Rolly Kapoor on Group Travel and Women's Job Search Behavior in India

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast where we examine academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and we are kicking off the 2024 job market series, where I speak with young scholars entering the academic job market about their latest research on India. 

Our first scholar in the series is Rolly Kapoor, who is a PhD candidate at the Department of Economics at University of California, Santa Cruz. Before this, she received a BA in Economics from Delhi University and an MSE in Economics from University College London. 

Her research focuses on issues related to gender, access and urban mobility in developing countries. We spoke about her job market paper titled, Together to Work? The Effect of Travel Buddies on Women’s Employment and Mobility in India, co-authored with Smit Gade. We talked about the difficulties women have in navigating urban areas, its effect on female labor force participation, the impact of safe travel on job market decisions, and much more.

For a full transcript of this conversation, including helpful links of all the references mentioned, click the link in the show notes or visit mercatus.org/podcasts.

Hi, Rolly. Welcome to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you here.

ROLLY KAPOOR: Thank you so much for having me. I’m quite excited about this.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m super excited about this because I have been one such woman in India, going to job interviews and going to university and traveling and navigating the lack of safety and how, generally, the public spaces in India are not very friendly to women, especially young women. I was so excited to read your paper. What you’re looking at is what kinds of interventions you can make for women commuting to job interviews. This is very important because in India, female labor force participation is shockingly low, often declining.

I found this RCT fascinating: You place women in one of three groups. One is a control group where they’re invited to job interviews individually—and this is in the manufacturing sector in the suburbs of Delhi. The second is you organize these women who are job candidates into peer groups, but you randomize them to attend job interviews on different days, so they’re a group, but they don’t go to the interview together. Then the third is your travel-buddy treatment or travel-buddy intervention, where these women are placed in a group that is invited to go to the job interviews together on the same day.

What you find is amazing. First of all, most women show up to these interviews with an adult no matter what setting they’re in, and the effect of being placed in the travel-buddy group, or intervention, is quite extraordinary on labor participation decisions. You find that inviting women together in groups to participate in these interviews as part of this travel-buddy program on the same date, as opposed to inviting them individually, increases the probability of women’s participation in interviews by 80 percent. I would not have expected that.

You also find that this travel-buddy treatment increased women’s probability of making job search trips. It increases that by 75 percent. They double the number of trips compared to the control group who are doing this alone. 

First of all, I love the experiment, but I also find the magnitude of the effect quite extraordinary. First, is this a good summary? Then can you walk me through what you were actually trying to do, and did you expect to find any of this?

Mobility Constraints for Women in India

KAPOOR: That’s a great summary of the paper, thank you for that. To answer the question of is this the kind of effect that I was expecting? There are two reasons why I would say yes. One is the first result that you said—one of the most fascinating results for me—that regardless of which group the women were coming from, almost all of them showed up with a companion. That’s exactly what we see. Also, as a girl growing up in India, that’s exactly what my experiences were. 

The idea for the study came from my own lived experiences in India. My parents were always hoping that I had someone to travel with, whether it was going to the college, whether it was going to work, whether it was just commuting, or going out with friends. It happened similarly with my sister. I haven’t worked much in India, but my sister is a working woman in India. Every time she went out, there was this whole entire coordination that they had to plan:  Who’s going to pick her up? Who’s going to drop her off? She’s going to be late, so how are we going to get her home? Is somebody coming with her or not?

This is something that women do. Women do face a lot of mobility constraints in India. There’s a lack of freedom. Women themselves have come up with ideas to overcome some of these challenges, one of which is to travel with other people, so you feel safe and less vulnerable. 

Also, there are norms in India where it’s not okay for women to step out alone. A lot of times, while doing fieldwork, we’ve had women say, “My husband said that people are going to say, ‘Why are you going alone? Where does she go all alone?’”

The entire intervention came about the point that there are mobility constraints and women have found a potential solution to this, which is traveling together or traveling with adults. There were two ideas to this. First, how does commuting together actually impact their labor force participation or job search in particular? Second, do women face challenges and commute together—because there is an additional layer of coordination that you need to do. Keeping these ideas in mind, I designed this intervention.

The Study: How Do Women Travel Together?

It started with the basic idea of how to enable women to travel together or to travel with companions? There are different ways to do this. One way could be to incentivize their family members, who are then more likely to say, “Yes, I’m picking you up, dropping you off.” Then what if there are 10 women from this neighborhood that are going. Why don’t they just go together? Because that’s what you see a lot in the manufacturing sector. You will literally see women holding hands going to work and holding hands coming back from their factories to their homes. That brought about the idea of the travel-buddy intervention. The rest of the experiment was designed around the travel-buddy intervention. 

Coming back to your question: Did I expect these kinds of results? I would say “yes,” because, like I said, we see this every day in our lives.

I did a pilot before this main experiment took place. It was not based in Delhi, NCR. It was based near Dehradun in Uttarakhand, where I find similar results, even bigger results, to some extent. It gave me the confidence to say, “Okay, this is really something that women do struggle with.” Then we partnered with Good Business Lab. They worked with Shahi. I pitched them this idea. They said, “Let’s get on board. Let’s do this.” I partnered with five Shahi factories in Faridabad and Noida, and we came up with the travel buddy intervention.

Then the control group was the exact opposite of inviting women together in groups, versus, on the same dates invite women individually. That allows us to see: Do women organize themselves? Are they able to find other women who are traveling? This helps me answer whether women face constraints. What if a woman almost always needs a companion, and she can find one? Then there’s no problem to solve. There’s nothing we can do here. I wanted to see: Is there a problem to solve, and is there a constraint? 

That’s what we find. Women want to travel with companions, but they do struggle finding companions, and that brings about that 80 percent change in job interview show up.

Background on Women’s Travel in India

RAJAGOPALAN: That was amazing to me. Everything you see, I can relate to in such a visceral way, because you basically described my entire life in Delhi. Even today. I am a grown woman. I’m no longer a child. I’m no longer going to college for the first time. This is not my first time on a commute, but when I go back to India and my parents’ house, I am constantly chaperoned wherever I go. The chaperone may be a family member, it may be a friend, it may be the family chauffeur because he’s the only person we trust, and we’re not so sure about other forms of public transport. Some of the things my parents are comfortable with is a metro because it’s got an all-women’s compartment. 

I can just relate to this so much, which is why I love this paper. One of the things I was thinking about, and maybe this is a little too related to my life, is that there are two parts going on: Your experiment is set in the context of something very specific, which is job interviews and decisions regarding labor force participation. Whereas the same problem applies, not just to job interviews, but if you’re trying to go and see your primary care health provider. It’s true when you’re trying to go to college because Girija Borker finds these massive costs that women take on to get a safer route.

KAPOOR: Just to give you an idea, I was reading Girija Borker’s paper where she has this one line where she says that there is a percentage of both men and women that travel with friends, but there is a higher percentage of women that travel with their family members. Then there is a lightbulb moment that just goes up and you go, “Yes.”

RAJAGOPALAN: This is it. 

KAPOOR: That is how this idea came from a line in the paper to what it is right here. 

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m so thrilled to hear that because I love that paper too, and that’s going to Delhi University, which is where I went as a young woman, so big shout out to Girija Borker and all the work she’s done here. 

One thing I want to parse out is that there is a difference between we want to go to university or recreation or something like that and we need a travel buddy to feel safer to go to university versus job interviews because there’s a chance that some of your results are also driven by the network effects of watching other women work and other women looking for work and other women willing to travel to work.

Like you said, there’s this issue with families thinking, “Is it okay to send someone to work? Is it okay for them to go alone to a job?” Safety seems like just a part of it. Can you tell us if there’s a way of separating these two effects, this effect of safety versus the network effects of watching other women hustle to get a job, repeatedly try at job interviews, and then actually land a job?

Social Norms and the Cognitive Load: Benefits of Women Traveling Together 

KAPOOR: I think I’ll start off by just talking qualitatively about why it’s different for the sample that I’m working with versus our experiences as women growing up in India. The women that we are targeting here are very immobile at baseline. There was a big chunk of women who hadn’t left their houses in the past week. 

I think for those women traveling with someone is not just about the need to feel safe, but it also takes away the cognitive load of organizing travel, which I felt when I was doing the fieldwork. 

There were cases when the women would say, “Oh, why are you giving us different dates? You should give us all same dates. We would be able to come together.” The whole cognitive load of trying to plan a trip from their house to a factory—they have to take rickshaws or buses because these are the women who can’t afford metros and many of areas where they live have no metro connectivity. For them, it’s not just about the safety, but being able to plan the commute because they have not been commuting or going out. That is different from our perspectives: I need someone to feel safer, but regardless I would go. So, in kind of separating out the effects.

There are two kind of peer effects happening. One is the meeting in itself, which is changing norms about women’s work to the idea that most of the women from this neighborhood are interested in working. You get this information; you go tell your family. It’s going to reduce the social costs of working, so you are likely to have family say, “Yes, you can go and work because so many women are working.” 

There is an amenity value of potentially having friends at work. There was this recent paper by Florian Grosset, who was on a job market last year, that found that people are willing to take jobs if people in their networks get one.

The other aspect of having a peer network is traveling together, which not only makes you feel safe, but also confident. You are more likely to travel if you have someone coming with you. Say, I have the cognitive load that I cannot figure out how to get to the factory, but there is another woman who can—there is that peer effect as well.

My idea was to separate these two peer effects. One regarding women’s work and one regarding commuting. To precisely do that, we created two intervention norms. We have the travel-buddy treatment where they are invited in groups but on the same dates, but then we have the peer-effect intervention as we call it, which is where we invite them in groups, keeping the different aspects of peer effects together for the second part, but we randomize the dates they get for the interviews so they can’t travel to the interviews together.

What that allows us to do is say that there’s another aspect, which is not about commuting to the interviews, but it’s about commuting daily to the job. These interventions are going to allow us to separate that out because you will potentially get women who are working at a factory close to you who you know.

Findings on Travel Buddies and Job Interview Attendance and Additional Positive Impacts 

These two interventions and the comparison of the means for both of them tell us about the effects of commuting together versus all these other mechanisms. 

What we find is that the travel-buddy treatment increased the interview show-up rate by 90 percent compared to the peer-effect group. That’s even more than what we find for the control group, which gets me to the second research question that I was interested in: What are the effects of women commuting together on the labor force? There is one group where we are suppressing them from commuting together and one group where we are enabling them to commute together. The differences are even larger compared to the control group.

RAJAGOPALAN: One of the other results that I find fascinating coming out of your paper is that even outside of that job interview that day, the travel-buddy treatment significantly increased women’s mobility, leading to an average of two more trips per week outside of their homes relative to the control group. This is a little bit crazy because these women oftentimes literally don’t leave their home even to go to the market or some other place. There are other family members who look after everything outside the home, and their domain is really within the home. 

First, I’m curious to know what all you found, how you interpret those results, and second, what are the downstream effects of something as simple as finding a travel buddy to go to the market, or a travel buddy to go visit a doctor, or something like that? It seems like quite a significant thing in these women’s lives.

KAPOOR: I saw different kinds of effects. Like you said, the first had to do with mobility. Not only are the women making more trips outside of their neighborhood, they are now making more job-search trips—so they’re looking for jobs. One of the most surprising results for me was that at baseline about 16 percent of women reported that they had looked for the jobs in the last two weeks.

Just to remind you, these are the women we enrolled because they said that they were interested in working. Technically what you would expect is that women who are interested in working would be looking for jobs, but the majority of them were not looking for jobs. What happened after the intervention is that it substantially doubles the amount of women that look for jobs now. 

Compared to the control group, we had an 11-percentage-point increase in women reporting to have made a job-search trip in the six weeks following our assigning them the interview dates versus the endline surveys that we did with them. It doubled the number of job search trips they made.

One more interesting result was that most of these trips were made with women from their neighborhood. They’re holding onto this idea that they were introduced to initially: “Hey, I know we do this, but maybe we can do this together as well.”

Maybe that experience of traveling to the interview together changed something in their behavior where they seek out their travel buddies time and again to travel outside of work. It translates to trips beyond the job search to general trips like visiting the market, going to the temples, and things like that. 

The other effect that I found was on their networks within the neighborhood, with women who are close to where they’re living. We had similar effects around the peer effect, which strengthens the design that we have because if the peer effect was not doing what it was supposed to be doing, we would find different effects in the networks that they formed. We do find that the networks have strengthened. Women are more likely to discuss their household issues, their serious issues, with each other.

“Travel buddy” had a significant lead. They know one more woman, which is more than the peer effect, and is natural because now that you’ve had this experience of traveling together you are more likely to keep in touch, you’re more likely to stay friends rather than with a woman you met at a meeting for five minutes. Those were the other effects that I found. 

Implications for Further Research on Women’s Mobility Patterns

RAJAGOPALAN: Here I have a question. Do you have a sense of whether this kind of intervention can have a long-term impact? I don’t just mean, “Are these women going to be friends with each other for a long time?” That’s hard to contrive in an experiment. But more that are women who have been subject to this kind of a treatment effect once more likely to find women in their neighborhood for other tasks—to go drop off or pick up kids at school or to go to the marketplace? Does this become part of their life in the long run and does their overall mobility increase, or do you think these interventions will necessarily be short term and very specific to the original aspect of life or decision-making that you introduced them to, which is basically traveling to job interviews together?

KAPOOR: I don’t know about the long term. I do find some short-term effects—that women continue to travel with these women outside of their neighborhoods, other than for the job search trips. I cannot say, based on the experiment that I did, whether there are going to be long-term effects because we followed up with them six weeks later, and we do not have any plans of following up or funds to follow up with them anymore. 

My intuition is that it could go either way, and my reasoning for saying there are going to be long-term effects, is that you realize how convenient and easy it is for you [to travel]. Now you don’t face the same constraints so it might become a part of your life. 

It might also have a different effect because now that you’re going out more, you feel more confident, and you’re more likely to be able to go out there by yourself. You might transition out of needing someone to travel with you to, say, a market. You might still want to do it when you’re taking the bus, or you are traveling long distances. You might transition out of doing this because now that you are traveling more and are more mobile, you know how to get around. 

I think it could go honestly either way, but it’s an interesting point to see in future research: How does this actually change women’s mobility patterns in the long run? It’s fascinating how women travel in developing countries, especially countries like India, the mental math we have to do every time we step out of the house. I think it’s important to understand what’s really going on with women’s mobility there.

Traveling for Work or Working from Home

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Another curious finding in your paper is that the travel-buddy treatment led to a 68 percent increase for women’s at-home employment and a 12 percent increase in their outside employment. I found that really odd. That’s not what I was expecting to find. I would have thought that these women who are willing to work outside might already be working at home.

Then the even more curious thing that you find is that for the peer-effect intervention, there is a 45 percent increase in outside employment but only a 15 percent increase in at-home employment. Did you also find this to be counterintuitive to your original hunch or intuition? What is a good way to think about this particular result?

KAPOOR: Yes, I did find it going against what I expected. There’s a kind of substitution. The effects mirror one another—working at home versus outside. I don’t have the data where I can say why is this happening or explain it, but I have two hunches here. 

The first hunch is that during the course of this project, there is a lot more that I now understand about women’s labor force participation in India and the constraints they [women] face. Because I was working with a firm for this project, I got insight from the firm side. 

We witnessed them during this interview process that they were doing with the factories, and there were instances where women came to the factory floor and saw, “This is not the work that I want.” There were cases where women left the trials that they do at the factories— to see the skills —they left them in the middle because they realized that this is something they don’t want to do for the rest of the five hours every day.

My first hunch is that it revealed something about the interview process, about the job to the women, is that they shifted away from wanting to work outside. The travel-buddy women do show up more for the interview. They are exposed to this information more than the peer-effect women or the control group. I think that is one of the areas where there’s possibly this shift because you now think you do not want to do this. You go back to, say, at-home employment.

Diverse Reactions to Travel Interventions

RAJAGOPALAN: I guess what you’re saying is, there’s something about the interview process which reveals to these women that we like working. We want to do something. We see other women working, but this is not the ideal setting for us. Or this entire hassle of traveling an hour a day to then work six or seven hours a day is not worth it. That I buy, but that still doesn’t explain why for the peer-effect intervention, you see the opposite trend almost. That doesn’t quite add up to me then.

KAPOOR: I think it also has to do with the women. I do think the kind of women that do show up at the interviews are the women on the margin. For the women who will never work, the travel-buddy intervention doesn’t do anything for them. You’ve never stepped out of the house, and you’re not willing to do it now. Maybe people in your family are not working. Because of the intervention, the marginal women are more likely to work now. 

For the peer-effect intervention, the women who are not working, we do not solve any constraint for them. What I feel happens with the peer-effect women is they just keep looking for jobs because somehow, we have disadvantaged them in commuting together more than the control group. 

There’s still some aspect of the control group coming in and traveling. 63 percent of women from the control group traveled with study participants. That’s a big thing. I feel like something along these lines is happening, but again, this is all very conjectural. I have no evidence backing these hypotheses that I have, but I do agree these are very surprising findings for the study.

Policy Implications for Supporting Women’s Travel 

RAJAGOPALAN: What does all this mean for us? Just to step away and to think of the bigger picture. Now I understand that these results are specific to the experiment, they’re not generalizable, but you’ve also studied this from different angles. You’ve spoken to all these women. What is your intuition about the policy implications of this? Does this mean we need more gendered buses or compartments in metros?

Do we need an app which is just for women, like an Uber for women where the drivers will be women, the travelers will be women?Should we be thinking about giving travel subsidies to women, which is, by the way, a whole part of your paper we haven’t talked about yet that we can talk about. Some states make public bus travel free for women. What does this mean for us if someone asked you to design policy around it?

KAPOOR: The different solutions or different policies that you mentioned, I have something to say about one or the other, but I think in general if I were to design a policy, I think it goes as simple as that for a lot of the hiring that takes place in these factories or in sectors like these where they have to hire women in groups, and often the outreach or mobilizing they do is putting up posters or asking the workers they know to refer people to working. I think a direct policy implication is changing these hiring policies or the mobilization of these workers by providing this information in groups. 

It could further be done with other policies like in S. Anukriti’s “Bring a Friend” paper. It’s along the same lines. Of course, you can’t do a group meeting about family planning. There is also this paper by Erica Field and others which is about inviting women together for training programs. If you do the mobilization for a lot of these policy programs and groups, it might increase the take-up of it because now you’re relieving one of the key issues, which is the mobility constraints that women face. I think that’s a big direct policy implication. 

Then having the buses, the free buses, I think the issue there is, if you’re in a gender-segregated space, the safety concerns go away. Then maybe you do not need to travel with a woman or with a family member to feel safe. But I think there are a lot of last-mile connectivity issues. You need someone to be with you for the metro station. If it’s too far from your house, you might do that.

I think it needs to be much more nuanced. We have free buses in Delhi, because it’s free for women but there are still men there. It still exposes women to these safety issues and constraints. Like we saw, the issue with women traveling together is that they do not have peers to travel with, or they face constraints in organizing this group travel. Providing free buses will probably not help them because the constraint is not so much the cost, but more that you do not have someone to travel with, and having a free bus does not give you someone to travel with.

Then on the other end that you were talking about travel subsidies—I think even travel subsidies need to be much more nuanced. I think that’s my next research agenda to go towards which is there can be different travel subsidies. If the issue is the cost, if you want to travel in an Uber, and that’s a safe mode of transport for you, then yes, providing you money for Uber will lift that constraint. 

Let’s say, I give you 20 rupees or 30 rupees, which is enough to travel on shared transport, but you’re still sharing that space with strangers? In my surveys, I find a majority of women are not willing to do so. They don’t want to use shared autos, but when they’re traveling in groups, they are able to do so because now there are these four women who are in a shared order so there is no space for anybody else. 

In those cases, travel subsidies help you, but if you do not have those women to go with, and if I give you a subsidy for a shared auto, it’s not going to do anything for you. But if I give you money for a private auto, it might do something for you, because now you don’t need them. 

There’s also a caveat to it, because if it’s not about safety, but about norms and your cognitive load—you feel like you want someone to be with you or you don’t know how you’ll commute—then in that case, travel subsidies may not do enough for you. Because again, your need for traveling with someone is not because of safety or travel costs, it’s because of other intrapersonal issues and constraints.

Other Research Projects on Women and Labor

RAJAGOPALAN: You have a couple of other papers on this exactly. One is trying to understand a little bit more nuance on job-search behavior, the differences between genders, and the other is on the Delhi metro system and how women are navigating mass public transit for employment. Can you talk a little bit about those two papers, if you’ve gotten some results, and what you find, and so on?

KAPOOR: For the paper on job searches, the pilot is ongoing on the field.

RAJAGOPALAN: This is the paper with Monica Shandal and David Sungho Park.

KAPOOR: Yes. They’re both fellow UCSC grad students. David has graduated, but Monica is still at UCSC. We did a lot of scoping work for this project, and while I was doing this project, the idea that’s quite fascinating is that women say they want to work. They are interested in working. They say they do not face constraints, or they don’t face pushback from their families when it comes to work, but they’re not looking for jobs. A simple question is, why?

There is an aspect of mobility constraints that we do explore in this current paper, but there are other aspects to it, too. A lot of times during fieldwork, women would say, “We just don’t know where to go,” and these were the cases where the factories were 500 meters away from their houses. The informational constraints women face are quite splendid. 

We also found that there are very distinct and different job search behaviors between men and women. We found that men search for longer and women do not search as much as men do, but one might argue, “What if women are finding jobs more quickly than men?” That’s one thing that we want to look at. Is it because women are finding jobs quickly.

The second thing we find is that 70 percent of men said, “Oh, we found the job we were looking for,” whereas only 30 or 25 percent of women say so. The point is that women are stopping their search early. They are not finding the job that they wanted. What’s driving these behaviors? Is this because they have low reservation wages, or they have unrealistic views about wages or about the kind of jobs there are. Are women going out and saying, “This is not the kind of job I want. I don’t want to be working outside.” Is something like this happening? 

This project is designed to understand the different hypotheses we have that might explain the differences in job-search behavior between men and women. Some of the things that we look at are the pessimistic wage distributions. We look at information constraints that women face. There is a lot of work that has been done that shows that employers’ gender constraints are one of the biggest reasons why women do not work well or do not earn well.

RAJAGOPALAN: Basically, you don’t want a supervisor of a different gender.

KAPOOR: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: You are a little uncomfortable in that position.

KAPOOR: Also, a lot of jobs have these specific requirements: male only, women only. That’s the idea we’re trying to explore with that project, which is to understand if women even know about the jobs that are available outside. Do they only look for very hyperlocal job markets? Is that what they target? Do they not go beyond? Things like that. 

In the other paper that I have with Moumita Das on the Delhi metro, we were looking at how the staggered opening of daily metro stations affected women’s employment in the enterprises that were near the stations. We use an economic census, and we find that there was a 15-20 percentage point increase in enterprises hiring more female workers with respect to or the ratio of female workers to male workers went up in enterprises near those stations. 

Now there are issues regarding identification for that project because we do not have a panel, we have an economic census. We create a panel data set for the census town and village level, but we do not actually observe the firms. We don’t know if there are more firms coming in who are hiring more women or if the current existing firms have changed their hiring patterns. That project looks at that.

RAJAGOPALAN: I understand why you need to have an identification strategy to separate those two, but whether they are self-selecting those locations or whether they were always there and the metro has exogenously solved it for them, that’s a piece of news that makes me quite happy: That if you place enterprises close to safe transport or often times where it might be easier to take safe transport closer to where the enterprises are, that’s going to lead to an uptick in female labor force participation. I think there is a relatively cheap policy intervention that we can think about.

KAPOOR: There are a lot of things that you can do immediately to help improve women’s mobility. I think there definitely needs to be a big revamping that changes a lot of these things structurally, but as researchers, we can focus on some of the practical ways to do it.

RAJAGOPALAN: I think this is the way to do it, one paper at a time. Your entire research agenda looks super fascinating. Thanks so much for this. I’m looking forward to reading more of your work.

KAPOOR: Thank you. Thank you so much.