Glass Walls: Experimental Evidence on Access Constraints Faced by Women

Individual progress often requires being able to access opportunities. Yet many, especially women, face signi cant barriers in doing so. This paper examines access constraints in the context of skill acquisition. Using experimental evidence from rural Pakistan, we show that physical distance poses a signi cant hurdle. Women whose villages are randomly selected to receive a training center are four times as likely to complete a skills development course than women who have to travel just a few kilometers. Half of this penalty is paid simply upon crossing the (virtual) village boundary and therefore cannot be readily reconciled with time or economic costs associated with travel. Instead, this boundary e ect likely re ects the social costs women face when temporarily leaving their village. This constraint is costly to compensate. Using exogenous variation in stipend o ered, we estimate that over half of monthly household expenditure would need to be paid to allow women to cross this boundary. In examining interventions to lower this barrier, we nd that while informational and social interventions have little impact, providing reliable group transportation partly addresses the access constraint. Our results further suggest the boundary e ect is due to social perceptions that constrain women's agency and mobility: It is lower for women who enjoy more in uence over domestic a airs, have fewer dependents, hold lower socioeconomic status, and live in more ethnically diverse communities. Our work suggests that while non-economic obstacles faced by women are indeed substantial, interventions attuned to the local context can o er feasible ways to ameliorate them. *This project is the result of collaboration among many people. We thank Rosemary Berberian, Olivia DaDalt, Ismail Khan, Yanchuan Liu, Kunal Mangal, Guillermo Palacios Diaz, Landin Smith, and Gabriel Tourek for outstanding research assistance in Cambridge and Shahkar Ali, Danya Arif, Minahil Asim, Sahaab Badar, Rehan Hasan, Hafsa Iqbal, Maheen Jahangir, Tanya Javed, Mahnoor Khan, Arqam Lodhi, Wafa Masood, Hasan Murtza, Hassan Murtaza, Anum Mustafa, Rania Nasir, Minahil Niazi, Shaiza Qayyum, Nouman Rasool, Minahil Raza, Zara Riaz, Sarah Shaukat, Sahaab Sheikh, Anam Shoaib, Sameem Siddiqui, and Ahmed Sultan for outstanding research assistance in Lahore. We are grateful to the seminar participants at the AALIMS Princeton Conference, CHW/RPDS Princeton Conference, IDRC GrOW Conference, IZA/World Bank Conference, Boston College, Cornell University, ITAM, Sussex University, Paris School of Economics, Toulouse School of Economics, AixMarseille School of Economics, Trinity College, UC San Diego, and USC for their comments. This paper was funded through support from DfID Pakistan, DfID and IZA's GLM LIC programme, IDRC's GrOW program, and the WAPPP at the Harvard Kennedy School. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily re ect those of the many individuals or organizations acknowledged here. Cheema: Associate Professor of Economics, Lahore University of Management Sciences; Senior Fellow, Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives; cheema@lums.edu. pk. Khwaja: Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; khwaja@hks.harvard. edu. Naseer: Assistant Professor of Economics, Lahore University of Management Sciences; farooqn@lums.edu. pk. Shapiro: Professor of Politics and International A airs, Princeton University; jns@princeton.edu.