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Skip to primary sidebar Skip to footer G²LM|LIC About History Investigators Team Projects GLM|LIC Agricultural Labour Markets Gender and Employment Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries Migration Skill Training G²LM|LIC Fact & Policy Fertility & Labour markets Barriers to gender parity The Future of Work Policies & Welfare COVID-19 Publications Policy Briefs Synthesis Papers Working Papers Published Articles Book Datasets Events Evidence Finder Mentoring Programme Latest News G²LM|LIC Policy Meeting on April 18, 2024: Boosting Women’s Labour Force Participation – Evidence from Western and Sub-Saharan Africa April 24, 2024 Thank you to all speakers, Andy Hinsley from FCDO for contributing the introductory remarks and all participants for an interesting discussion! The online workshop assembled recent empirical evidence on possibilities to improve the position of women in the labour market and their access to it in Western and Sub-Saharan Africa and discusses policy solutions. The presentations focused on the benefits of education, social networks, entrepreneurship and the public and private sector. All evidence presented is based on projects funded via the G²LM|LIC programme. Please find the programme here . New synthesis paper published! March 20, 2024 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 March 8, 2024 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 . A small selection of our Projects Measuring the Long-Term Impact of Reducing Childhood Poverty Female Entrepreneurship and Professional Networks Digitising Historical Plant Level Panel Data on Labour Outcomes Strength in Numbers Dodging Promotions 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,...