For women workers in India, direct deposit is ‘digital empowerment’
By Mike Cummings
July 1, 2021
Giving women in India’s Madhya Pradesh state greater digital control over their wages encouraged them to enter the labor force and liberalized their beliefs about working women, concluded a new study co-authored by Yale economists Rohini Pande and Charity Troyer Moore.
The study, published in the American Economic Review, found that a relatively simple intervention directed to poor women — providing them access to their own bank accounts and direct deposit for their earnings from a federal workfare program, along with basic training on how to use local bank kiosks — increased the amount they worked, both in the government program and for other employers.