# **2.3. Networks and Role Models**

Networks are critical to young adults’ decisions to join the labor force, invest in schooling or training, and choose an occupation. Once an individual has chosen a career path, networks are also an important source of soft skills and contacts central to success both in business (Feigenberg et al., 2013; Field et al., 2015) and in accessing wage employment. Some global evidence suggests that coupling skills interventions with social network-building for women can improve outcomes through social reinforcement (Austrian and Muthengi, 2014; Chong et al., 2014; Field et al., 2015).

In the labor market, the process of matching employers to workers suffers from imperfect information on both sides. In the presence of ineffective judicial systems or restrictive regulations, hiring employees comes with an additional risk. Employers struggling to judge the quality of a prospective worker tend to rely on social networks and word of mouth to identify employees, and may discriminate against youth in the absence of reliable mechanisms to assess their abilities. Youth, particularly poor and vulnerable youth, have inadequate networks and do not hear about or are not referred to the few job opportunities that exist. These challenges are further complicated in Sub-Saharan Africa where wage employment is not the norm and young people often have little exposure to the world of work, exacerbating the disadvantage of poor networks.

Young women may experience network constraints more acutely than young men if they experience less exposure to the workplace and employers, more discrimination, and have fewer role models and smaller networks due to limited mobility. Limited research has examined whether and how young women’s networks differ empirically from young men’s and adult women’s, and how those networks enhance or diminish job prospects.<sup>10</sup> For example, Magruder (2010) demonstrates that fathers in South Africa serve as useful network connections for sons during the job search process, but not for daughters. A survey of employers in Zambia found that 15.1 percent of employers reported a preference for hiring men for professional positions, and 23.5 percent reported the same for production positions (Chigunta et al., 2013). Evidence from Malawi demonstrates that men are systematically less likely to refer women for jobs, despite the availability of qualified women in their networks (Beaman et al., 2013).

Discrimination and network disparities may also partially explain why there is a larger percentage of working men “work for someone else” compared to working women (Filmer and Fox, 2014). Discrimination, whether overt or institutionalized, can diminish young women’s job prospects especially when they are unable to accurately signal their abilities in the formal labor market and employers rely on implicit judgments of their abilities. Finally, the gender of role models in women’s networks can also influence skill acquisition and occupational choice. A study from India finds that increasing the presence of women in leadership positions reduces the gender gap in education and improves young women’s career aspirations (Beaman et al., 2012). The type of female role model can also influence women’s interest in entering a high-return occupation, as detailed in Section 2.5 on occupational choice.

> 10 Family and kin networks in particular may exert more pressure on women to share resources than they do on men. While this constrains women’s ability to generate income and have control over earned income, there is no evidence on how this pressure influences labor market entry. Suggestive evidence comes from Grimm et al. (2013), who find that among entrepreneurs in West Africa, labor inputs to female enterprises were more affected by the proximity of family and kin, which they hypothesize was due to females’ responsibility to participate in non-business family activities.

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