Gender and development: 36 insights from research

Interested in research on gender but don’t know where get started? Here are over 36 insights from the leading evidence on the challenges faced by women across 18 developing countries[1]1. This includes Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, post-war Japan, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.  in the workplace, school, household, and with fertility and gender norms. I conclude by identifying where we still need more research.

Eleven insights on women in the workplace

1. In Bangladesh, trialling women in managerial roles corrected biased beliefs about their ability, leading to sustained increases in female supervisors even when initial performance appeared weaker (Macchiavello, Menzel, Rabbani, and Woodruff 2025).
2. In Brazil, prioritising women in collective bargaining increased female-friendly amenities in the workplace, which in turn increased women’s retention and productivity without reducing wages, employment, or firm profits (Corradini, Lagos, and Sharma 2025).
3. In Pakistan, encouraging women to apply for jobs immediately after graduation significantly increases their likelihood of working, by enabling them to enter the labour market before marriage pressures intensify (Bandiera, Jalal, and Roussille 2025).
4. In India, language used in job adverts steers young women towards low-paying and stereotypical job roles (Chaturvedi, Mahajan and, Siddique 2025).
5. In Pakistan, women’s participation in skills training is constrained primarily by social and safety barriers, rather than preferences or the ability to monetise skills (Cheema, Khwaja, Naseer, and Shapiro 2026).
6. In South Africa, half of the gender pay gap comes from women sorting into low-paying firms, with low formality and high churn being key to understanding this dynamic (Bassier and Gautham 2025).
7. In Iran, labour reform reducing the number of hours women could work backfired, causing female labour force participation to fall by 2–5% (Chen and Ebadi 2026).
8. In Pakistan, while digital marketplace may reduce discrimination in prices, female buyers continue to face higher rates of inappropriate interactions and unsolicited contact (Asad, Ahmad, and Majid 2025).
9. In South Africa, women must outperform men to overcome customer bias in the services industry (Kelley, Lane, Pecenco, and Rubin 2024).
10. In Egypt, married women that applied to jobs online were much more likely to receive callbacks for additional information, such as whether they had access to safe transport or childcare, which can be considered paternalistic discrimination if used as a precondition for employment (Krafft 2025).
11. The Global Gender Distortions Index (GGDI) quantifies the impact of gender gaps in the labour market, shedding light on how much higher economic activity would be if women had the same opportunities as men (Goldberg, Gottlieb, Lall, Mehta, Peters, and Ratan 2025).

Six insights on girls’ education

12. In Ghana, high school scholarships had especially pronounced impacts for female recipients, including improved graduation, university attendance, and income, as well as delayed marriage and childbirth (Duflo, Dupas, Kremer, Spelke, and Walsh 2024).
13. In India, a school-based career exploration programme raised female students’ aspirations and confidence by improving access to information and role models. However, persistent structural constraints prevented these gains from translating into medium-term behavioural change (Asri, Asri, and Hoeffler 2026).
14. In Uganda, universal secondary school policies increased girls schooling, access to resources, and shifted social norms, enabling greater decision-making (Kazibwe and Li 2025).
15. In India, a state-wide programme providing girls with free sanitary pads in schools substantially reduced dropout rates, primarily via increased school attendance (Agarwal, Chia, and Ghosh 2024).
16. In Zimbabwe, dialogue-based engagement campaigns offered alongside other interventions, such as teaching training or literacy programmes, offer a potential cost-effective solution to encouraging women’s education (Cotton, Nordstrom, Nanowski, and Richert 2024). 
17. In India, constructing separate toilets for girls in schools led to marked reductions in reported sexual assault cases. Specifically, a 10% increase in female students with access to sex-specific toilets reduced child rape cases by 2.6% (Gao, Kothari, and Lei 2025).

Five insights on women in the household

18. In rural Malawi, women’s reputational concerns within households leads to the underinvestment in new technologies and persistence with bad ones. Engaging both spouses and/or equipping women to effectively communicate the proven benefits of new technology can help promote adoption (Buchmann, Dupas, and Ziparo 2025).
19. In Uganda, formally including women in commercial agriculture – through contract ownership or behaviour-change interventions – increased women’s empowerment without reducing productivity, and with positive spillovers for household welfare and gender relations (Ambler, Jones, and O’Sullivan 2026).
20. In Kenya, pairing an aspirations workshop with cash transfers helped women gain control of household resources and reduced intimate partner violence (Mahmud, Orkin, and Riley 2025).
21. In Uganda, digital cash transfers had contrasting effects on women’s empowerment: whereas mobile money improved women’s personal income and decision-making power, jointly disclosed transfers reduces intimate partner violence – highlighting an important trade-off (Greco, Gulesci, Prabhakar, and Sulaiman 2025). 
22. In India, women tend to wake earlier and eat later than men, leading to reduced sleep, socialising, and leisure – all of which are associated with worse physical and mental health outcomes (Rathore 2025). 

Four insights on fertility preferences

23. Analysis of over 100 Demographic and Health Surveys across 34 countries in sub-Saharan Africa reveals that having a firstborn daughter, as opposed to a son, significantly shapes a woman’s life trajectory – affecting marriage prospects, exposure to divorce or polygamy, fertility decisions, and economic well-being (Genicot and Hernandez-de-Benito 2025).
24. In India, institutional features of the marriage market are behind persistent sex selection, including intra-caste marriage, patrilocal residence, and dowries as the norm (Borker, Eeckhout, Luke, Minz, Munshi, and Swaminathan 2025). 
25. In Zambia, providing young women with information that dispelled misinformation about infertility led to increased contraceptive use and delayed first births (Bau, Henning, Low, and Steinberg 2025).
26. In India, as women become scarcer, some of the social and economic conditions that long sustained strong son preference have begun to weaken, pointing to a ‘self-correcting’ mechanism within the missing women crisis (Seetahul, Clément, and Levasseur 2025).

Ten insights on gender norms

27. In Brazil, women-only spaces on public transit offered a quick fix for those facing higher risk of harassment, but may have worked to legitimise exclusion and reinforce the idea that women are responsible for preventing their own victimisation (Kondylis, Legovini, Vyborny, Zwager, and Andrade 2025).
28. In India, although women city councillors outperformed women, gender quotas reduced overall voter welfare as deep-seated discrimination against women outweighed policy gains (Desai, Montero, and Karekurve-Ramachandra 2024).
29. In Nicaragua, when women enter low-wage manufacturing, intimate partner violence increases, as women’s expanded earning potential may have disrupted household gender dynamics (Grogan 2025).
30. In Somalia, less severe forms of female genital cutting are unlikely to serve as a stepping stone to eliminating the harmful norm, as the intermediate action risks becoming the new norm (Gulesci, Jindani, La Ferrara, Smerdon, Sulaiman, and Young 2025). 
31. In India, training women in assertive communication enabled them to more effectively persuade their husbands to support their participation in the workforce, leading to substantial increases in employment (Kala and McKelway 2025). 
32. In post-war Japan, radio programmes targeted at women increased women’s political participation and accelerated fertility decline, but had limited impact on labour market outcomes where structural barriers persisted (Okuyama 2026).
33. In India, male absence due to internal migration led to significant shifts in household dynamics and created pathways for women’s political engagement (Kumar 2025).
34. In Mali, combining direct questions with list experiments helped deduce men’s true perspectives on gender-based violence (Bertelli, Calvo, Lavallée, Mercier, and Mesplé-Somps 2025).
35. In rural India, exposure to over 15 years of women’s reservation in local elections did not boost women’s representation once quotas were lifted (Karekurve-Ramachandra and Sood 2024).
36. In Senegal, teenage girls spent less time on caregiving and completed more years of education after the death of an elderly household member, suggesting that the burden of caring for dependent relatives negatively affects girls’ schooling (Thivillon 2025).

Research gaps in gender and development

Our VoxDevLits, alongside highlighting what we have learned, identify where we need more evidence. Here are some of the key open areas related to gender identified by our Senior Editors:

• Female Labour Force Participation:
  • Reducing harassment on public transportation
  • Stopping violence against women in the workplace
  • Overcoming barriers to women’s hiring and promotion
  • Women in supervisory, managerial, and leadership positions
• Barriers to Search and Hiring in Urban Labour Markets: Job-search policies that can be adapted to best meet the unique constraints faced by women
• Microfinance: Asset-based financing for women
• International Trade: The gender-unequal impacts of trade
• Refugees and Other Forcibly Displaced Populations: Tailored interventions addressing the unique challenges faced by displaced women and girls, such as heightened risks of violence and systemic barriers to accessing essential resources
• Organised Crime: How gender influences organised crime dynamics
• Training Entrepreneurs: Training programmes designed specifically for female entrepreneurs

Closing thoughts

Gender inequality remains a key barrier to accelerating growth and development worldwide. And though the latest frontier of gender research has made significant advancements in improving women’s experiences at work, school, and home, the field remains under-explored. I look forward to seeing how the evidence on gender and development evolves, and plan to keep this blog up-to-date as additional insights emerge.