# **1. Introduction**

Women’s labor market participation has remained stubbornly flat or is even declining in some parts of the world. In such countries, low female employment presents a persistent policy challenge. Although the prevalent U-shape hypothesis posits that women’s work first declines and then increases with economic development (Goldin, 1995, among many others), this hypothesis has mixed empirical support (Gaddis & Klasen, 2014; Verme, 2015). In fact, substantial heterogeneity in women’s work across countries suggests that economic growth is but one of many factors that explain female labor force participation. Other factors, such as initial economic structure and social norms also are posited to play a major role in explaining women’s persistently low economic participation (Boserup, 1970 <mark>; Heath & Jayachandran, 2017;</mark> Klasen, 2019). These issues influence women’s willingness and ability to work outside the home, and they may limit women’s pursuit of wage work and constrain their entrepreneurial choices (Jayachandran, 2021; Jayachandran, 2015; Field et al., 2021).

Many questions remain regarding what types of employment opportunities and interventions draw women into the labor force, especially in settings with persistently low levels of participation. Recent examples of such policies include wage subsidies for female graduates in Jordan, which led to short-term increases in employment that faded after the subsidy expired (Groh et al., 2016). Other interventions have addressed social norms by directly shifting men’s attitudes about women working by providing them with information to correct their misperception of their peers’ disapproval of female employment in Saudi Arabia <mark>(Bursztyn et al.,</mark> 2020) and changing family attitudes about women working in India (Dean & Jayachandran, 2019; McKelway, 2023). Alternatively, in Tunisia efforts were successfully made to foster women’s self-employment opportunities at home, since social norms limit women’s physical mobility (Gazeaud et al., 2022).

In this study, we leveraged a unique intervention in urban Djibouti that randomized access to a short-term and targeted employment opportunity in the form of public works for women in an economically and socially constrained environment. This intervention was designed to address two research questions. First, we study the short-term effects of this job offer on unskilled women with limited labor market ties and foundational social constraints. Second, we ask whether this short-term employment opportunity induced them to stay in the labor force after the program ended. Public works participation may not only provide short-term income, but also serve as a gateway to future employment (Ho et al., 2024), so we also look at the intervention’s contemporaneous effects and medium-term impacts to document whether it ultimately increases labor force participation.

Drawing on data on the labor supply of the female beneficiaries, their husbands, and other adult household members, we measure the labor supply response to the short-term public works offer. We also consider how the job offer and uptake affects women’s decision-making power, time use, and intra-household resource allocation decisions, as well as their and their 2