Publication: Does Culture Matter or Firm? Demand for Female Labor in Three Indian Cities
Date
2019-02
ISSN
Published
2019-02
Author(s)
Abstract
In discussing the inordinately low
employment of Indian women in urban areas, several studies
have argued that culture and attitudes have created a labor
market that is inherently discriminatory. The unsaid
corollary is that culture is slow and hard to change and so,
women will stay out of the labor market until social change
occurs. The empirical evidence on the role of culture is
slim at best. This paper fills the void in the policy
literature, as it assesses the relative role of culture, as
signified by attitudes of employers, and firm
characteristics in hiring women. The paper is based on a
unique survey of 618 firms in three of the largest cities in
the state of Madhya Pradesh (India)—Bhopal, Indore, and
Gwalior. Using detailed descriptive, bivariate and
multivariate analysis at the firm level, the hiring process,
and attitudes toward male and female workers, the paper
addresses the issue of culture and firm characteristics,
while noting that the two are not necessarily in binary
opposition. The results reinforce the conventional wisdom in
some ways and are surprising in others. The most salient
result is that employer attitudes matter much less for the
chance that women will be hired, than do firm and location
characteristics. This has significant policy implications,
the most important of which is that female employment in
urban India is amenable to policy intervention, and that it
is not necessary to wait for culture to change.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Das, Maitreyi Bordia; Mehta, Soumya Kapoor; Zumbyte, Ieva; Sasmal, Sanjeev; Goyal, Sangeeta. 2019. Does Culture Matter or Firm? Demand for Female Labor in Three Indian Cities. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 8736. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31268 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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