Training women in assertive communication in India enabled them to more effectively persuade their husbands to support their participation in the workforce – leading to substantial and sustained increases in women’s job uptake and earnings at low cost.
Editor’s note: For a broader synthesis of themes covered in this article, check out Issue 2 of our VoxDevLit on Female Labour Force Participation.
Men are more likely to participate in the labour force than women in virtually every country, and this gap is particularly wide in India (Agte et al. 2024). This is especially concerning in light of evidence that the misallocation of female talent constrains economic growth (Ashraf et al. 2022, Chiplunkar and Goldberg 2021, Chiplunkar and Kleineberg 2024, Hsieh et al. 2019). While there are numerous constraints to female employment (Heath et al. 2025), one that is often discussed in the Indian context is intra-household: men in India tend to be less supportive of female employment than women, and husbands have a great deal of control over their wives' labour supply (Bernhardt et al. 2018, Bursztyn et al. 2024, Field et al. 2021, Lowe and McKelway 2025).
Existing work has considered two approaches to tackling intra-household opposition: raising husbands’ support for female employment (Bursztyn et al. 2020, Dean and Jayachandran 2019, McKelway 2025) and raising women’s bargaining power in the household (Field et al. 2021, Heath and Tan 2020).
In recent work (Kala and McKelway 2025), we consider a novel approach: developing women’s communication skills so they can persuade their husbands to allow them to work. In doing so, we build on existing work suggesting interpersonal skills can have effects on outcomes that are important for development (Ashraf et al. 2020, Björkman Nyqvist et al. 2024). There are several appealing features of our approach for boosting female labour supply:
- It fits into local customs regarding household decision-making whereby husbands make decisions and wives provide input; it does not try to shift power dynamics but instead attempts to make women’s input more persuasive.
- It empowers women to achieve the outcome they want, rather than telling anyone what they should want.
- It can be done at low cost and may be cheaper than alternative policy levers.
A field experiment on communication and female employment
We conducted a field experiment among women in India, randomising whether they were given the communication training prior to a large expansion of new jobs for women. The jobs were with India's largest carpet manufacturer, Obeetee, and began with four months of paid training in carpet weaving, followed by weaving employment for any women who completed the training and wished to continue. Both training and employment were full-time and took place in all-female weaving centres located in participants' villages.
Our sample included 1,540 married women, aged 18-40, who would be eligible for the new jobs. Female labour supply is the topic about which couples in our sample most often hold different opinions. This disagreement almost always takes the form of wives being more interested in working than their husbands; 53% of couples in our sample have different levels of interest in the wives working, and in 81% of those couples, the wife is more interested.
The communication training was specifically in assertive communication, i.e. expressing one's view clearly and respectfully. Note that this meaning of assertive, which is used in communication research and adopted here, is different from how assertive is often used colloquially (to describe pushy or off-putting communication).
The training was designed by WorldBeing, an organisation that provides evidence-based psychosocial programmes in developing countries. WorldBeing combined and adapted existing assertive communication techniques to develop a training relevant for women in our setting. The training was delivered in six, one-hour sessions with groups of women over a month. Content was conveyed in a variety of formats, including instruction, storytelling, and group activities. Examples in the curriculum focused on communication between husbands and wives, and covered a range of different topics spouses might disagree about.
To control for the effects of attending sessions unrelated to communication, we use an active control group. The same sort of meetings were held with the control group, but in these meetings, women played games and took surveys. The firm’s job began three weeks after the intervention ended.
We test whether communication training increases women’s uptake of the new job, as observed in the firm’s administrative data. We present effects in our full sample but also focus on one particular subgroup: women who, at baseline, were more interested than their husbands were in the women working. This is precisely the group in which husbands’ opposition may constrain female employment and where communication skills could raise labour supply. Studying effects in the context of a job expansion programme means the key labour demand-side constraint of job availability is relaxed, allowing us to more cleanly test whether the supply-side, intra-household constraint is binding.
Communication training shifted communication
First, we assess whether the treatment shifted women’s communication styles, measured in a survey done five weeks post-treatment. Women were given vignettes in which a married couple disagreed about whether the wife should do something, and asked what they would say to their husbands if they were in the same situation.
We find the treatment raised women's use of assertive responses by 0.17 standard deviations, driven by greater use of summarising the situation and providing a rationale for their preferred outcome.
Gains in labour supply and earnings for women facing husband opposition
Turning to labour supply, we find the treatment had a positive but small and statistically insignificant effect on application for the firm’s job; however, this masks variation by spousal disagreement. Among women more interested than their husbands, the treatment increased applications by 6 percentage points (p.p.), or 35%. The effect in the rest of the sample was -2.5 p.p. and not statistically significant.
This translated into differences in actual earnings in the job, observed in the firm's administrative records. In the subgroup where women were more interested in working, the treatment increased total earnings in the first 10 months of the job (the months for which we have data) by 53%. The effect was persistent, with significant effects on earnings in the final two months. This is notable as prior interventions in this setting produced short-run increases in female employment that faded within a year (McKelway 2025). While the overall level of earnings fell over the 10 months as some women chose to leave the job post-training, the treatment effect was largest in percentage terms in the final month, at 124%.
Using data from a survey six months post-treatment, in the subgroup where woman were more interested in working, we find the treatment increased the fraction of women who reported any work for income in the previous three months. Thus, the treatment did not simply lead women to substitute their labour supply to the firm and away from another sector, but rather increased their overall employment rate.
The power of persuasion
What explains our results? We only see effects on labour supply among the women facing opposition from their husbands. Women in this subgroup did not learn the intervention content better or attend more meetings, and we find that the heterogeneity in effects is robust to controlling for correlates of being in this subgroup. Thus, the heterogeneity appears to come from the disagreement in spousal preferences. This itself points to a mechanism within the household, but what within the household changed?
In theory, a household’s decision could change if either spouse's interest in the wife working changed or if bargaining power changed. We find no evidence of effects on bargaining power or women’s own interest in work in the subgroup of interest. However, treated women in this subgroup report greater support for their employment from their husbands and are less likely to report being more interested in employment than their husbands at the five-week endline. The mechanisms analyses thus suggest that impact on labour supply stems from women persuading their husbands to let them work.
A cost-effective approach to raising female employment
A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that it costs around one-eighth as much to get one woman employed with our intervention than with government-funded vocational training. Thus, our results imply that frictions within the household can keep women from taking up jobs even when jobs are available for them, but communication training can relax these constraints at low cost.
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