Choice, constraints and the gender dynamics of labour markets in Bangladesh

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This research will address the first overarching question in the call specification concerning the most effective approaches in enabling the poorest sections of the population to exit and stay out of poverty. It will also contribute to the second question relating to the political and institutional conditions associated with sustained transitions out of poverty. Empirical research from different contexts has attested to the positive implications of women's labour force participation, particularly in forms of employment that offer predictable income flows and decent conditions of work. These implications relate to health and wellbeing of family members as well as broader development goals, including economic growth and poverty reduction. In the light of such findings, the persistence of low rates of female labour force participation in the South Asia region, which accounts for a substantial proportion of the world's poor, is a matter of considerable policy concern. The persistence of these low rates despite economic growth across the region has been attributed to prevailing cultural norms giving primacy to male breadwinning roles together with strong restrictions on women's mobility in the public domain. At the same time, the fact that women's labour force participation has been rising in these countries, albeit at a very slow rate, suggests that cultural norms are not immutable. The aim of this project is to explore the changing gender dynamics of labour markets in the specific context of Bangladesh. Bangladesh provides a particularly salient context for such research. Described as a 'test case for development' in the early years of its independence and as an extreme form of patriarchy, the country has experienced moderate rates of both growth and poverty reduction as well as considerable progress on gender equality in education and health. Quantitative studies from the Bangladesh context have suggested that access to paid work serves to promote women's empowerment (as measured by a range of indicators) while qualitative research testifies to the value that women themselves place on access to employment opportunities. Despite this, women's labour market activity remains low and largely concentrated in unpaid family labour and home-based self employment. We propose to draw on different theoretical approaches to labour market behaviour, both those that focus on individual choice as well as those that emphasize structural constraint, to explore this labour market puzzle. We will utilize the rich data set provided by a purposively designed survey carried out in 2008 of 5198 women in 8 different districts in Bangladesh as part of the DFID-funded Pathways of Women's Empowerment research programme (2006-11). We will use qualitative research methods to gain deeper insights into the findings generated by the quantitative analysis. Our analysis will take advantage of the district-level variations in women's economic activity recorded by the 2008 survey to explore the influence of political and institutional variations in the local context on the women's labour market behaviour. A resurvey of these women, together with an additional component on the labour market behaviour of 2500 men randomly selected from the study locations, will allow us to gain both a gender perperspective on labour market dynamics as well as changes over time in the interactions between choice and constraint for women from different socio-economic groups in different locations. We will pay particular attention to the combination of household/individual characteristics and contextual factors most likely to enable women to take advantage of economic opportunities and translate these into improvements in household living standards and family well being. This will allow us to develop both short and longer term policy responses which would promote these enabling factors and to work with the policy actors best positioned to address them.