The race between the marriage and the labour markets

In Pakistan, encouraging women to apply for jobs immediately after graduation significantly improves their likelihood of working by enabling them to enter the labour market before marriage pressures intensify. Results are driven by the women who misperceive how quickly these constraints will limit their employment opportunities.

Editor’s note: For a broader synthesis of themes covered in this article, check out our VoxDevLits on Female Labour Force Participation and Barriers to Search and Hiring in Urban Markets.

Education levels for young women in many developing countries are rising rapidly. Yet more schooling does not necessarily translate to higher employment. In Pakistan, for example, women graduate from college at rates similar to men, but their labour market participation remains strikingly low, at just 34%.

Motivated by this asymmetry, our research asks: what happens at graduation that sets men and women on such distinct paths?

At college graduation, women resemble men across many dimensions

In our research (Bandiera, Jalal, and Roussille 2025), we track the career paths of a large sample of Pakistani college students graduating from two of Pakistan’s largest universities. Right before graduation, women and men report similarly high probabilities of working shortly thereafter. Post-graduation, women search for jobs as intensively as men, and receive as many interviews and job offers. Yet, six months after graduation, a 27-percentage point gender employment gap emerges. This gap is driven by women rejecting job offers at substantially higher rates than men.

Application timing matters uniquely for women

Application timing strongly predicts women’s job acceptance decisions. Women who apply immediately after graduation are 20.4-percentage points more likely to accept job offers than women who apply later.

To test whether applying early has a causal effect, we conduct an experiment that encourages early applications. We randomly select a group of students (the treatment group) and, one month before graduation, inform them that they can receive a small monetary reward by applying to at least four jobs during the first month after graduating. The control group is not offered this financial incentive.

The intervention leads to a sharp increase in early applications for both genders (69% among women and 45% among men). However, employment effects arise only for women:

At 6 months, treated women are 7.5 percentage points (22%) more likely to be employed and 10.2 percentage points (40%) more likely to work for a firm.
These effects persist at 14 months.
The intervention has no effect on men’s employment.
As a result, it closes one-third of the gender employment gap.

The ‘illusion of time’: Why timing matters and why women do not anticipate it

Since timing matters only for women, any explanation of our results must account for why delaying search is uniquely costly for them. We argue that the answer lies in the interaction between (beliefs about) the labour and the marriage market.

Most women in our sample understand that marriage market considerations can constrain the labour supply of their female peers. What they misperceive is when those constraints will bind, and for whom.

For women in our sample, marriage market activity accelerates sharply in the months immediately following graduation. This creates a narrow window in which labour market entry can occur before marriage pressures intensify. Yet, we find that some women underestimate how quickly this window closes for them personally, operating under an ‘illusion of time’. It is these women who drive the employment effects of our treatment.

Why might earlier job search increase employment for these women? Because it relaxes the work-marriage trade-off. Specifically, entering the labour market early does not increase the number of marriage offers women receive, but it changes their composition. Women induced to work sooner attract more progressive suitors. This, in turn, can relax the perceived trade-off between marriage and work, therefore creating a self-reinforcing cycle.

Gender norms are not fixed constraints

A crucial piece of context is the decision-making environment.

Women largely control their job search. However, job acceptance decisions, as well as marriage matches, often involve parents.

Our intervention does not alter parental authority or the timing of marriage offers. Instead, it changes the environment under which parents exert this authority.

By shifting job search earlier – before marriage activity peaks – job offers arrive in a different social environment. Parents may be more willing to permit employment when it does not appear to jeopardise marriage prospects, or when suitors themselves are supportive of women’s work. Timing therefore reshapes the context in which family decisions are made.

The key insight is that norms are not fixed but rather context-specific and time-sensitive.

Our findings speak to three strands of existing research:

Most interventions that successfully raise female employment operate on the demand side – offering remote work, transport support, or better childcare. These hold immense promise but are hard to scale without broader structural changes in the labour market. We identify a window at labour market entry where a low-cost supply-side nudge suffices, because at this stage, women's preferences mirror men's and firms are already willing to hire them.
A growing literature shows that misperceptions about gender norms shape labour market outcomes as powerfully as the norms themselves. We identify a specific set of misperceptions that influence women’s employment: women understand that marriage and family pressures constrain the employment of their female peers. Yet they systematically believe that those constraints won't apply to them personally – an exceptionalism bias that leaves them underprepared for the very barriers they identify for others.
Recent work on behavioural job search shows that women in rich countries overestimate their labour supply post-childbirth. We document a parallel bias at an earlier life stage: women substantially overestimate their own likelihood of working in the months following graduation, failing to anticipate that delaying job search – as marriage market pressures intensify – will sharply reduce their employment chances.

Policy implications

Intervene early. Much of the evidence base focuses on motherhood penalties and later-life labour supply. In Pakistan, however, the gender gap emerges before marriage and motherhood. Our research identifies college graduation as a narrow window in which women’s aspirations resemble men’s and increasing female employment does not require changing firms’ behaviour.

Account for misperceptions. Women experience exceptionalism bias: they are aware that marriage pressures constrain other women’s employment, yet believe that they will personally overcome those constraints. Providing credible information about their own risks, or structuring incentives that shift behaviour before constraints bind, may be especially effective.

Adapt to norms… to change them? Rather than attempting to immediately dismantle deeply embedded gender norms, effective policy can operate within existing social structures. Our intervention does not alter parental authority or the timing of marriage offers. Instead, it shifts labour market entry into a more opportune window. One could imagine that, if scaled carefully, the intervention can normalise women’s work and, in turn, gradually reshape the very norms that constrain women’s employment.