Associate Professor Caroline Krafft co-authored a new working paper, “The barriers to female employment: Experimental evidence from Egypt.”

Krafft and the research team conducted an experiment in Egypt—a country where social norms limit female employment—offering job matching (making jobs easier to find) and child care subsidies (making jobs easier to keep) to see if those steps would make it easier for women to find jobs. 

They found that neither intervention led to appreciable changes in women’s employment or the use of child care. The main barrier appeared to be a mismatch in what the participants wanted in a job (not relating to money) and what jobs were available. The results demonstrate the limits of female employment interventions, and stress tackling norms or strengthening job amenities.