Raising female employment in South Asia, one step at a time

South Asia’s female labor force participation today remains among the lowest in the world: More than 400 million working-age women in the region are outside of the labor force, which constitutes a significant output loss. South Asia’s working women face supply-side and demand-side obstacles, as well as unfavorable social norms.

A recent conference, co-hosted by the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) and the World Bank, explored policies that could help raise female labor force participation in South Asia. Speakers from both academia and policymaking identified a host of obstacles that South Asian women face when working outside the home.

Safety. South Asian women are often either unable or unwilling to work outside the home for safety reasons. One aspect of women’s inability or unwillingness to leave the home is concern over workplace safety. A first step toward improving workplace safety is accurate reporting of harassment. Deliberate switching of survey responses to protect the identity of those who report harassment can significantly increase the reporting of harassment, revealing the problem to be widespread in the Bangladeshi garment sector.
Network. Jobs are often found through social networks, but South Asia’s women often lack the networks needed to find jobs, particularly once married. Digital technology can help bridge this gap. In Jordan, expanded internet access significantly increased women’s job search and female labor force participation. In India, self-help groups could be the networks that encourage women’s employment. In Nepal, training with socially connected friends was more effective at increasing female entrepreneurship than other forms of training.
Wage growth. For Indian women, in particular, the incentive to join the labor force faded as their wage growth lagged that of their husbands. Women’s wage growth has been less than half of men’s in India, explaining a substantial share of the decline in Indian female labor force participation up to 2019 for couples who decide on women’s participation together.
Training. South Asian women are also constrained by a lack of skills. In Nepal, training significantly increased female entrepreneurship. In Bangladesh, training programs for female garment workers helped propel them into more senior positions while also raising productivity and improving work conditions for other workers.
Hiring discrimination. Many jobs are simply not open to women in South Asia. In Lahore, Pakistani women were significantly less likely to be offered jobs with lower education requirements, longer working hours or evening shifts. A first step to expanding women’s employment may be to lift formal restrictions on work conditions.
Recent data pointing to a rapid rise in women’s labor force participation in India over the past several years—from just 21.6% in 2018-19 to 35.6% in 2023-24—offers some hope. However, the concentration of this increase in unpaid and self-employed employment in rural areas points to a continued lack of high-quality employment opportunities for women outside the home.

Finally, South Asia’s social norms also discourage women’s employment outside the home. In India, home-based work significantly increased women’s likelihood of taking up employment opportunities, and an experiment with mixed-gender teams in call centers produced no productivity gains and only worsened men’s gender attitudes, highlighting the need for gender sensitization training at workplaces. In Nepal, women from more conservative households were significantly less likely to seek employment.

But norms can shift, as a widely cited experiment in Saudi Arabia has shown, particularly when private beliefs are more liberal than perceptions of social conventions. And restrictive norms can soften when exposed to liberal norms, such as among the Hindu households that live in areas dominated by the more liberal group of Adivasi in India.

On its own, none of these measures is likely to make a material dent in South Asia’s female labor force participation rates. As illustrated by the case of Saudi Arabia, it would take a society-wide effort to bring millions of South Asian women into the labor market. But once started, increases in women’s employment are likely to gather their own momentum. The experience with parental leave in Sweden and decades of changes in U.S. labor markets suggests powerful snowball effects.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

First published in the Brookings Future Development blog on 30 January, 2025.

Source: World bank blogs