Employment improves women’s welfare, but women’s labor force participation lags behind men’s globally and particularly in South Asia. In Bangladesh, 44% of women, compared to 84% of men, are in the labor force. Both supply and demand side factors may contribute to low rates of employment for women. We run an experiment to measure the effects of employment on women vs. men, and the effects of having woman vs. man as an employee on firm’s outcomes and owner’s attitudes towards hiring women. We recruit small retail businesses that are interested in expanding by adding an employee and ask them to identify two women and two men who they would be willing to hire. We randomly choose some businesses to receive subsidies towards the wages of a randomly selected candidate employee for 6 months. This randomization provides variation in whether shops have female employees, male employees, or no employees; it also provides variation in whether qualified women and men receive jobs. Initial take-up of the subsidized jobs is high for both men and women and persists throughout the six month intervention period. Six months after the subsidies end, there are positive but imprecisely estimated effects on the probability that treated businesses have employees and on their profits, with no differences between businesses that were assigned to hire women and those assigned to hire men. For employees, the subsidized jobs increase the probability that women are employed for a wage and raised their skills across a range of technical and soft skills, but appear to decrease men’s employment and to have no effect on men’s skills. The subsidies appear to have improved employer’s relative perceptions of women as employees, but there are no differences between employers who experienced a woman employee compared to those who experienced a male employee.
LISER had the pleasure to host the prestigious event which gathered over 80 participants
