妇女的流动性和劳动力供应：来自巴基斯坦的实验证据

Women’s Mobility and Labor Supply Experimental Evidence from Pakistan Robert GarlickErica FieldKate Vyborny Policy Research Working Paper11256 Abstract This paper studies whether commuting barriers constrainwomen’s labor supply in urban Pakistan. This study ran-domized offers of gender-segregated or mixed-gendercommutingservices at varying prices.Women-onlytransport more than doubled job application rates, while service more than large price discounts for the mixed-genderservice. The results are similar for baseline labor force par-ticipants and non-participants, suggesting there are many“latent jobseekers’’ close to the margin of participation. Women’sMobilityandLaborSupply ExperimentalEvidencefromPakistan RobertGarlick©r EricaField©r KateVyborny©r Keywords: transport, mobility, gender, female labor force participationJEL codes: J16, J22, J28, L91 1Introduction Women have substantially lower labor force participation and employment than menin many parts of the world, particularly in South Asia (ILO, 2023). This pattern has per-sisted despite substantial increases in women’s education levels relative to men’s (Heath& Jayachandran, 2018). For example, in Pakistan, 24% of working-age women are em- ployed, which rises to only 29% for those with university degrees (ILO, 2025). Increasing What can be done to help women’s employment in these settings? In this paper weexplore whether women’s labor supply in urban Pakistan is constrained by the multidi-mensional challenges associated with commuting to work: risk of harassment or violence,penalties for breaking propriety by sharing public spaces with men from outside theirfamily, and the high cost of commuting relative to women’s wages. Better commutingoptions could boost female employment on two distinct margins. First, easier commutes To study this question, we build a large job search and matching platform and con-duct door-to-door recruitment in a representative set of enumeration blocks around thecity of Lahore. A novel feature of our platform is that we actively register roughly equalnumbers of labor force participants and non-participants at baseline, allowing us to study The platform runs a transport service that uses motorized rickshaws and 12-seat vansto pick up women from their homes, drop them at work, and then return them homeeach day. The service is designed to address concerns women without access to private walk to or wait at public transport nodes, reducing their risk of harassment or breachesof propriety.We randomize access to the transport service, its price, and whether thevans are women-only or mixed-gender. These additional randomizations allow us to test We study effects on one specific margin of women’s labor supply: job applications.While not a comprehensive measure of labor supply, job applications are a necessarystep in all subsequent stages of labor supply and employment, and many women in oursample report that commuting concerns deter them from applying to jobs farther fromhome or applying to any jobs at all. We deliberately do not study downstream outcomes We find that offering women any form of transport increases their job application rateby 70%, from a relatively low base. This increase is almost entirely driven by women-only transport, which raises the application rate by roughly 150%, compared to only 40% Lower transport prices also increase job application rates, and the randomized pricesallow us to calibrate the value of women-only transport in monetary terms. Applicationdecisions reveal a high pecuniary value of gender-segregated transport: offering women-only rather than mixed-gender transport increases job applications by as much as an 81% These findings show that improved transport services can boost female labor sup-ply, particularly when the services allow women to avoid interacting with men whilecommuting. However, back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the cost of running ment and generate economies of scale that make it sustainable in the future. This paper provides the first experimental evidence about the separate importanceof pecuniary versus safety and propriety factors during commutes in shaping women’s job application behavior. By actively enrolling non-labor force participants, we also pro-vide the first experimental evidence on commuting constraints to women’sparticipation,an important and understudied margin for policy influence on female labor supply in many settings. We build on an extensive literature on barriers to female labor force par-ticipation and employment, reviewed by Borker (2024), Heath et al. (2024), Jayachandran (2020), and Petrongolo & Ronchi (2020). This research documents that women face risksof harassment and violence while traveling in many settings (Aguilar et al., 2019; Amaralet al., 2023; Chakraborty et al., 2018; Kondylis et al., 2025), that harassment risks are asso- Our work extends and bridges the gap in findings from four contemporaneous pa-pers stu