Do labour market opportunities affect young women’s work and family decisions? Experimental evidence from India

Objectives

The paper tests whether exogenous improvements in modern labor market opportunities for young women in rural India change their work, schooling, marriage, and fertility decisions. It evaluates a three-year randomized intervention that linked villages to business process outsourcing (BPO) recruiters, effectively raising the perceived and actual returns to female employment in white-collar service jobs.

Findings

Young women aged 15-21 in treatment villages were more likely to work for pay, especially in BPO jobs, and more likely to enroll in computer and English training, while school-aged girls showed higher enrollment and improved BMI, indicating increased human-capital and health investments.

The same cohort of young women were 5-6 percentage points less likely to marry or have a child over the three-year period and reported lower desired fertility and stronger intentions to work throughout their lives, showing that better job prospects can quickly delay marriage and childbearing and shift aspirations toward long-term careers

Recommendations

The authors argue that policies which expand access to stable, well-paid non-farm employment for young women should be central to strategies that aim to delay early marriage and first births and to raise female human-capital investments. Governments and partners should pair labor-market interventions like job-placement services and sector-specific training with efforts to keep girls in school, and they should rigorously evaluate such programmes over longer periods to determine whether short-run delays in marriage and fertility translate into sustained gains in women’s economic empowerment and reductions in child and early marriage.