Bringing Work Home: Internet-Mediated Gig Work and Women's Employment

Last registered on October 31, 2024
View Trial History

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Bringing Work Home: Internet-Mediated Gig Work and Women's Employment
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0009190
Initial registration date
April 07, 2022

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
April 07, 2022, 3:03 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
October 31, 2024, 4:35 PM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Country
India
Region
West Bengal

Primary Investigator

Name
Lisa Ho
Affiliation
MIT
Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Suhani Jalota
PI Affiliation
Stanford
Contact Investigator
PI Name
Anahita Karandikar
PI Affiliation
University of British Columbia
Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status
Completed
Start date
2022-04-11
End date
2023-06-30
Keywords
Gender, Labor
Additional Keywords
female labor force participation, gig work, social norms, internet, digital, work arrangements, job attributes
JEL code(s)
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
This paper studies the effects of introducing flexible work arrangements on female labor force participation and gender norms. In a field experiment with 1,670 households, we test the impact of offering flexible jobs to women currently outside of the labor force. We find three sets of results. First, flexible work-from-home jobs are highly effective at bringing out-of-labor-force women into paid work. Job flexibility more than triples take up from 15% for an office job to 48% for a job that women can do from home while multitasking with childcare. Second, these flexible work-from-home jobs can also act as a stepping stone to less flexible work. The opportunity to try paid work from home increases women's take up of office-based jobs two to three months later. This opportunity to have a "gateway job" may be especially important for women from traditional households: job flexibility is more important to the labor supply of more traditional women, and work experience in turn shifts the gender attitudes of these women to become less traditional. Third, work-from-home comes with tradeoffs. It selects for less productive workers and causes workers to complete tasks more slowly and less accurately. However, these drawbacks are outweighed by the large positive extensive margin labor supply response to work-from-home. Thus, flexible work arrangements can both attract women to the labor force and provide a gateway to outside-the-home jobs.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Ho, Lisa, Suhani Jalota and Anahita Karandikar. 2024. "Bringing Work Home: Internet-Mediated Gig Work and Women's Employment." AEA RCT Registry. October 31. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.9190-7.0
Sponsors & Partners

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
The intervention consists of month-long internet-mediated gig jobs which can be done on a smartphone. Participants complete speech-based tasks on an Android application developed by Karya Inc. We pay participants a piece rate of approximately Rs. 1 per task, which is the wage our implementing partners have previously used in similar contexts. These tasks include recording oneself speaking specific sentences in Bengali or Hindi, and the tasks range in difficulty level.

Participants are randomized into work arrangements which vary across three characteristics: (1) the ability to work from home, (2) the ability to choose one's work hours flexibly, and (3) the ability to multitask with childcare. After making job offers but before the work begins, we randomly select half of participants in the treatment groups with inflexible constraints to be upgraded to the most flexible work arrangement, which allows them to work from home, choose work hours, and multitask with childcare.
Intervention (Hidden)
We randomly assign women from 1,670 lower-middle-income households in a mix of urban, peri-urban, and rural areas to either receive a job offer or to a control condition with no job offer. Among those receiving job offers, we introduce variation along three dimensions of job flexibility: (1) the ability to choose one’s work hours each day, (2) the ability to combine working with childcare, and (3) the ability to work from home. All jobs are part-time, last for one month, and are offered in partnership with Karya, a Microsoft Research spinoff company that distributes smartphone-based data tasks to gig workers in India. The job involves tasks that contribute to Bangla or Hindi datasets that can train language models. In order to separately estimate the effects of flexible work arrangements on job performance versus worker composition, after participants have decided to accept or reject their job offer, we randomly select half of the participants who accepted a less flexible job to be surprised with an upgrade to the most flexible job.
Intervention Start Date
2022-06-17
Intervention End Date
2023-01-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
1. Interest and take up of jobs by work arrangement. The work arrangements vary across three attributes: (1) ability to choose location, (2) ability to choose hours of work, and (3) ability to multitask with childcare. We will assess interest/take up of jobs in at least two ways: (1) women's responses in the baseline survey to whether they would take each job if offered it, and (2) whether or not women actually start the job that they are assigned during the intervention period.

2. Interest in further training and work after the intervention. During the endline survey, we will elicit women's interest in skills training or other work opportunities. We then offer another round of work opportunities to all participants who completed the endline survey. These work opportunities vary in their flexibility in time, ability to multitask with childcare, and work location. We measure take up of these job outcomes.

3. Gender attitudes related to gender and work, household roles, and technology.

4. Women's agency. We will measure agency related to at least two categories: (i) mobility and (ii) ability to make financial decisions.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
1. Attributes of women who select into different work arrangements. We will measure whether women who opt into more or less flexible jobs differ along (i) baseline characteristics such as agency, gender attitudes, and household structure, (ii) on-the-job productivity, and (iii) persistence in the job throughout the month-long intervention.

2. On-the-job productivity, including comparisons across work arrangements.

3. Persistence in the job (i.e. to what extent women continue in the job throughout the intervention), including comparisons across work arrangements.

4. Children's aspirations and attitudes. We will compare the stated educational/career aspirations and gender attitudes at endline between children in treatment households vs control households. We do not expect to be well-powered on this outcome.

5. Time use. We will try to understand how women change their schedules in order to accommodate work in the treatment group.

6. Spending. We will try to understand how households use the earnings that women make from the intervention.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Our evaluation consists of an RCT in and around Kolkata, West Bengal with approximately 1,500-2,000 households. Participating households will be randomly assigned into job treatment groups and a control group. The month-long, smartphone-based jobs consist of contributing to a Bengali or Hindi dataset by speaking aloud provided sentences.

The job treatment groups vary across three dimensions: 1) ability to choose work location, 2) ability to choose work hours, and 3) ability to multitask with childcare. First, we offer jobs to women and measure the difference in job acceptance for each job variation. Second, we return to a random subset of participants who were originally offered inflexible work arrangements, and we offer them the option to switch to the most flexible job. Third, we implement the month-long jobs. Lastly, at the end of the short-term job, we provide information about further training and work and measure the impacts of jobs on the households (e.g. women's interest in future work, time use, gender attitudes, and agency). To measure the impact on women's interest in future work, we offer another round of jobs and measure take up of these job opportunities. These jobs vary in whether they are digital or non-digital, and vary across the same three dimensions as the original treatment.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Randomization done by a computer
Randomization Unit
Household
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
N/A
Sample size: planned number of observations
1670 households
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
1250 treatment, 420 control;

First job offers: 208 most flexible job, 208 fixed time-slot job, 208 for no multitasking with childcare, 208 fixed time-slot and no multitasking with childcare, 415 fixed location.

Final job offers (after option to switch to most flexible job): 731 most flexible job, 103 fixed time-slot job, 105 for no multitasking with childcare, 105 fixed time-slot and no multitasking with childcare, 206 fixed location.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Institute for Financial Management and Research
IRB Approval Date
2021-09-13
IRB Approval Number
N/A
IRB Name
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects
IRB Approval Date
2022-02-22
IRB Approval Number
2106000402A003
Analysis Plan

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information

Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
Yes
Intervention Completion Date
October 21, 2022, 12:00 +00:00
Data Collection Complete
Yes
Data Collection Completion Date
April 29, 2023, 12:00 +00:00
Final Sample Size: Number of Clusters (Unit of Randomization)
1670 households
Was attrition correlated with treatment status?
No
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations
1525 (endline survey)
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms
386 control, 1139 treatment households
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
Yes
Public Data URL
https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JBVUO1

Program Files

Program Files
No
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials