As women’s labour force participation remains stalled globally, unlocking its benefits for empowerment and growth requires context-specific, multi-pronged policies – addressing childcare, safety, social norms, and workplace equality together.
Editor's note: This episode of VoxDevTalks is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
Issue 2 of our VoxDevLit on Female Labour Force Participation (Heath et al. 2025) is out now! In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Rachel Heath discusses new insights from the evidence on women in the workforce. Contrary to assumptions of steady growth, Heath stresses that the story is far more complex.
“If we take a medium-term approach to say the last 30 years… in most parts of the world, we’d say female labour force participation has stagnated, even slightly decreased.”
Latin America stands out as a success story, but in many other regions, participation has stalled. The pandemic further disrupted data collection and labour markets, though there may be cause for optimism: flexible work arrangements in high-income countries appear to be helping some women remain in or re-enter the workforce.
Why women’s work matters for empowerment and growth
The episode highlights how paid work affects women’s autonomy and decision-making.
“Working outside the home is really good for women in a variety of different outcomes… women have more say in household decisions when they work outside the home, they control their own income.”
Job opportunities also provide bargaining power even if women are not formally employed, as the option of earning an independent income changes household dynamics. From a macroeconomic perspective, evidence suggests that when barriers exclude women from the workforce, productivity suffers:
“Bringing in high productivity workers into the labour force would happen if more women were working.”
No silver bullets: Overlapping barriers and constraints
The conversation underscores the idea that no single policy can transform female labour force participation. Constraints vary by context, from childcare to transport safety, and from labour market discrimination to entrenched social norms.
“In countries where there are low rates of female labour force participation, there’s probably many interlocking constraints.”
For instance, childcare may be crucial in one setting but ineffective in another if women still face unsafe commutes or discrimination. Policymakers must therefore consider a ‘bundle’ of interventions tailored to local realities.
Fertility, family planning, and childcare provision
Declining fertility and wider access to contraception do not automatically translate into higher participation. In some contexts, extended families provide childcare, while in others, norms restrict women’s work regardless of family size. Heath recalls her own research in Ghana, where “some women did drop out of the labour force... but the ones that stayed in were actually working more… because children take time, but they also take money” (Heath 2017).
Promising childcare interventions are emerging. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, new village-level childcare centres increased women’s employment (Donald et al. 2023). Similarly, Burkina Faso integrated childcare into public works programmes with positive effects (Ajayi et al. 2023). These models show that affordable, scalable childcare solutions can be designed even in low-income settings.
Male backlash and shifting social norms
A major theme is how men’s attitudes can undermine progress. Heath describes research following the lifting of Saudi Arabia’s driving ban (Abou Daher et al. 2025):
“For the single women... this was great for them, they were more likely to work, but women that were married… weren’t more likely to work, and they actually had reduced autonomy over the spending that they could make.”
This illustrates ‘male backlash’, where men actively resist women’s empowerment. Sometimes this manifests as reduced autonomy and, in other cases, as increased intimate partner violence. Tackling this requires careful programme design, often including men in training or awareness initiatives.
Correcting misperceptions of norms can also help. In Saudi Arabia, informing men that most of their peers supported women working increased women’s expressed interest in employment (Bursztyn et al. 2020). As Heath notes, the more women are seen working in public life, the more norms shift in their favour.
Psychological interventions and women’s aspirations
The conversation explores whether raising aspirations can influence participation. Visualisation exercises and interventions to boost self-efficacy have shown promise in increasing women’s labour supply. However, when it comes to clinical mental health issues like depression, the evidence is mixed: therapy improves wellbeing but may not directly increase employment where structural barriers remain.
Protecting women from harassment and workplace risks
Safety concerns are a major barrier to women’s work. Public harassment discourages education choices and restricts access to better jobs. One innovative experiment in Hyderabad, India, tested increasing policing on public transport and found that visible, supportive officers reduced gender-based violence (Amaral et al. 2025).
Inside the workplace, female managers appear more likely to discipline perpetrators of harassment, though much remains unknown about how to make workplaces safer on a larger scale (Dobbin and Kalev 2019).
“It’s great to get women safely to the workplace, but they’re going to spend most of the day in the workplace, and so how can we make those workplaces safer?”
Limited mobility and job switching costs
Women’s limited ability to switch jobs also contributes to persistent wage gaps. Research from Brazil shows that when firms face financial stress, women are less likely to leave declining jobs than men. This is partly due to concerns over commute safety and dependence on family-friendly employers, which narrow women’s choices and constrain wage growth.
Future directions for research and policy
The conversation closes by looking ahead. Key areas for future study include:
- Understanding how different barriers interact in varied contexts.
- Identifying which combinations of policies – such as childcare plus safe transport – can deliver the greatest impact.
- Monitoring how shifts in the global economy, including tariffs and trade realignments, affect women in export-dependent industries.
Despite challenges, the incentives for policymakers remain strong. Increasing women’s participation supports growth, reduces inequality, and has intergenerational benefits.
“If your goal is to improve the welfare of people that are worse off, jobs for women [are] a good way to achieve that goal… job availability leads to more investment in children, especially girls.”
References
Abou Daher, C, E Field, K Swanson, and K Vyborny (2025), “Drivers of change: Employment responses to the lifting of the Saudi female driving ban,” American Economic Review 115(9): 3248–3271.
Ajayi, K F, A Dao, and E Koussoubé (2023), “The effects of childcare on women and children: Evidence from a randomized evaluation in Burkina Faso,” World Bank.
Amaral, S, G Borker, N Fiala, A Kumar, N Prakash, and M M Sviatschi (2025), “Sexual harassment in public spaces and police patrols: Experimental evidence from urban India,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, qjaf026.
Bursztyn, L, A L Gonzalez, and D Yanagizawa-Drott (2020), “Misperceived social norms: Women working outside the home in Saudi Arabia,” American Economic Review 110: 2997–3029.
Dobbin, F, and A Kalev (2019), “The promise and peril of sexual harassment programs,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(25): 12255–12260.
Donald, A, S Lowes, and J Vaillant (2023), “Experimental evidence on rural childcare provision.”
Heath, R (2017), “Fertility at work: Children and women’s labor market outcomes in urban Ghana,” Journal of Development Economics 126: 190–214.
Heath, R, A Bernhardt, G Borker, A Fitzpatrick, A Keats, M McKelway, A Menzel, T Molina, G Sharma, “Female Labour Force Participation” VoxDevLit, 11(2), October 2024