program may have triggered renewed bargaining in the household over more than just the newly earned income.

While these results are encouraging for policy approaches that aim to increase equity for women in both the workplace and the home by fostering female leadership, the direct effects of promotions will only affect the small share of the female population that attains a management position. I therefore analyze whether there are any indirect effects of having the new female supervisors as role models on the women working as their subordinates. These effects would potentially be relevant for a much larger number of women. I compare outcomes of female sewing-line operators who were working on lines to which the newly selected female supervisors were assigned for the promotion program (the “exposed” group) to outcomes of women who were working on other lines (the “non-exposed” group) for an intent-to-treat analysis. I interviewed about 500 exposed and non-exposed wives and their husbands about nine months after the start of the exposure to female supervisors. According to industry experts, the assignment of operators to production lines is first and foremost determined by production requirements. It is especially unlikely that workers can sort to lines of new supervisors in their trial period, since factories use these periods to observe the performance of potential new supervisors with the resources they have been given. Extensive tests indeed indicate that the two groups are very similar on observable characteristics. I again use PDS Lasso to identify control variables for OLS in my estimation approach, but find that the estimates are robust to the inclusion of control variables.

I find that the exposed women — similar to the promoted women — are considerably more involved in decision-making in the household, especially regarding their own mobility, with a point estimate of 0.36 SD. There is suggestive evidence that the exposed women are able to translate this increased decision-making power into a reallocation of expenditures away from men’s goods, with the income share spent on men’s assignable expenditures decreasing in relative terms. For both the promoted and exposed groups, there is some suggestion that the increased involvement in decisionmaking and changes in expenditure patterns are resulting from women being more willing or able to get involved in negotiations in the household, as indicated by marginally insignificant increases in self-reported measures of attitudes towards bargaining. Notably, for both groups I do not find any impacts on outcomes of time use, domestic violence, or economic games inspired by Almås et al. (2018) that measure respondents’ willingness to pay to hide or control payouts.

This paper makes two empirical contributions. It provides the first evidence of women’s career advancement on intra-household decision-making, and shows that the impacts are not primarily driven by a change in the woman’s income. It thus relates to the large literature investigating the impacts of women entering employment on the household level, which has found positive effects on a range of measures of women’s bargaining power, such as domestic violence, expenditures, 5