Determining Why Benefits for Women Go Unused

• Authors: Ali Cheema (LUMS), Asim I. Khwaja (Harvard University), M. Farooq Naseer (LUMS), Jacob N. Shapiro (Princeton University)
• Title: “Glass Walls: Experimental Evidence on Constraints Faced by Women in Accessing Valuable Skilling Opportunities”
• Journal: Journal of Political Economy

Well-meaning government programs that seek to expand economic opportunities for underserved populations, especially women, can face a significant obstacle: adequate physical access. Despite mounting evidence that limited mobility keeps women from getting to the programs, policymakers have been slow to recognize the phenomenon and design remedies.

Princeton SPIA’s Jacob N. Shapiro and research colleagues in Pakistan and the United States wanted to determine the scope of these constraints, what drives them, and how they can be handled.

“We had to do three things to answer these questions: measure where mobility barriers arise, quantify the costs they impose, and test alternative ways of reducing them,” said Shapiro, the John Foster Dulles Professor in International Affairs. “This helped us figure out whether mobility barriers in the region reflect a minor inconvenience or a deeper constraint, and whether easing them could help unlock the full benefits of public programs for women.” 

The team collaborated with the Punjab Skills Development Fund to implement a program to teach in-demand tailoring skills to women in the province. They randomly allocated training centers across villages in three districts, and also  randomized the stipend amounts women received, which let them determine the level of financial compensation required to overcome distance-related barriers. They also offered additional interventions, including trainee and community engagement activities, peer-based incentives, and group transportation options to assess whether these would increase women’s mobility.

“We find mobility barriers are substantial and discontinuous,” the researchers concluded. “Take-up declines with distance at every stage of the process, from accepting and submitting the training voucher to enrolling and completing the course.”

Specifically, about 35 percent of women completed the training if the training center was located inside their village, while less than 20 percent did so if they had to leave their village, even if the distance wasn’t all that great. Simply having to cross the village boundary, which is socially constructed rather than an actual physical demarcation, dramatically reduced training attendance.

Additionally, paying women a stipend to leave their village proved prohibitively expensive; it was about the same as the median monthly household spending on all non-food items, and almost three times larger than standard estimates of travel and time costs. And while providing safe group transportation did increase mobility, other interventions, including providing women’s families with more information about training centers and holding community meetings to increase the social acceptability of travel to training, did not.

Increasing access to training had undeniable benefits. The researchers found that for 30 months after the training, women who participated spent more time stitching, reported improved design and sewing skills, saw modest increases in earnings from tailoring activities, and were also more likely to own a sewing machine. 

“In this setting,” they wrote, “the hidden barriers to travel screened out women who would have benefited from the training.

Since funding travel and offering stipends were ineffective, costly, or both, the team recommended government action.

“Effective policy must recognize socially driven mobility constraints, especially concerns about women’s safety in public spaces, as a central barrier,” Shapiro said. “Addressing them will require tangible measures such as careful decisions about where services are located, including pushing them out to the village level, and the provision of safe transport options.”

The findings, according to Shapiro, are applicable to gender-unequal settings in developing countries well beyond Pakistan.

“There is now a large literature showing that women face particular challenges in accessing valuable training and work opportunities,” he said. “What’s unique about our work is that we estimate the shape of those constraints, link them to security concerns, and document just how much you need to compensate people to overcome them.”