Abstract
n low and middle-income countries, there is a pronounced gender gap in labor force
participation. Women often work less, earn less, and face greater job insecurity than men.1
In India, the scenario is particularly stark, with only 25 women participating in the labor
market for every 100 men. While unequal burden of household chores, restrictive social
norms and other factors contribute to this disparity, the impact of limited physical
mobility faced by women is under researched.
The lack of safety in public spaces and regressive social norms disproportionately affect
women’s mobility in many countries. In India, women lack freedom of movement
and face pervasive harassment in public spaces which makes it difficult for them to travel
alone outside their homes. In the pilot baseline surveys we find that: 1) more than 60%
of women reported not leaving their neighborhoods in the last week compared to 20% of
men; 2) 60% of women reported that they did not travel alone outside their neighborhoods
in the last week compared to 15% of men. This project aims to investigate whether these
mobility constraints significantly hinder women’s ability to participate in job interviews,
thereby affecting their employment rate. If a woman needs someone else to go with her to
feel safe or because it’s “expected”, but no one is available, she might not go to the interview
at all. Using a cluster RCT, the project evaluates an intervention that addresses the fact
that women cannot travel alone but can travel with other adult women.
In the “travel buddy” intervention, unemployed women in a randomly assigned group
of neighborhood clusters are invited to attend job interviews via group meetings. Inviting multiple women together from a neighborhood could help reduce the familial pushback towards women’s work, signal about the gendered nature of the jobs, improve women’s con-
fidence and increase the amenity value of the job if women prefer having friends working
with them. To isolate these effects of organizing women in groups, in the second treatment
group, we also randomize interview days while still inviting women in groups.
We randomly assign 75 clusters in Delhi-NCR to the three groups and study the impact
of treatments on women’s probability of participating in the interviews, employment and
mobility. To gather proof of concept, we conducted a pilot RCT during the summer 2022
with 95 women across 10 neighborhood clusters in India. It produced two key findings: 1)
88% of all women who showed up for the interview came with an adult companion; 2) 27%
of women showed up from the travel buddy group compared to 9% from the control group
(200% increase).
The academic contribution of this project is two-fold. First, while multiple studies in-
vestigate women’s low labor force participation rates and physical access constraints
separately, few studies have attempted to quantify the effect of mobility constraints on
women’s labor market outcomes.The study is unique in its focus women’s inability to
travel alone - and its impact on showing up for interviews. Second, the role of peer effects
in low-income settings has been extensively studied in different contexts, such as that of
learning, family planning, and female autonomy. By contrast, our study looks
at the presence of peer effects in commuting and hiring.