Bringing Work Home: Flexible Work Arrangements as Gateway Jobs for Women in West Bengal

Abstract There is a large latent workforce in developing countries that consists of hundreds of millions of women who prefer to have paid work and yet are out of the labor force. Often, available job opportunities are incompatible with traditional gender roles that encourage women to stay at home. In a randomized experiment with 1,670 households, we partner with a jobs platform to offer short-term data work to women who are out of the labor force. We find three main results. First, flexible work-from-home jobs are highly effective at bringing women into paid work. Job flexibility more than triples take-up from 15% for an office job to 48% for a job that women can do from home while multitasking with childcare. Second, these jobs can act as a stepping stone to less flexible work. Trying paid work from home increases take-up of less flexible jobs two to three months later among women without previous work experience. “Gateway jobs” are especially important for women from more traditional households: their labor supply is more likely to be marginal to flexibility, and in turn, work experience shifts their attitudes to become less traditional. Third, from the labor demand side, remote work comes with trade-offs in worker performance. Working from the office increases accuracy by 3% and speed by 18%. However, these performance drawbacks of work-from-home arrangements may be outweighed by the increase in available workers.