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 South Asia RegionGender Innovation LabNovember 2025 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, whilemixed-gender transport had minimal effects on men’s andwomen’s application rates. Women valued the women-only 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.These findings highlight the importance of safety and pro-priety concerns in women’s labor decisions. The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely thoseof the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank andits affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Women’sMobilityandLaborSupplyExperimentalEvidencefromPakistan* 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). Increasingfemale labor force participation and employment has the potential to raise aggregate eco-nomic output as well as women’s empowerment (Agte et al., 2024; Ashraf et al., 2023;Chiplunkar & Goldberg, 2024; Duflo, 2012; Hsieh et al., 2019). 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 commutescould expand the set of jobs over which unemployed women search, speeding their pathto employment. Second, some women out of the labor force may be “latent jobseekers”at the margin of participation, willing to work if commuting options improved. For ex-ample, although only one quarter of women in Pakistan work outside the home, anotherquarter report being willing to work, suggesting scope to double female labor force par-ticipation by encouraging active search (Field & Vyborny, 2016). 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 studypotentially latent jobseekers who are missing from samples of existing workers, jobseek-ers, or job platform users.1The platform provides rich administrative data on searchbehavior and all jobseeker attributes visible to firms during the application process. 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 privatetransport raise about commuting to work: the door-to-door structure avoids the need to 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 testwhether women’s labor supply is sensitive to the price of commuting and whether itresponds more when barriers to safety and propriety are lowered. 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 n