What Works For Her? How Work-from-Home Jobs Affect Female Labor Force Participation in Urban India

Abstract

In many developing countries, married women face significant barriers to entering the workforce that are often rooted in gender norms. These may manifest as practical constraints—like travel restrictions and housework responsibilities—and other less tangible domesticity constraints—the expectation that a woman’s role is confined at home. We design an experiment to distinguish between these barriers by establishing new job offices for part-time, smartphone-based digital work with minimal practical constraints: the office is local, located within a five-minute walk from home, only for women, and permits children. We assigned 3,200 wives in Mumbai to the same jobs, either from home or the office, and cross-randomized them to one of three monthly wage levels (low, medium, or high). We find that 56% of wives started working from home, while only 27% took up office jobs, matching India’s female labor force participation rate. Even wages that double household income did not significantly affect job uptake. A parallel experiment revealed that husbands were more responsive to wages and indifferent to job location for themselves, yet over half opposed their wives working outside the home. A follow-up experiment found that enforcing a two-minute office check-in daily to a home-based job, making a woman’s work status visible outside, significantly reduced job take-up, especially among women from less progressive households. Taken together, the experiments suggest that even beyond practical constraints, domesticity constraints keep married women out of the labor force in India. Without changes to these constraints, home-based jobs may represent the most immediate path to increase women’s labor force participation.

Keywords: female labor force participation, gig work, digital jobs, gender norms

JEL Classification: J00, J12, J16, J21