Kailash Rajah

13/ Huge thanks to a wonderful team of advisors, colleagues, RAs, surveyors and donors for making the research possible!

12/ Future research should explore how to tackle husbands' jealousy directly, exploring interventions to increase marital trust or boost husbands' self-esteem to see whether this can increase women's employment and mobility outside the home.

11/ The results suggest spousal jealousy could be a significant driver of misallocation of labor across the Indian economy. The implications are big: remember, almost 20% of the world's working age women live in India.

10/ I use additional treatment arms to rule out that the results are coming from alternative mechanisms, for example, husbands preferring to speak to the male mentor, or the quality of the mentoring declining when husbands are present.

9/ Consistent with a jealousy mechanism, willingness to pay declines significantly if the husband can join and therefore monitor the conversation. Effects are again stronger in households where women say their husbands are more jealous.

8/ The majority of households give up roughly a full day of household income to guarantee having a female peer!

7/ I measure willingness to pay for a female vs. presumed male "standard" peer in the mentoring program. (For ethical reasons, all standard peers are actually women, but participants don't know this when choosing.)

6/ To narrow in on spousal jealousy, I conduct a second experiment in which I offer a separate sample of women a job in the women-only office that comes with a compulsory online mentoring program.

5/ These preferences don't seem to come from workplace safety concerns. A cross-randomized safety intervention increases perceptions of safety but has no impact on attendance. Treatment effects are, however, much stronger in households with more jealous husbands.

4/ In a first experiment, I randomize 1,400 married women to receive a two-week job in either a mixed or women-only workplace. Participants in the women-only workplace are 46% more likely to apply for a job and 31% more likely to turn up.

3/ Here's what some women say: “Where boys and girls are together, there’s always a bit of an issue, especially for married people. The husband might object.” Another says: “Today’s men don’t want their wives to talk to anyone except them. Not even to look at another man”

2/ As in many places, spousal jealousy is very common in my setting in Bihar, India. For example, 60% of our sample think their husbands would be jealous or angry if they spoke to other men at work!

1/ There are over 300 million working age women in India who are not in the labor market. Economists have studied many reasons why this may be the case but have perhaps ignored one very important reason: spousal jealousy.

Excited to post the latest version of my JMP: The female labor supply constraints of spousal jealousy bit.ly/4nn9apn

I use two field experiments to study the role of spousal jealousy in constraining married women’s employment. More below 👇: