby villages which are culturally similar. I hypothesize that women’s labour supply decisions depend on the labour supply decisions of other women in the village thus potentially leading to a “trap” of low FLFP where few women work in the village. This suggests that decisions of other families matter and that a critical mass of women working is needed to sustain the FLFP.
The potential mechanisms for why the number of women already working in a village matters are (1) Information: there is more specific information available about the monetary and non-monetary factors about the work and adjustments at home to accommodate it, (2) Travel: working women need numbers to co-ordinate to rent an auto/taxi or need enough numbers to walk and take the bus together to work, (3) Endogenous social norms: since women working is often seen as a signal that the husband is incapable of providing for the family, more women working would help to dampen this signal and enable a positive norm shift.
In this project, the material and social costs and benefits of work for women and their families, as well as the utility gained from other women in their village working, are first measured. Next, using these measures, an intervention, such as travel coordination, will be targeted to enable women at the margins to take up work. Finally, the project will measure if and how this intervention, encouraging some women to work, leads to a snowball effect, causing women further away from the margins to take up work as endogenous social norms against women’s work relax.
The board methodology of the survey will involve (1) a model of work/no work choice by women and their families (based on wage and non-wage amenities like num. of women working from village), (2) Measured preferences elicited through surveys (described below) to see willingness to pay for amenities like distance (closer factories), female composition (number of women working in their village), and transportation facilities, (3) A structural model putting together the theory and data on preferences to quantify the implications of valuations other women’s labour supply.
For the immediate first step, this project will be conducting surveys to elicit economic and social costs of work to women and their families, as well as the utility gained from other women working from one’s village. This will be done through a mix of Bayesian Adaptive Choice Experiments, hypothetical experiments, and embedded experiments. Based on the survey inputs, interventions will be designed by partnering with local governments and private sector firms to mobilize women in groups and enable coordination in transportation.
The contribution of this research to the literature is threefold. First, it adds to the growing literature on the reasons for low FLFP in India and ways to encourage more women to enter the workforce. Second, it speaks to the broader literature on occupational segregation by gender and gender typing of jobs. Third, it contributes to the theoretical literature on multiple equilibria, thresholds and discontinuous changes, and social learning, in a way that brings insights from theory into the designing of policy relevant interventions.