Giving women in India’s Madhya Pradesh state greater digital control over their wages encouraged them to enter the labor force and liberalized their beliefs about working women, concluded a new study co-authored by Yale economists Rohini Pande and Charity Troyer Moore.
The study, published in the American Economic Review, found that a relatively simple intervention directed to poor women — providing them access to their own bank accounts and direct deposit for their earnings from a federal workfare program, along with basic training on how to use local bank kiosks — increased the amount they worked, both in the government program and for other employers.
The women who had access to the banking resources were more likely to report in surveys that a working woman made “a better wife” and that husbands with working wives were better spouses and providers. They also were less likely to say women who work outside the home bear social costs for it.
The study points to the role of gender norms in India’s low and declining rate of women in the workforce and it also demonstrates that boosting women’s control of their finances can expand their autonomy, said Pande, the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“Economics research often assumes that a country’s men and women embrace the same cultural norms, but our study highlights the fact that norms can be differently experienced and held within the same country or culture,” said Pande, who is also director of Yale’s Economic Growth Center. “Improving a woman’s access to her earnings should cause her to work less because she can make the same amount of money with less effort. That we found women work more suggests that some women would prefer to work but are potentially being constrained by social stigma perceived by their husbands — specifically, that working wives diminish their husband’s social status.”