Research

(with Giorgia Barboni, Erica Field, Charity Troyer Moore, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner and Aruj Shukla)

Access to smartphones and mobile internet is increasingly necessary to participate in the modern economy. Yet women significantly lag men in digital access, especially in lower-income settings with gender gaps that span other dimensions and where digital gaps threaten to deepen existing analog inequities. We study the short- and long-term effects of a large-scale state-sponsored program in India that aimed to close digital gender gaps by transferring free smartphones to women while constructing 4G towers to bring rural areas online. The program was well implemented, reversing gender gaps in smartphone ownership in the short run. However, many women lost ownership, and gender gaps in use quickly worsened as men made use of the new phones. Nearly 5 years after the program began, we find limited evidence of persistent effects across a range of outcomes, including phone ownership and use, gender norms, access to information, and local economic activity, although we do find some evidence of sectoral reallocation in the labor market. Despite a widespread increase in smartphone adoption across households, digital gender gaps persist and were not affected by the program. Our findings suggest that in gender-unequal, resource-constrained settings, addressing affordability alone may not close digital gender gaps.

 (with Naveen Bharathi and Gautam Nair)

How does women’s political representation shape female entrepreneurship and economic participation? Building on prior scholarship, we evaluate this question in the context of a natural experiment, a novel dataset on quotas for women in over 12,000 villages in South India, and census micro-data encompassing over 700,000 enterprises. In contrast to earlier observational findings, our results show null-to-negative effects of female political leadership on women’s economic outcomes. We find no increase in the proportion of female-owned firms or in women’s access to formal credit. When the fraction of reserved villages is high, we observe a decrease in hired female workers across various enterprise types, including those owned by women and marginalized groups; we also find a substitution from hired to non-hired female labor and a decline in firm size in agriculture. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about the economic benefits of political reservations and align with recent research highlighting the complex relationship between women’s political representation and economic empowerment.