CGD Podcast: Women and Work in South Asia with Seema Jayachandran

Rachel Glennerster: Welcome to The CGD Podcast, I am Rachel Glennerster, President of the Center for Global Development. I'm excited today to be having a conversation with Seema Jayachandran who is a Professor of Economics at Princeton, a good friend, and also one of the most innovative economists working on development at the moment. She has done a wide range of work in many different sectors and countries. Today, we're going to talk about her gender work. It's an area where she's particularly focused recently and has a lot of exciting work. Seema, welcome to The CGD Podcast.

Seema Jayachandran: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, Rachel.

Rachel Glennerster: Tell me why you focus quite a lot of attention on gender recently, what made you think it was important to economic development? What are some of the puzzles that got you interested in this?

Seema Jayachandran: One of the reasons I think it's an important topic is because it doesn't naturally always improve with development. When people have more income, usually health improves and education improves. It doesn't mean we don't need policy there, but I think with at least some aspects of gender equality, it feels much less certain that economic development, the neo-classical forces we think about will narrow those gaps. I think there are some reasons in particular cases why they might exacerbate that and surely we need concerted policy that's focused on gender and we can't just rely on broad development policies with gender gaps naturally narrowing.

Rachel Glennerster: Yes. I've just been going back and thinking about the history of thought and development on what we focused on at different periods in time and it struck me that, initially, we just thought that income and growth was going to solve everything. Then Sen and other people came in saying, "No, it's more complicated than that. People could be rich and not have freedoms." I think you're right, this is exactly the classic case of where that's true.

One of the papers that got me really excited about your work and made me think about things differently was on the difference between what was happening in Africa and Asia in how women were treated or how families thought about gender. As a measure of how much families cared about sons and daughters differently was their height and therefore how much nutrition they were getting. It's a great example of your work where you take a really complicated issue of how families think about boys versus girls and boil it down into a very measurable outcome.

Can you tell me a little bit about that paper and what you think it tells us about how gender is the same and different in Africa and South Asia at a very broad level?

Seema Jayachandran: Yes, that's work with Rohini Pande where we look at children's height, comparing India mostly to Sub-Saharan Africa, but also to a broader set of other low and middle income countries. There's a well-known puzzle that children's height is lower in India than in Africa. We really start in this project coming in it from the angle of, "What explains that puzzle?" as opposed to specifically thinking the answer was going to be related to gender.

It's an interesting policy debate because one answer some people give is it's all genetics. If it's all genetics then there's nothing to infer about people being worse off or a need for policy, but a lot of epidemiologists and nutritionists would say that you don't get that large of differences across populations just through genetics. The reason we care about child height is it's a summary measurer of the nutritional inputs and the disease environment of those kids, but it's also related to their cognitive development as well as their physical development.

The question is, "What explains it?" What we've stumbled upon is that one big difference in India than in other countries is that there's a very steep drop-off with birth order of children's height. The firstborn child is the tallest, and the secondborn is not as tall, et cetera. You see that general pattern in all countries and for lots of outcomes, but it's just very steep in India. It's related to gender in a couple of ways.

In India and a lot of societies that are patrilocal, people don't just have general son preference, they really care about the eldest son. Patrilocal is in societies where the older parents will reside with their oldest son. A lot of the property will go to the oldest son so that the family lineage passes down from the eldest son. In Indian Hinduism, the eldest son has special roles in funeral rituals. There's just something special about the eldest son, not just relative to his sisters, but even relative to his younger brothers.

In India, that eldest son gets more resources than his younger brothers, but it also has repercussions for daughters because part of the dynamic is parents are continuing to have kids and running out of resources as they're trying to have a son and they're having more kids than they had planned for or they wanted to have. As they continue their fertility, the later-born children are doing worse.

Importantly, it's about differences within families. It's not about genetics. If we see within the family, there are really big differences in children's resources and their height. It's also not just environmental factors. Like another big culprit is open defecation, meaning no toilets, so people having bad sanitation.

Rachel Glennerster: Also, then they get diarrhea, and then being sick means that they don't grow as much.

Seema Jayachandran: Exactly, yes. The connection to height is not because of the food intake, but the nutrients you're able to absorb and keep. That is an important policy dimension, but it can't be all of the story because that wouldn't explain these differences within families. That project was unique because it's not a typical one where you have a particular hypothesis and you can test it very cleanly causally, it was much more a mystery of what is the explanation and then trying to piece together the story. I think it just shows the complex interplay between how parents' fertility choices in India can affect girls and also boys.

Importantly, I think we learned in this project why cross-country comparisons are useful because in most African countries, boys are doing worse than girls. You see overall that the height of boys isn't doing as well as girls at these very young ages, which suggests that improving the disease environment might differentially help young boys and girls. You don't see these same patterns, the steep drop-off with birth order or the benefits that boys are seeing relative to girls that you see in India, you're not seeing those in sub-Saharan Africa.

Rachel Glennerster: There seems to be more of a gender difference or at least an elder son versus everyone else difference in India. That's not so too in Africa. Actually, we seem to be getting more resources to kids for the level of income in Africa, which is really important in thinking about gender and division of resources and I think goes against some people's sort of hypotheses in this space.

I think this is a great example of how carefully describing what's happening in different countries can tell us a lot. We don't always need randomized control trials or sophisticated econometrics. Just careful descriptive work is really important for understanding causes.

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about women's labor force participation. This is only one aspect of gender. We've said that freedoms, your ability to do what you want with your life is really important. It's not all about income but there is a strong economic case for giving more rights to women and allowing them to participate in the labor force. That's very important for the economy. Can you tell us a little bit about what some of the facts are as countries develop with women participating in the labor force?

Seema Jayachandran: I think there are two dimensions to think about how to describe what's happening with women's labor force participation. One is over the trajectory of economic development. I think there the classic story is that there is a U shape where women have a very high labor force participation in agricultural societies, at least most of them. That's partly because your home and your work are the same place and a woman can more easily balance childcare responsibilities if that's her responsibility, which it is in most parts of the world and work. Also, because people are very poor and you need a second earner. You don't have the luxury of saying, "We'll have just one earner in our family."

Then, as societies get richer, it becomes harder to balance. When work is outside the home, it becomes harder to balance work and family responsibilities. You don't need that income as much. With a structural transformation towards more services and brain versus physical strength being what's important in the labor market, then women have a comparative advantage, meaning, with physical tasks, many men will be better at those. If there's equality in terms of mental tasks, then that's going to mean women will participate more.

That's generally what's happening. I think there's just a lot of differences even among countries with the exact same level of structural transformation or income. A lot of that is probably what we call social norms, different cultural expectations about prohibitions around women's role in society and women's role in the economy.

I think that part of the story of increasing women's employment or increasing their proactivity is ensuring that their job that reward women's comparative advantages, but then in some parts of the world, I think it's hard to think about women's employment without thinking about these restrictions on women's ability to leave the home or interact with men outside their family. That means that policy priorities for East Africa might be very different from Morocco and Pakistan.

Rachel Glennerster: Tell us a little bit more about where South Asia stands. How does it compare? Is there any progress being made?

Seema Jayachandran: This map I show the most when I give talks is the female labor force participation around the world, or just female relative to male. The places that light up as really low female labor force participation are North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. That's a powerful graph because just like differences within families, systematic differences between boys and girls or across birth order makes genetics not so plausible.

When you see this range of Saudi Arabia and India and Morocco, it's implausible that the structure of the jobs that are available explains why they're all low. What they have in common is they're all places with restrictions on female mobility. It's probably highly correlated with women's ability to leave the house without permission, et cetera. Among those, India is one of the countries with the lowest female labor force participation, around 30%. It's not uniformly increasing over time. I think there have been some stagnation and improvements.

The measurement is changing. I think there's some debate about has it risen in recent years, by how much, et cetera, but it's certainly low. Vietnam is at roughly the same GDP per capita. It has 80% female labor force participation. It's not about the level of economic development or probably even the general jobs that are available. It's something about families' expectations about husbands' or parents' willingness to allow women to work.

I think what's important in the background here is that a lot of countries in North Africa, in India, there has been amazing progress on girls' education and women's education, such that it looks like richer countries where girls are getting more education than boys in many cases, where this gap for STEM education and the stereotypes about girls not being good in STEM seem much less prevalent in India and North Africa to me anecdotally than they do in the US. There's been this amazing progress on education, but then there's a stumbling block between education and female employment.

In US or lots of parts of Africa, there's a question of, can women be in the occupations that are high return? Can they part-time work versus full-time work? There's still the challenge of balancing family and work, but in India and a lot of other countries that I'm talking about, it's really about whether women can work outside the home.

Rachel Glennerster: Do you think there's been progress on learning what policies could change this or what interventions might be able to release some of those barriers or even allow women to work while accepting the barriers? Those are two different approaches you could take. Do we have any evidence here about what works?

Seema Jayachandran: Yes. I think it's one of the most active and exciting areas of research. I think the jury is out on what is the best approach. Probably the answer is there isn't one-size-fits-all. I think you laid out a taxonomy of like, "You could try to change those norms directly." Policy could try to intervene to break down those restrictive norms, or you could say, "Let's accept those and design work differently so that they're less of a bottleneck," or we can just say, "Let's even ignore them and try to have normal job growth." Then as women work more, someone will be on the borderline of working or not. If there are more good jobs at work, there'll be a role model effect or a snowball effect.

We're getting some nice evidence of things that do work. Probably the next frontier is seeing what's scalable. In what context should we use one approach or another? The work I've done most recently is on trying to change those norms directly. In secondary schools in Haryana, India, where there is a curriculum added every two weeks there would be a discussion or an activity in class related to gender equality, where the idea was really to change hearts and minds. Less about lecturing kids and teaching them new facts, and more the hypothesis was that if adolescents kids at those formative years just think about inequalities and restrictions on opportunities, they'll come around to the view that equal opportunities is valuable.

Those kids aren't old enough yet to see whether this is going to translate into big changes in female employment, but we do see that it has durable effects that both boys and girls who participated state more support for women working. When we look at the behavioral measures, we seem to see bigger effects for boys than girls. You can change the hearts and minds of both boys and girls, but if boys have more power in society to actually act on what they believe because of this very problem of gender inequality, it's important to involve boys and men in the social change.

Our hope is that when these boys get married, they're going to think, "The right thing to do is to support my wife if she wants to work. When I raise my daughters, I'm going to have them have equal opportunities as my son." That's an approach of really just trying to say, "Let me change people's views on what's right and wrong." Then if you do that for enough people, the whole societal norm will change.

Rachel Glennerster: I feel like there's been a lot of telling people to change norms for a long time, and it hasn't worked. What's different about this, do you think, than the standard approach?

Seema Jayachandran: The special sauce is probably that people have more malleable moral views when they're young, according to psychologists. People are idealistic. They want to see themselves as good people. I think this was a good age to work with kids when they were 13, 14, 15. It's also an interesting approach to not lecture them, just to introspect and debate.

My view on this is that kids have lived among this inequality for years. They're 12, 13 years old, but they probably spent very little time thinking about it. I don't think parents are explicitly having conversations with their kids about why we want to keep the current inequality entrenched. It's just in the background. Then the minute you have to think about it, defend it, you have an aha moment.

The one part of the curriculum, I think, really sums it up for me is there's a discussion about why women don't work outside the home as much, and kids are asked, "Who does the cooking at home?" and they say their mom does. "Why is that?" A lot of kids say, "Oh, she's a better cook." Then the discussion leader says, "Who are the cooks in restaurants? Who's cooking at weddings for many people? It's men."

Then kids have to reconcile, "Wait, I just said women are better cooks." You can make an economic argument that it would create a lot more social value if those amazing cooks were cooking for big weddings, and you could also just make a human rights case that someone is good at it. They enjoy using their talents. Part of coming back to the Sen idea of capabilities and broader human flourishing that you want people to use their talents.

Probably where there's the most work being done now is saying, "Those norms exist. Let's try to work around them." Let's take them as a constraint and say, "How can we make work and policies to improve work successful in light of that?" I have some older work with Erica Field and Rohini Pande, where we were interested in business training for female micro-entrepreneurs, and we made a small tweak to it, which is people are allowed to come with a friend.

There's some constraint on whether women can travel outside the home or just expectations about doing things alone, so by allowing them to come with a friend, they would be more likely to take up, and it would be more successful. Interestingly, we found that it was far more successful when they could bring a friend, but not for the reason we thought. It wasn't that there was higher take-up, it was that when they came, they set more ambitious goals for themselves, and they followed through with them.

It was really a story that part of this limited world women live in is that they are not talking about their business with other women. They're not having people coach them or be their cheerleaders. Part of what this tweak to the training unlocked was this friend who had your back, and that was something women didn't have in their regular lives.

More recently, there's really exciting work by Suhani Jalota and Lisa Ho and others, where they're thinking about starting out women from working at home and seeing if that can be a stepping stone to employment outside the home. The idea there being that you need to go in baby steps with people, and whether it's an internalized norm where the woman believes it herself, or what her husband allows, or her in-laws allow, that if you offer her a job outside the home immediately, she might say no, but if you offer work from home, which is increasingly available with digital work, then she'll take that. If the family has a good experience with that, then they'll be willing to have her work outside the home. Or even if it's not through that channel, it could be through a channel of, "As she gains more income, she gains more power in her family," and she says, "I'd like to now take a job outside the home." That's another approach of can we meet people halfway at the beginning with the hope that then has a snowball effect where eventually women will be free to take jobs outside the home?

I think there's a third approach that I don't know what the best research on this is, but you could just have pure job growth. Just think of a industrial policy or whatever a minister in charge of industrial growth is focused on if we want to bring jobs in a gender-blind way, and maybe that will be enough. There will be some women for whom social norms are binding and they won't take up those jobs, but there should always be someone on the margin, some women will take it up and maybe that will spiral in.

I think I'm a little skeptical that that will be enough, but I do think to the analogy of a lot of the growth in girls' education, where we see catch-up, was because of general policies to improve education where they ended up differentially helping girls over boys. I think something that's gender-blind in the policy design could work well. I can see the political advantages of that, that you might have more buy-in for something that was a generalized jobs policy. The hope is that when more women are working, it becomes less stigmatized.

There's also the work of Rob Jensen, where people were informed about these new jobs and back-office processing. Those are the kinds of jobs that are deemed acceptable for women, socially acceptable. They're office jobs. People have some view that a factory might not be an appropriate job but a pristine office is. He finds that when families were told about those job opportunities, they invested more in their daughter's education, her English skills so that she could be prepared for those jobs. When people see those jobs are available, it gives them more incentive to invest in their daughter's education.

Rachel Glennerster: It shows that you reduce gender discrimination by just telling people about the availability of jobs that women could do. For me, this isn't saying the policy should be, "Tell people about jobs," it is a way of getting at, "What's the impact of having more jobs available?" You obviously can't change how many jobs are available in a country, but if you tell some people about the availability, and you don't tell others--

Seema Jayachandran: No, that's, I think, the right way to think about it, but if you build it, they will come. Yes, just change people's knowledge about those jobs are built, and the rest happen on its own.

Rachel Glennerster: You sound a bit skeptical as to whether that would work more generally, or is it specifically about changing the mix of jobs, which might happen with development so that they're culturally seen as more appropriate jobs?

Seema Jayachandran: Yes, I shouldn't be skeptical because I don't have data to say it won't work. I have a project with kindergarten teachers in South India where that's a very appropriate job for young women. It's in the village. Part of it is not just distance from home. It's who's at the office place. Your office place are kids, they're safe. We saw there that when the organization that ran these schools would do trainings, the husbands would get jealous or paranoid about that, or people would block it.

Even those appropriate jobs, there's always going to be some times where these norms come in, but someone will always be responsive to a policy that's creating jobs, and then hopefully there's strength in numbers, and that will change the stigma for the other ones for whom social norms are binding.

I think job growth combined with a few concerted policies, like there's been a lot of work on safer transportation for women to jobs, women-only subways or women-only buses, or training women to drive mopeds so they could take their own moped to work, or vouchers for the equivalent of a Uber so they're not traveling alone. Those sorts of small policies to ease some of the norms-related concerns combined with normal job growth might be valuable.

Rachel Glennerster: We talked a lot about the promising areas. Are there areas where you think people would expect them to have worked and it hasn't? Are there myths that have been busted by some of the work that you or others have done in this space?

Seema Jayachandran: We don't have great ideas of how to improve women micro-entrepreneurs. That's a general area where there's been a ton of attention, not just microcredit but training and other policies. There are a few bright spots where a policy seems really effective, but I think by and large, it's still unknown how to really transform the profits of women who run businesses. I think it's part of a broader reckoning about microfinance and micro-entrepreneurship that not everybody's going to be a great entrepreneur. I think with growing, working-age population and no ideas of how to create large employment to match that, self-employment is going to remain important for a long while and thinking about how to help close those gender gaps is important. In Africa, we might fall back into a norms story of, "How do we get women to move into occupations that are currently male-dominated, because some of those might be the highest-return businesses." I think that for women and female entrepreneurs, that seems to be one where the normal toolkit seems disappointing.

Rachel Glennerster: There was a lot of excitement that microcredit would be a big answer to women's employment and women's empowerment. If you showed that you could run a business, you would be better supported by your family and respected by your family, and have more agency. That didn't really seem to pay out at all. Then there was some more evidence about capital drops, I think, where you just gave existing small businesses capital, and it didn't seem to be as effective for women. Am I right about that, Seema?

Seema Jayachandran: There's a really great follow-up on that by Arielle Bernhardt and co-authors, where they re-examine that. Some of it seems to be because when a woman gets that capital drop, the money gets spent on her husband's business. The easiest way to see this is if, when a woman is the only business in her household, then you see good returns to capital. It's when her husband also has a business that you don't see it. If, instead of looking at the returns to capital for her business, you summed up her business and her husband's business, all the businesses in the family, then it looks pretty good to give money to women.

There's nice evidence that giving in-kind grants, so the loan or a grant is specifically a sewing machine for the woman's business, that's less likely to be co-opted by others in the family. I don't know if that's a universally good policy, but it's an example of thinking about, "How to design policies, knowing that once I give it to a woman, there's a whole set of dynamics that are happening inside her home that could amplify or reduce the benefits of that intervention?"

It's very hard to separate women's employment decisions, their success as micro-entrepreneurs, from dynamics within the household. Again, we could either try to have policies that try to equalize men's and women's power, or we have to think about that when we design programs.

Rachel Glennerster: Just as we come to wrapping up, tell me why these questions are important?

Seema Jayachandran: We should care about equality in society. Jobs are partly about a way to earn money, but also it's about freedom and a way to use your skills. We take pride in our work. I think a lot of women around the world don't have that opportunity to use their talents and find that fulfillment. That's the human rights case for this.

There's also an economic one, and that's probably the one that's going to motivate more policy solutions, which is we're just leaving money on the table, that, "Human talent is pretty evenly distributed across countries, across genders, across races, and those opportunities to use those talents aren't." To build up new human capital in society, that's expensive. We're just misallocating it. If we can unlock a woman's talent, it's a cheap win in terms of improving everybody's well-being.

Rachel Glennerster: If you had a magic wand to change one policy instantly, what would it be?

Seema Jayachandran: Something around international migration. It's not something I work on, but if I think about the greatest misallocation of talent, CGD gets credit for putting on the map such an important policy lever. The fact that where you're born is such an important determinant of whether your skills can be used in the best possible way, which benefits the individual, but also the global economy, that seems to be a really big misallocation. That would be the policy I would try to change.

Rachel Glennerster: That is definitely a big theme of CGD's work. Thank you, Seema, for joining us and talking about gender and labor force participation. You can find Seema's work on her website if you search for seemajayachandran@princeton. There's a ton of really interesting work out there.

Seema Jayachandran: Thanks, Rachel.