Push or Pull? Drivers of Female Labor Force Participation During India's Economic Boom
By Stephan Klasen, Janneke Pieters. Social Science Research Network, 2012
179 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In the past twenty years, India's economy has grown at increasing rates and now belongs to the fastest-growing economies in the world. This paper examines drivers of female labor force participation in urban India between 1987 and 2004, showing a much more nuanced picture of female labor force participation than one might expect. Recent trends in employment and earnings suggest that at lower levels of education, female labor force participation is driven by necessity rather than economic opportunities. Unit level estimation results confirm that participation of poorly educated women is mainly determined by economic push factors and social status effects. Only at the highest education levels do we see evidence of pull factors drawing women into the labor force at attractive employment and pay conditions. This affects, by 2004, only a small minority of India's women. So despite India's economic boom, it appears that for all but the very well educated, labor market conditions for women have not improved.
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/240034261821ab94ae4514a63014c4f22ec1a3aa
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Citations in the corpus
- Women Workers in India: Why so Few Among so Many? (2015, methodology): “Similar to Klasen and Pieters (2012), the following two-stage estimation procedure is used to analyze the above questions.”
- Why is Female Labour Force Participation Declining so Sharply in India (2014, background): “Some authors suggest that these women benefit from increased investment in their human capital and may be able to obtain jobs with better working conditions and adequate remuneration (Klasen and Pieters, 2012).”
- Economic development, structural change, and women’s labor force participation: (2013, unknown): “The graphs confirm the widely recognized trend of increasing economic activity amongst women over the past decades (see Killingsworth and Heckman 1986; Blundell and MaCurdy 1999 for advanced economies; Klasen and Pieters 2012; Gaddis and Pieters 2012 for some developing countries).”