Gender Norms, Labour Supply and Poverty Reduction in Comparative Context: Evidence from Rural India and Bangladesh

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The project focuses on women's well-being as related to their attitudes and their work. It has two branches and involves research in two geographic areas, rural Bangladesh and rural low-income parts of India. The first branch is to use secondary data to look at changing attitudes and women's labour-force involvement over two decades. This part of the work has highly qualified specialist researchers in four countries (UK, Germany, India, and Bangladesh) working together to apply the most recently discovered methods of statistical analysis to both secondary survey data and a new primary survey data set. The survey experts will advise on the administration of the primary survey with 600 households in India and 600 households in Bangladesh. We gather data in rural areas where two mysteries of labour supply can be explored -- 1) mainly in India, what caused so many women to apparently withdraw their labour from the labour market during the boom of 2000-2007, and what happened during the later years up to 2013?; and 2) in both India and Bangladesh, what attitudes differentiate women (and men) in ways relevant to labour supply, causing some households to avoid offering paid wage labour of women to the market, while gaining their availability for other forms of unpaid, informal and domestic work? We include only poor rural areas.The primary survey data includes household, personal and village data-collection instruments, and has data at two points in time within one year, allow male-female wage differentials to be examined over a small seasonal panel. We can create models of the supply of labour from these data. The results will be better than standard results.The second branch involves mixed methods analysis of attitudes about gender and work. Here, the research also moves on to examine the sources of change and resistance to change in women's labour and women's roles, based upon the attitudinal data and semi-structured interviews (80 per country, carried out as followups to the survey for selected individual cases, 60 men and 20 women in India and the same in Bangladesh).We examine attitudes about women's work and their informal/formal labour supply in each area. Some attitudes about domestic roles to limit the willingness of some women to labour outside their home, and offer resistance to the general trend toward more egalitarian attitudes during the potentially modernising influence of economic growth. We will report on the actual diversity of these attitudes in the states of Jharkand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (India) and two rural areas of Bangladesh. Our Key Stakeholders Meetings in Year 1 analyse the pilot data on attitudes.The qualitative research offsets a tradition in economics of focusing purely on narrowly defined paid labour, and using individualistic approaches, when studying labour-supply of women. We avoid individualism and yet we combined quantitative and qualitative data. This research integrates demography with sociology and economics. We have a new modelling method that looks at the husband-wife pair. Another strong advantage is our use of multilevel models and our ability to control for change over time in the panel of survey data (for two seasons). We expect the results to give profound insights into the feminisation of the casual and informal-sector rural labour force that occured prior to 2007. Our interpretation of this change will be very sophisticated. We will consider what economists call efficiency losses, how families achieve 'distinction' and dignity as well as well-being, and feminist approaches to women's work as alternative interpretive frameworks. The project thus encourages a scientific exploration of new data while also being of service in exposing how different poverty alleviation interventions interacted with existing gender roles and norms. The study is strongly interdisciplinary and highly original. The team has a strong track record of such research.