What are the barriers constraining women's labour supply? What policies can increase women’s labour supply? This VoxDevLit explores the reasons for low female labour force participation and factors affecting female labour force participation more generally.
Women’s labour force participation is lower than men’s throughout the world. Increasing the female labour force participation rate is of great interest to policymakers, given its positive impacts on women’s empowerment, children’s human capital, and overall economic growth.
We identify several policies that consistently increase women’s labour supply: increasing childcare availability, empowering women within households, psychological interventions, prompting businesses to offer amenities like flexibility that female employees value, and increased global exposure among export industries that disproportionately hire women. Other policies we discuss, such as skills training or depression treatment, yield more mixed results and are probably insufficient by themselves to increase female labour force participation in environments (e.g. India or Pakistan) where they face other large barriers, such as social norms or childcare and other household obligations.
We also identify several important barriers to women’s labour supply – namely, discrimination and a lack of safety and harassment in public spaces. The importance of female labour force participation is clear, but developing effective policies to address these constraints remains an important and unresolved question.
Female Labour Force Participation: Presentation of key takeaways
For our launch event, Rachel Heath joined us to present the key takeaways from this VoxDevLit, highlighting policy relevant results from recent economic research on female labour force participation.