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Chapter 4
Factors that affect employers’ decision to hire female workers
Discrimination
A key demand-side barrier to equal labour market outcomes for women is discrimination in hiring and treatment on the job. Outright requests for applicants only of certain gender are still legal in many low-income countries, though by now outlawed in most richer countries (Kuhn et al. 2020). Data from the World Value surveys show that the poorer a country, the more likely respondents agree that “on the whole, men make better business executives than women” (Jayachandran 2015). Economists traditionally distinguish between taste-based discrimination (in which employers dislike hiring or working with women) and statistical discrimination (in which employers infer characteristics of individual women based on average characteristics of women). Both forms have been documented in many developing country settings in the literature, though not all studies clearly distinguish between these categories, and both forms of discrimination interact in many places.[1]
Using rich data from, and experiments run on, a researcher-operated job matching platform in Pakistan, which was offered to representative sets of households and firms, Gentile et al. (2023) estimate that demand side restrictions are a larger constraint to women’s job opportunities than supply side factors, especially for jobs requiring only low education levels. Nevertheless, the volume of research on demand side barriers is smaller than on supply-side barriers in developing countries (Gentile et al. 2023), which may be related to higher costs of conducting well-identified studies with employers than with (potential) employees. This section begins with a review of a number of papers analysing gendered patterns in job advertisements in developing countries. It then reviews a number of experiments on discrimination in hiring, and on unequal treatment of women on the job.
Gendered patterns in job advertisements
A series of papers have studied gendered job advertisements on Chinese online job pages. Kuhn and Shen (2013) find that over one in ten job ads on one of the largest Chinese job boards requested applicants of a certain gender, evenly split for men and women. But gender preference is strongly correlated with required age and physical attractiveness of the candidates; 87% of gendered ads requesting young, tall and attractive candidates were asking for female candidates. Two thirds of the variation in requested gender occurs within firms, suggesting that firms target men vs women for particular occupations. Kuhn et al. (2020) find that requests for applicants of a certain gender strongly increase the share of applicants from that gender, even when controlling for firm-job-title fixed effects. Gender-mismatched applicants are less likely to receive a call-back, compared to when applying to an identical job but without gender request, with this penalty being larger for women. Kuhn and Shen (2023) study the effects of an overnight withdrawal of the ability of employers to indicate a preferred gender in job ads on one platform. They observe applications to the same open job ads in the days before and after the ban, and responses of employers to these ads. The ban of preferred gender indications led to large increases in the number of applications from the previously discouraged gender. Notably, applicants from that gender also received a higher share of callbacks. The effects were larger for men applying to jobs initially requesting female applicants, possibly because these jobs had on average less stringent skill requirements than those previously requesting men.
Similar studies of gendered job ads have been conducted in countries such as Mexico, Indonesia, or India, with largely consistent findings. In particular, requested gender strongly correlates with other requested applicant characteristics. Ningrum et al. (2020) find that in Indonesia, 40% of online ads specified a preferred gender, and female applicants were more likely requested to be single or of young age. Using Chinese and Mexican data, Helleseter et al. (2020) find that more than a third of the gender-age relation in requests is explained by employers’ preferences for older men in managerial positions, and for young women in customer contact and helping positions. Using data from an Indian job portal, Chaturvedi et al. (2021) find that jobs requesting female applicants offer on average 7% lower salaries, and the gap is even larger if one compares job offers “implicitly” offered to men versus women, based on text analysis of the job ads. Chowdhury et al. (2018) and Anand (2013) are earlier studies from India that found similar gendered patterns in job ads. While these empirical patterns do not automatically indicate gender discrimination – i.e. treating men with the same productivity as women differently – they are nonetheless consistent with discrimination if a representative of the non-preferred gender with the same potential productivity as the preferred gender is less likely to be hired.
Experiments in hiring processes
Correspondence studies have become a popular tool to study discrimination in the next step of the application process, callback rates to applicants. However, their number is still limited in developing countries. Zhou et al. (2013) sent 19,000 fictitious resumes to Chinese companies, finding that state-owned companies tend to prefer male applicants, while foreign-owned and private firms prefer female applicants. Ozen et al. (2019) do not find gender differences in call-back rates in Turkey in their overall data (they only find one in cases in which the job applicants included socio-economic skills on their CV for jobs whose ads did not ask for such skills).
Buchmann et al. (2023) document the presence of “paternalistic discrimination” in hiring, when employers believe that certain jobs are not suitable for certain applicants, i.e. being too dangerous for female applicants. They observe the hiring process for a night shift office job, for which safe transport for the workers is offered. If information about the safe transport is not provided to the employers, employers are less likely to hire the female applicant.
There are a few examples of successful interventions at the hiring level. Ibanez and Riener (2018) randomly inform applicants about an affirmative action policy in the hiring process for research assistants in Colombia, i.e. a preferential treatment of female applicants. The policy increases the number of female applicants more than it decreases the number of male applicants, with the quality of the top 15th percentile of applications remaining unchanged. Aydin et al. (2023) find that a “blended finance” programme that combines private and public funding increases funding to female entrepreneurs in Turkey. They emphasise the role of the programme in teaching loan officers to evaluate female applicants, which suggests that similar interventions into hiring processes could be effective.
Discrimination in the job
Studies on the unequal treatment of men and women on the job in firms in developing countries are scarce.[2] They mostly study some form of “subordinate discrimination”, i.e. where a woman is in a professional leadership position (i.e. a line supervisor), with effective leadership requiring acceptance by his or her subordinates (Gibbons and Henderson 2012), or even his or her clients. Ayalew et al. (2021) let study participants in Ethiopia play a game, and provide them written advice, framed as either coming from a male or female “leader”. Participants are less likely to follow the advice when it comes from a female leader, and consequently receive lower pay-offs. However, participants are more likely to follow female leaders’ advice if they are presented as highly trained and competent, suggesting statistical discrimination drives the results. Similarly, Islam et al. (2021) find that Indian patients prefer male physicians, though this gap shrinks among physicians of higher castes. Interestingly, Abel and Buchmann (2020) find no different effect of positive or negative feedback to workers depending on whether it comes from a male or female supervisor, in a study with 1,800 Indian gig economy workers. A very similar previous study with U.S. gig workers found that negative feedback provoked more negative reactions among recipients when it came from a female supervisor (Abel 2022).
Macchiavello et al. (2023) randomise production lines in Bangladeshi garment export factories to receive newly promoted male or female line supervisors. They find that lines receiving female supervisors have lower productivity, but this is driven by lines with workers with negative beliefs about the abilities of women as supervisors at baseline. Furthermore, workers on lines allocated female supervisors are more open to having female supervisors in the future, even if they graded their randomly allocated supervisor worse than workers on lines that were allocated a male supervisor.[3] Meanwhile, Doering and Thébaud (2017) randomise whether new microfinance clients are initially assigned a male or female loan manager, and show that those assigned female managers comply less with managers directives, and continue to do so when later reassigned to other managers, regardless of the new manager’s gender.
We conclude this section by pointing towards two under-studied areas in the discrimination literature. The literature on gender discrimination in labour markets on the African continent is still very limited. Gradín (2021) documents strong occupational gender segregation in South Africa, which cannot be explained by worker’s observables such as education. Shepherd (2008) applies a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to gender wage gaps in South Africa, showing that the decline in gender discrimination stalled after 2000. Finally, Muñoz-Boudet et al. (2013) conduct focus groups with men and women on gender discrimination in 20 (mostly developing) countries across the world. Alongside a wealth of insights on all forms of gender discrimination, and its consistency across the world, they also document perceived discrimination against men in some labour markets, in particular in former planned economies and otherwise struggling economies, a topic that remains otherwise largely unexplored.
Education and skills
Increasing human capital – through formal schooling, vocational training, and entrepreneurship training – could increase women’s potential earnings, and, correspondingly, their labour force participation. However, this possibility depends on the availability of jobs that reward increased human capital and the absence of other binding constraints to female labour supply. Indeed, Bandiera et al. (2022) find that training programmes are more effective when women’s labour supply is already high. The empirical evidence is correspondingly mixed.
Formal schooling
Estimates from observational data suggest that the returns to a year of education in low-income countries are 7.6% on average, and are higher for women – by 1.5 percentage points, or 25% – than for men (Peet et al. 2015). Despite these differences in potential returns, women continue to lag behind men in educational attainment.
A wave of reforms in the 1990s and early 2000s that made primary schooling free had large impacts on enrollments, often disproportionately benefitting women. Osili and Long (2008), Keats (2018), Zenebe Gebre (2020), and Chicoine (2021) all find that these reforms boosted female attainment relative to males in Nigeria, Uganda, Malawi, and Ethiopia, respectively. An exception is Lucas and Mbiti (2012) who show free primary schooling increased gender gaps in Kenya. Both Keats (2018) and Chicoine (2021) find that women who benefited from free primary schooling had improved labour market outcomes, including increased probability of paid or skilled work (by 7-9 percentage points). In contrast, Zenebe Gebre (2020) finds no evidence of any labour market effects.
More recently, attention has shifted to improving access to post-primary schooling as well, either through reducing fees or introducing scholarships. Filmer and Schady (2014) evaluate a programme that randomly allocated scholarships to low-income primary school graduates in Cambodia and don’t find any evidence of an effect of increased post-elementary education on labour market outcomes, for either women or men, in late adolescence and early adulthood. In contrast, Duflo et al. (2023) find that a secondary school scholarship programme in Ghana increased female income (by a substantial 24-30%) and had no effect on male income. However, these earnings gains took almost a decade to be realised as secondary school graduates apparently prefer to remain unemployed as they wait for a potential admission to tertiary schooling programmes that serve as gateways to relatively high-paying public sector jobs (such as teachers and nurses). Overall, the effects of secondary schooling, including those for women, were below baseline expectations of both parents and participants.
Vocational training
McKenzie (2017) summarises the evidence of the effectiveness of vocational training programmes in low- and middle-income countries (see also Buvinić & Furst-Nichols (2016) for an earlier review). The typical vocational training programme features about three months of classroom instruction followed by 2-3 months of on-the-job training. They are often targeted to either the unemployed, low-income or “at-risk” youth. Training may feature hard skills such as those needed to perform an occupation-specific task, or soft skills including communications, self-confidence, and personal effectiveness, or both. Few studies empirically test whether one type of training is more effective than another.
In general, the effects of vocational training on labour market outcomes, if any, are modest and tend to fade over time. Of the 12 studies McKenzie (2017) reviews, only nine measure effects on employment. Of these, only three find statistically significant impacts, with an average (unweighted average intent-to-treat (ITT)) effect of 2.3 percentage point gain in employment and a 3.6 percentage point increase in formal employment. Across studies, the point estimates of the effect training on earnings are positive, with an average of a 17% increase, but only two studies find effects that are statistically different from zero. Overall, the returns from vocational training are comparable to the expected gains from an equivalent amount of time in formal schooling.
Further, McKenzie (2017) notes there is little evidence that vocational training is systematically more effective for women. Of the ten studies reviewed, only four formally test for differential effects by gender, finding that equality either cannot be rejected or, in one case, that the impacts are larger for men.
The results from evaluations that have emerged over the last five years are largely consistent with these earlier findings, often showing modest gains, but no strong evidence in favour of one type of training over another or differential impacts across genders.
Chakravarty et al. (2019) study a vocational skills training programme targeted to youth in Nepal using a regression discontinuity design. The Employment Fund (EF) is the largest youth training programme in the country serving 15,000 participants through 600-700 training courses per year. The programme consists of 1-3 months of classroom training, followed by six months of paid on-the-job training. In addition to hard skills, the training also provides life skills training to women on negotiation, workers’ rights, sexual and reproductive health, and discrimination response. Nine to eleven months after training, women are 8 percentage points more likely to be employed and 16 percentage points more likely to be employed in the non-farm sector, and their earnings double. The effects on any employment fade after two years in a follow-up sub-sample, but point estimates for the impacts on the likelihood of non-farm work, hours, and earnings remain nearly identical to the short-run results. For men there are no short-run effects (and these are statistically different from women), but after two years the effects for men increase and are indistinguishable from those for women.
Field et al. (2019) use an admission lottery for an oversubscribed secondary-level Technical Vocational and Educational Training (TVET) programmes in Mongolia to measure impacts on labour market outcomes. Take up of the training, conditional on winning the lottery, is almost twice as high for females relative to males. Intent-to-treat effects show that women admission winners were 6.8 percentage points (15%) more likely to be employed for more than a month, and 4.7 percentage points (23%) more likely to be employed in a paid job lasting more than a month. The effect sizes for male admission winners were about half as large. Two years following the training programme, impacts remain large and statistically significant for women, and increase somewhat in size and statistical significance for men. In both the short- and longer-run, earnings increase for women by about 25%, while for men earnings impacts are close to zero and statistically insignificant. Training increased the probability women were employed in both the government and private sector, whereas for men training increased the likelihood of obtaining internships.
Hardy et al. (2019) study the impacts on labour market outcomes of Ghana’s National Apprenticeship Program (NAP) using a randomised control trial. The programme matched applicants who had not completed secondary school to free apprenticeships in microenterprises in masonry, welding, carpentry, garment-making, and cosmetology. Approximately four years after the start of the programme, treated participants are about 3 percentage points (25%) less likely to be employed and have about 13% lower labour earnings, though these effects were not present among women who entered cosmetology apprenticeships. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to still be apprentices. Hardy et al. (2019) also find that participants who were matched with trainers whose enterprises had been in business longer, and had higher profits, had higher own-enterprise profits themselves – large enough to offset any losses from forgone wage labour.
Da Mata et al. (2021) also use admission lotteries to estimate the effects of an intensive vocational training programme focused on disadvantaged individuals in Brazil. PROSUB (programa subsequente) is a government-operated, tuition-free programme open to public secondary school graduates with the goal of helping them enter the labour market. The programme includes 18 months of classroom training (six months of subject knowledge training including math and language, followed by 12 months of vocational training), and a six months-long internship. Women participants who enroll in the training increase employment by 4-5 percentage points relative to a mean employment rate of about 30%. The effect for male enrollees is small and not statistically significant. There are, however, no effects on earnings. Similar to Field et al. (2019), Da Mata et al. (2021) also find that impacts are reduced for participants who enter the labour market during recessions.
Das (2021) measures the impacts of on-the-job and classroom training targeted to unemployed youth in Bangladesh. Individuals aged 15-30 with no more than eight years of schooling were randomly assigned to receive apprenticeships with a local “Master Crafts Person” through local BRAC branch offices. In a random half of the branch offices, individuals were also provided with classroom-based training on trade-specific skills and soft skills, including financial literacy, market assessment, and basic English. Nearly two years after the training, women participants’ long-run earnings are no higher than controls (self-employment earnings increase but are offset by a decrease in earnings from casual labour), whereas the effect on men’s total earnings, driven by an increase in wage employment. Point estimates for the effect on employment are nearly twice as large for those who received both classroom and on-the-job training, but this difference is not statistically significant.
McIntosh and Zeitlin (2022) study a workforce training programme targeted to underemployed young adults in Rwanda in a randomised control trial. The training consisted of three ten-week modules covering basic business skills (e.g. accounting) and soft skills, sector-specific skills (develop a business idea, identify market opportunity, outline operation and financing, make business plan), and technical training (e.g. tailoring, hairdressing, carpentry, or beekeeping). Following completion of all three modules, participants were then placed in apprenticeship. Three and half years after treatment there was no change relative to controls in the probability of working, but hours in off-farm paid work or microenterprises increased by 3.32 hours per week (17%). Own enterprise sales and profits increase statistically significantly for men. Impacts across all outcomes are lower for women, but formal tests cannot reject equality with men. Overall, the training helped move individuals out of agricultural wage labour into employment or entrepreneurship, but, for either gender there was no change in income and no change in household consumption per capita.
Calderone et al. (2022) use a randomised control trial in Tanzania to measure the impact of a skills training programme with an explicit gender focus. Strengthening Rural Youth Development through Enterprise (STRYDE 2.0) is a three-month classroom-based programme on life and career skills, including training in self-awareness, self-confidence, personal effectiveness, personal finance management, and business plan development. The classroom component is followed by nine months of technical assistance and support from trainers, as well as support to connect to potential employers. As part of the emphasis on gender, approximately half the trainers are female, women are permitted to attend classes with their children, and early training sessions focus on challenging gender stereotypes. After two years, hard skills, business skills, soft skills, and social skills all increase by about 0.2 standard deviations, with no differences across genders. For women, labour participation increases by almost 5 percentage points (6%), an employment quality index (measuring job permanency, hours, and satisfaction) increases by 0.2 standard deviations (70%), and an economic outcome index (measuring income, savings and assets) increases by 0.12 standard deviations (36%). For men, point estimates across these outcomes are all small and statistically insignificant (although the hypothesis that effects are the same for women and men cannot be rejected).
Kugler et al. (2022) provide additional long-run follow-up of the vocational training programme in Colombia studied by Attanasio et al. (2011) and Attanasio et al. (2017). The programme, Youth in Action, provided a three-month classroom training followed by a three-month apprenticeship in formal sector companies. Attanasio et al. (2017) found training increased formal employment for both men and women by more than 4 percentage points ten years following training, and raised earnings for women by as much as 20% (effects for men were smaller, but a test for equality with women could not be rejected). Kugler et al. (2022) additionally finds that recipients of vocational training go on to obtain more formal schooling as well. Programme participants were 1.4 percentage points (27%) more likely to complete secondary school, and 3.5 percentage points (31%) more likely to enroll in tertiary education (women tend to go on to vocational colleges). There is suggestive evidence the vocational training, and subsequent labour market gains, helps raise expectations, relax credit constraints (particularly for women), and provides information about own ability.
Adhvaryu et al. (2023) randomised women employees in garment factories in India into a workplace-based training programme on communication, time management, problem solving and decision making, and effective teamwork. Treated women increased productivity by 13.5% (relative to control), with stronger effects for women with fewer baseline skills and among women who work in teams alongside other coworkers (i.e. roles that are more likely to involve cooperation, communication, and other soft skills). Productivity gains are long-lasting and the programme is accordingly profitable for the firm. However, there are no effects on wages or retention, possibly due to frictions (such as imperfect information) in the labour market. While the soft skills included in the training programme are potentially transferable, they are likely unobserved by potential employers.
Barrera-Osorio et al. (2023) study the effects of random assignment to an oversubscribed vocational training programme on labour market outcomes for low-income men and women in Colombia. The Inclusive Employment Program (IEP) is a six month-long training in skills relevant for service sector employment (e.g. sales, cashiers, security); some participants were randomly assigned soft skills, including self-esteem, work ethic, organisation, and communication. Overall, training increases formal employment by 19 percentage points for men and apparently has no effect for women participants. One year after the end of the programme the treatment with additional soft skills training is less effective, but this difference disappears after two years. Women’s soft skills do not appear to have been affected by the training.
While this literature is extensive, the mixed results suggest that job training itself is not likely to be effective in the presence of the type of other barriers to women’s work we discuss in this review. There are also still open questions about the circumstances in which specific training targeted to jobs in which women are underrepresented can be particularly effective, especially at prompting women to enter traditionally male-dominated fields. This could be important for women’s success; Alibhai et al. (2017) document that female-owned enterprises in male-dominated sectors have higher profits than female-concentrated sectors. Correspondingly, BRAC has focused on recruiting women to its driving programme,[4] with anecdotal evidence of successes. However, we know of no formal programme evaluation that has been done.
Training entrepreneurs
A related set of papers look at training specifically focused on existing entrepreneurs. McKenzie (2021) and McKenzie et al. (2023) summarise the evidence on the impacts of small business training in low-income countries. The typical programme is designed to teach participants a range of business practices (from generating business plans to pricing and marketing to basic bookkeeping and accounting), usually takes place in a classroom setting, and lasts less than two weeks. A meta-analysis shows that training increases profits and sales by 5-10% on average (McKenzie 2021). However, there is a lot of heterogeneity across studies in terms of approaches, samples, and effects, and most are underpowered to detect impacts of this size. Therefore, it is difficult to draw strong conclusions about what types of training will be most effective and for whom.
Both McKenzie (2021) and McKenzie et al. (2023) discuss the few attempts to better tailor business training toward women. Bulte et al. (2017) and McKenzie & Puerto (2020) evaluate the ILO’s Gender and Enterprise Together (GET Ahead) programme in Vietnam and Kenya, respectively. The training combines standard business instruction with topics on gender attitudes and self-efficacy. The programme had no measurable effect on profits in Vietnam, but raised firm profits by 5% after one year and by 15.4% after three years in Kenya. Neither study, however, is able to disentangle the effect of the gender component from the rest of the business training.
There is also some evidence that the effectiveness of business training programmes depends on the characteristics of trainers and constraints on women’s participation. Field et al. (2016) study a business counseling intervention among customers of a women’s bank in India and find that the training was effective at increasing business activity and loan take-up among a subset of women randomly invited to attend with a friend. Attending the training with a friend, rather than alone, does not alter the use of recommended business practices or boost business confidence, suggesting that effects are driven by other channels such as increased peer support or help overcoming mobility constraints imposed by social norms. Alibhai et al. (2019) show that women’s outcomes on a personal initiative and psychology training are positively associated with trainer characteristics, including ever having been a business owner themselves but, equally, also being a woman.
Globalisation
Changes induced by globalisation – including export growth and tariff reductions – have had a profound impact on labour markets in the developing world. A number of studies seek to understand how these changes have affected the labour market outcomes of women in particular. There are various theoretical reasons why globalisation may have gendered effects on labour market outcomes.[5] First, sectoral sorting is often highly segregated by gender, and globalisation usually leads to the expansion of certain sectors (those in which a country has a comparative advantage). This could lead to differential effects on men and women. Second, globalisation often results in the transfer of new technology to firms in developing countries, which might affect the productivity of men and women differently due to gender differences in relative skills. Third, globalisation often places increased competitive pressure on firms. If there is discrimination against women in hiring or wage-setting, increased competition could reduce discrimination by making it more costly (as Black and Brainerd (2004) found to be the case in the United States).
What does the empirical evidence say? Several cross-country analyses have found that trade and export expansions are associated with higher female employment in developing countries (Wood 1991, Bussmann 2009, World Bank 2012, Rocha and Winkler 2019), though there is by no means a complete consensus (Aguayo-Tellez 2012, Tejani and Milberg 2016, Wacker et al. 2017); results appear to vary based on factor like how globalisation is measured and the choice of control industries/areas. In addition to the cross-country approach, there are a number of studies that focus on individual countries and utilise quasi-experimental variation to estimate the effects of globalisation on female labour market outcomes. These types of studies have generated substantial evidence that one specific aspect of globalisation – the expansion of export manufacturing – has generated improvements in labour market outcomes for women. In Bangladesh, rapid growth in ready-made garment exports led to higher female labour force participation (Heath and Mobarak 2015). In Mexico, lower export tariffs increased relative female employment and wages in blue-collar manufacturing, due to technology upgrades reducing the need for physical strength and increasing the productivity of women in this sector (Juhn et al. 2014). In Myanmar, exporting garment factories increased employment rates among women living nearby, likely because they offered better working conditions than non-exporting factories (Molina and Tanaka 2023). In these same contexts, women appear to have benefited in domains other than the labour market: for example, through higher levels of human capital investment and female empowerment (Heath and Mobarak 2015, Molina and Tanaka 2023, Aguayo-Tellez et al. 2014).
Of course, the expansion of export manufacturing is not the only possible consequence of globalisation in the developing world. Reductions in tariffs can have negative effects on labour market outcomes in individuals working in import-competing industries, which might be gender-specific. In Brazil, for example, microregions more exposed to tariff reductions saw declines in the employment of both men and women, but larger declines in absolute terms for men (due to their higher representation in the tradable sector) and therefore a reduction in the gender gap in labour force participation (Gaddis and Pieters 2017). In China (Yu et al. 2021) and Peru (Mansour et al. 2022), however, the opposite occurs: import competition (measured by lower import tariffs) increased gender gaps in labour force participation in the long-term. Yu et al. (2021) argue that female-dominated industries faced greater tariff reductions in the Chinese context, while Mansour et al. (2022) argue that in Peru, the relevant difference is within-sector, and women are differentially affected because of imperfect substitutability between male and female labour or occupational segregation.
There are other potential drivers of heterogeneous effects of tariff reductions. Kis-Katos et al. (2018) separately examine the effect of input and output tariff reductions during Indonesia’s second wave of trade liberalisation in the 1990s. They find that input tariff reductions increased female employment whereas output tariff reductions had no significant effects. Menon and van der Meulen Rodgers (2008) find that tariff reductions in India’s manufacturing sector increased the gender wage gap in more concentrated industries, contrary to the aforementioned theoretical predictions that trade-induced competition should reduce discrimination. They argue this is because of the weak enforcement of standards preventing discriminatory practices and limited bargaining power of women in the labour market. Taken together, these results underscore that the effect of globalisation on female labour market outcomes depends on the precise nature of the globalisation “shock” experienced by a given country, along with the existing economic conditions and institutions of that country. Thus, policymakers who are interested in women’s labour force participation (and welfare more broadly) and considering changes to international economic policy should be aware of the gender composition of industries likely impacted.
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