Job Market Paper

What Works for Her? Why Work-from-Home Digital Jobs Affect Female Labor Force Participation (with Lisa Ho)

In settings where social norms impose severe constraints on married women, their labor force participation—particularly for jobs outside the home—is markedly low. Flexible and remote digital job opportunities have the potential to shift this trend. We implemented a randomized field experiment in Mumbai's slum resettlement communities with 3,000 households, randomly assigning them to a job offer for either Work-from-Home (WfH) or Work-from-Center (WfC), and cross-randomizing to three wage levels. We find that women are twice as likely to take up a WfH job offer as compared to a job offer at a (women-only, child-friendly) local center (58% vs 27% take-up rates, respectively), and the actual burden of housework and childcare cannot explain most of the difference. Subsequent field experiments and analyses are consistent with the role of norms of domesticity, wherein wives are expected to stay home, as a key factor in explaining this gap. Remarkably, even when wages are increased up to five times for WfC jobs, women still overwhelmingly prefer WfH jobs; higher wages do not counteract the strong norms of domesticity, thereby not increasing job take-up.

Working Papers

Bringing Work Home: Impacts of Introducing Flexible Work Arrangements for Women in West Bengal (with Lisa Ho and Anahita Karandikar)

This paper studies the effects of introducing flexible work arrangements on female labor force participation and gender norms. In a field experiment with 1,670 households, we test the impact of offering flexible jobs – which meet households at the outer limit of their expectations on women’s domestic responsibilities – on women’s labor supply. We find three sets of results. First, flexible work arrangements dramatically increase take up of work: 49% of women in our sample take up the most flexible job, as compared to 15% of women who are offered an office-based job. Toggling on and off specific dimensions of job flexibility shows that the ability to multitask work with childcare and to work from home are the deciding factors in labor supply for many women, particularly those from more traditional households. Second, work experience shifts women’s gender attitudes to become less traditional, and experience with flexible work increases women’s likelihood of accepting outside-the-home work in a later job offer. Lastly, we show that despite the efficacy of flexible work arrangements at increasing women’s labor supply, employers may avoid offering job flexibility because of negative worker selection and negative effects on productivity.

Publications

Shrinivas, A., Jalota, S., Mahajan, A., & Miller, G. (2023). The Importance of Wage Loss in the Financial Burden of Illness: Longitudinal Evidence from India. Social Science & Medicine, 317. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115583

Abstract: A key aim of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is to protect individuals and households against the financial risk of illness. Large-scale health insurance expansions are therefore a central focus of the UHC agenda. Importantly, however, health insurance does not protect against a key dimension of financial risk associated with illness: forgone wage income (due to short-term disability). In this paper, we quantify the economic burden of illness in India attributable – separately – to wage loss and to medical care spending, as well as differences in them across the socio-economic distribution. Using data from two Indian longitudinal household surveys, we find that wage loss accounts for more than 80% of the total economic burden of illness among the poorest households, but only about 20% of the economic burden of illness among the most affluent. Overall, we find that wage loss accounts for a substantial share of the total economic burden of illness in India – and disproportionately so among the poorest households.

Works in Progress

Effect of COVID-19 on Women's livelihoods, health, and dignity outcomes in slums (with Sakshi Shah)

[Status: Data collection completed]

Effect of Slum Redevelopment on Women and Child Health outcomes 

[Status: Data collection]

Developing an Agency Measurement tool for Urban Slum Women

[Status: Design stage]