#### Box 5.  Summary and ways forward: Earnings and decision making

- Particularly in contexts where seasonal/irregular wage employment is common, using community data on average wages for men and women, across more disaggregated categories/sectors of employment, can help complement individual-level data on wage/salary earnings — and enhance an understanding of expected labor market returns.

- Within household farms/businesses, given difficulties in valuing individual family members’ labor contributions to household income, decision-making questions over earnings and management of operations can be helpful. Reported decision-making roles, however, may not be consistent across different household members, and trying to ensure the same respondents across modules is important (for example, across labor and non-farm enterprise modules). Asking about contributing family workers’ decision-making roles is also important for policies on rural women.

# V.   Rural transition and barriers to economic mobility

Rural economies are in transition around the world, although country experiences vary in the pace of growth. In some countries, rural women have benefited from improved access to improved inputs and technology, as well as greater access to labor and output markets and accelerated growth in production stemming from agricultural commercialization (see IFC, 2016 for case studies from Bangladesh and Indonesia). However, rural women have been left out in many other cases. This section discusses areas of data collection needed to better understand, for policy making, how (a) rural women’s employment is affected by structural changes occurring in rural economies and (b) factors affecting their ability to take advantage of new economic opportunities.

## Additional features of women’s employment amid rural transitions

### _Migration_

Rapid out-migration to urban areas has significant implications for rural women. Rural women often face greater barriers to migrating for work, but nonetheless find their work and time allocation are affected when other male household members do so. Mu and van de Walle (2011) and Slavchevska et al (2016), for example, discuss how rapid economic development and rural-urban migration led to lower engagement in paid work and greater on-farm work for women who remained in rural areas, but not for men. And when rural women do migrate, they are much more likely to be engaged in vulnerable, informal forms of work (ILO, 2018a).

Additional individual-level questions on migrants’ employment outcomes, including place and date of migration, would help shed light on how economic development is associated with work-related migration and outcomes of remaining household members, including women. Among the LSMS-ISA, currently only the 2015-16 Ethiopia survey asks individual-level questions on migrants spanning these topics. The 201314 Uganda LSMS-ISA asks on the second visit to the household whether any member from the roster has left, reasons why (economic/education/marriage/conflict), and where (region of the country, or abroad) they went. The question on locality of migration, if within the country, is asked at the district level. Having a similar, consistent set of questions across surveys and survey rounds is valuable in cross-country comparisons, as well as the longer-term effects of migration in these areas.

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