Improving Women’s Access to Employment Opportunities: Experimental Evidence from India

Women’s access to paid work opportunities in India is among the lowest in the world. For rural households, a demand-driven public workfare program offers a paid employment option, yet accessing this opportunity remains out of reach for many poor, low-caste women. This project seeks to understand whether ‘collective action’ via the creation of informal ‘women’s worker groups’ can improve women’s access to paid employment under the workfare program and improve their overall economic and social well-being. We do this by partnering with a local organization in rural Bihar that mobilizes marginalized women into worker groups and supports them in collectively demanding work from government authorities under the workfare program. We randomized the formation of these worker groups across 127 village councils and will use publicly available program data and household surveys to measure impacts on women’s participation in worker groups, their labor market outcomes, and measures of social well-being.