Yale researchers offer new insight into the role of women in economic development

Event Recap: Experimental Economics Workshop on Discrimination and Prejudice

Understanding belief formation and decision-making forms the crux of behavioral and experimental economics. From choices about education and careers to political attitudes or attitudes towards marginalized groups, individual behavior is shaped by expectations, norms, and perceptions of societal beliefs. Studying these mechanisms helps understand and explain persistent inequalities, polarization, and the limits of policy interventions.

On December 5, 2025, EGC hosted its first Experimental Economics Workshop on Discrimination and Prejudice, highlighting research from early- and mid-career scholars in behavioral and experimental economics. This was the first event in a series of planned Experimental Economics Workshops that EGC and YIE will host. Organized by Maria Kogelnik, the event offered new evidence on how people respond to incentives, norms, and institutional interventions, alongside what these responses imply for policy design.

Why haven’t women won globally (yet)?

Does economic growth close labor market-linked gender gaps that disadvantage women? Conversely, do gender inequalities in the labor market impede growth? EGC postdoc Patrick Agte and coauthors from EGC conduct an empirical analysis to demonstrate that growth is not a panacea for closing gender gaps and that structural transformation is gendered by nature.

A new methodology for estimating the impacts of gender gaps on productivity and growth

The Global Gender Distortions Index (GGDI) quantifies growth losses stemming from gender inequality and identifies their sources. This new tool created by EGC affiliates Pinelopi (Penny) Koujianou Goldberg and Michael Peters along with collaborators Meet Mehta, Charles Gottlieb, Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan and Somik Lall (World Bank) helps policymakers understand the economic costs of barriers in labor markets and make comparisons across time and space.

Read more about the GGDI:

• The global cost of gender inequality in labour market opportunities

Meritocracy and misallocation

In a purely meritocratic labor market, workers would be allocated to jobs based on skills and productivity, rather than on attributes such as gender. Ilse Lindenlaub and coauthors build an equilibrium matching model to quantify the role of worker-job matching in economic development and apply it to a particularly salient dimension of misallocation: gender differences in labor market outcomes.

From rural fields to urban kitchens: the decline of women’s work in India

Despite three decades of modernization and growth, female labor force participation in India fell from 36% in 1987 to a low 27% in 2019. In their new working paper, Michael Peters, Pamela Torola, Lindsey Uniat & Fabrizio Zilibotti find striking differences in the types of labor available to women in India’s rural and urban areas.

The social networks of mothers

Gender norms that frown upon married women moving freely outside the home make it difficult for them to create and maintain ties with peers. Orazio Attanasio, Costas Meghir, and coauthors conduct the first quantitative study to examine the socioeconomic gradient of Indian women’s social isolation, finding that wealthier women have smaller networks than their less-advantaged peers, primarily because wealthier women know fewer women within their own socioeconomic group.

Reputation dynamics and household finances

When women receive financial transfers from their husbands for household purposes, they work to maintain “good reputations” in order to maximize the transfer amount. EGC postdoctoral associate Nina Buchmann and coauthors study households in Malawi and propose a signaling model.

An overview of formal childcare programs

Provision of formal childcare may increase female labor supply, but household structure and restrictive gender norms may limit this impact. In a policy brief, Deanna Ford, Serena Goldberg, Ayush Jain, Emma Lambert-Porter, and Costas Meghir focus on how childcare programs affect young mothers’ decisions and child outcomes in low- and middle-income countries.

Unemployment as a status symbol

Sustained increases in female labor force nonparticipation have been documented in many lower-income countries. EGC affiliate Kaivan Munshi and Swapnil Singh provide a status-based explanation: Households or ethnic groups can signal their wealth, and thereby increase their social status, by withdrawing women from the labor force – paying a “signaling cost."

Insights on the impact of a pre-school intervention on women’s labor market outcomes in Kenya’s Tharaka Nithi County

Kenya’s economy has grown by around 4-5% annually in recent years, and yet the gender gap in labor force participation has widened – from 6 percentage points in 2016 to 9 percentage points in 2024. This growing gap in labor market engagement is accompanied by persistent gender disparities in unpaid care and domestic work. In a policy brief, Helen Baker-Henningham, Serena Goldberg, Ayush Jain, Emma Lambert-Porter, Costas Meghir, and Michelle Neuman detail a collaboration with the County Government of Tharaka Nithi to design a preschool-based model of care provision that extends access to early childhood education to younger children starting from age 3 – one year earlier than the standard entry age. By enriching the early learning environments and enrolling younger children in preschools, this tailored intervention aims to promote children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development during a formative phase of their lives, while also enhancing mothers’ ability to engage in paid work and other activities.

Flexible work as a “gateway” into paid labor

There is a large latent workforce in lower-income countries – women who prefer to have paid work and yet are out of the labor force. Often, available job opportunities are incompatible with traditional gender roles that encourage women to stay at home. Yale Inclusion Economics and EGC postdoctoral scholar Lisa Ho and coauthors find that flexible, work-from-home jobs more than triple employment take-up by women in West Bengal.

Paternalistic discrimination

The standard labor market model does not incorporate “other-regarding” employers – those who protect one group differently than another, potentially depriving the protected group of opportunities to build important skills and experiences. Nina Buchmann and coauthors observe real hiring and application decisions for a night-shift job in Bangladesh. They find a reduction in female labor supply associated with an employer’s perception of the danger a female worker might experience.

Closing the digital access gender gap

A program transferring free smartphones to Indian women reversed gender gaps in phone ownership in the short run. However, many women lost ownership and gender gaps in use quickly worsened as men made use of the new phones instead – in part due to social norms around the appropriateness of women’s smartphone use. EGC director Rohini Pande and a team of researchers find that addressing affordability alone may not close digital gender gaps.

Access to government benefits

In Saudi Arabia, information frictions and intra-household concerns influence women’s takeup of unemployment assistance. Rohini Pande and coauthors find that providing accurate information about financial agency – that is, that women fully control the registration for and access to benefits – has the largest impact on increasing participation.

The “multiplier effect” of women’s entrepreneurship

Policies that support the growth of women-owned businesses have far greater impact compared to policies targeting the costs of firm entry. In a new study published in Econometrica, Penny Goldberg and coauthor Gaurav Chiplunkar find that female entrepreneurs employ more female workers, drawing women into the labor force who then become wage earners and possibly entrepreneurs themselves. This can drive low-productivity male entrepreneurs out of business, reducing the misallocation of talent and resources in the economy.

The influence of women on the editorial boards of top economics journals

In an analysis for VoxDev, Rohini Pande and coauthors reveal that as female representation on editorial boards rises, more women-authored papers are being published and the focus on gender-related research increases.

Insights from ten years of research on women’s opportunities in India

In 2013, a team of researchers affiliated with Inclusion Economics at Yale University and the Inclusion Economics India Centre began a set of studies to understand Indian women’s economic and social challenges. More than a decade later, these researchers describe what they’ve learned and set forth a research-policy agenda that works for women. Published for Women’s Day 2024.

Towards Gender Equality newsletter: a bimonthly deep dive

EGC and IE launched the Towards Gender Equality newsletter as a forum for the community of researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and journalists interested in evidence-based policy on gender gaps and economic development. Each issue addresses a different topic: technology, law, labor, entrepreneurship, and more.

Pande & Goldberg in conversation on gender & economic growth

In the first installment of EGC’s “In Conversation” series – pairing Yale economics faculty with different perspectives on international development – faculty leaders for EGC’s Gender & Growth Gaps project discuss the complex relationship between gender inequality, labor markets, and economic growth.

Pande on the role of economics in addressing inequality

In the video, created by the Yale Faculty of Arts & Sciences, EGC director Rohini Pande discusses the origins of her interest in the way economics can be used to ask questions about power and policy – how we can look at patterns in the world to quantify the trade-offs between economic well-being and social justice.

Gender gaps and structural transformation in a new development era

At an event organized by the Yale Economic Growth Center (EGC) and the Center for Global Development (CGD) and hosted by the Gates Foundation on the sidelines of the 2025 World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings, researchers shed light on how gender gaps interact with and are impacted by structural transformation, including processes of urbanization, industrialization, and digitalization. Speakers at the event offered a rigorous challenge to those voices that have treated gender equality as peripheral to macroeconomics.

Insights on Harnessing Human Capital for Growth and Development in Kenya

The Yale Economic Growth Center (EGC) and Yale Inclusion Economics (YIE) hosted a dialogue on how evidence can inform strategies to drive human capital investments, gender equality, and economic transformation in Kenya and the region. The event showcased a range of partnerships between academia, government, and the private sector. These included EGC’s Gender and Growth Gaps project on labor market distortions, YIE’s work on digital inclusion, and a joint EGC-YIE project aimed at expanding access and enhancing public preschools for young children.