CIAS Inn: Norms, networks, and the challenge of women’s employment

Senior economist Amrita Dhillon, a non-resident fellow at Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies (CIAS) is researching why female labor force participation remains strikingly low in India and parts of South Asia and the Middle East. 

The title of her research project is: “How to empower women to join the workforce: more job opportunities or fewer household constraints?” In an interview, she explains that social norms and household constraints often outweigh the lack of jobs, and describes how peer networks can shape women’s employment decisions.  

Amrita Dhillon, Professor of Economics at the King’s College London, started her fellowship at CIAS last October, and the program is set to conclude this summer. As a non-resident fellow, she travelled to the university twice roughly every five months.  

This is the researcher’s first formal collaboration with Corvinus University. “Basically the way I got to know of it was through friends who have been for similar fellowship in the CIAS and they praised it a lot,” she says. Professor Dhillon expects concrete academic output from this cooperation. “There will be articles, of course,” she explains, adding that she hopes to finish a chapter in a book, which focuses on “norms and networks and women’s labor force participations.” 

Her research focuses primarily on women’s labor force participation in India, which she calls a big puzzle. Despite the country’s economic growth, the labor force participation of women is very low: “We have 20 or 25 percent labor force participation of women as opposed to 60 or 70 percent in the West,” she underlines, adding that women remain similarly excluded from labor markets in countries like Pakistan, and many Middle Eastern and North African states. 

The key question is whether women stay at home because there are not enough jobs, or because social norms prevent them from working even when jobs exist. “It’s not obvious what is holding back women,” she says, highlighting that her experiments suggest that norms and networks are central. 

Professor Dhillon divides barriers into supply side constraints and demand side constraints. Supply-side constraints include domestic responsibilities and deeply rooted norms. “The household constraints are not just childcare and domestic responsibilities, but also norms of male breadwinner,” she says. Another major factor is “this purity norm that women should not go out to work because they will meet other men.” 

However, the researcher’s work highlights another layer: women’s networks. As she points out, “the networks that women have are also composed of women like themselves”, meaning that many of the people around them are not employed. Consequently the job search becomes difficult, because men often hear about openings through employed peers, while women lack similar access. 

Professor Dhillon’s research team tested a digital job platform meant to solve this by connecting employers directly with women. “We introduced a platform that aggregates jobs, where women can register and then employers can just directly call them up” she says. The outcome was unexpected: “What we saw in the end was surprising. The men increased their workforce participation, they switched to better jobs. But the women’s participation actually went down.” The decline may reflect the male breadwinner norm: once husbands earn more, wives may withdraw from paid work. 

Her next experiment will test whether women accept jobs more easily when they can go as a group. “We try to use the fact that a number of women together will be offered some jobs,” she says, adding that “going to the same job, same time maybe it’s easier to explain to the husbands.” 

The professor believes that the biggest obstacle to women’s employment in these countries remains cultural norms inside households. “The household constraints seem to be much stronger than the demand side constraints,” she says, citing research showing that families respond differently depending on whether the husband or wife gets a job. “If the man gets the job, then both the husband and wife, they feel better. But if the woman gets a job, then the husband feels worse,” she explains. 

Still, that attitude can shift once women enter the workforce. “Once you have a critical mass of women who are working, then the attitude will change,” the researcher highlights, adding that the only real solution is accelerating women’s entry into paid work, even if norms resist at first. “Once you just get the women out to work, then people adjust,” she says.