Unlocking women's workforce potential: Early insights from India

Most Indian women never work for pay. Can career guidance at school facilitate their career choices and motivate more women to join the labour force?

While in many countries, women stop working temporarily after giving birth, in India, the vast majority of women never start working at all. The number of Indian women in the workforce has been declining for decades and has been particularly low in urban areas.

Many factors converge to explain the low numbers, but rigid gender norms are one of the main obstacles to low participation in the labour force, as well as stereotypical careers and gender-based occupational segregation for the ones who actively work for pay. Research shows that career guidance can have a positive impact, but the bulk of studies has been done in developed countries.

In the project “Unlocking Young Women’s Minds: The Impact of a Low-cost Career Guidance Program,” Ankush Asri and Viola Asri from CMI and the University of Konstanz, jointly with Anke Hoeffler from the University of Konstanz, study the impacts of a career exploration program in India. Their study involves over 5000 students, the majority of them girls, in the final grade of 45 secondary schools in a large urban area in Northern India. And their findings are good news for this kind of low-cost intervention. After participating in a 10-hour career exploration programme during school hours, students are more likely to know their career objectives, share them with family members around them, and, most importantly, pursue taking competitive entrance exams for access to further education at universities and technical institutes.

Elaborate yet low cost
The team of researchers collaborated closely with local school authorities and a local NGO in conducting the study. The program consisted of 15 career guidance sessions, and each session lasted for 45 minutes. The sessions were led by what the researchers call “relatable facilitators” - of the same gender as the participating students, from similar communities, and a few years older than the students pursuing tertiary education for their own careers. The students accessed online materials through a virtual learning platform using tablets provided during the sessions, providing information on the variety of career paths, and were invited to be part of WhatsApp groups for further exchanges among students and with the facilitator.

During these sessions, the facilitators encouraged students to consider their strengths and interests, take barriers into account, and set realistic goals when planning their career path.

-This particular kind of career guidance programme is low cost as it is implemented in the classroom and with students in groups, but still intensive given the number of sessions and the quality of interactions with the facilitators, says Ankush Asri from CMI as co-principal investigator of UNLOCK.

Promising results
So far, the researchers have seen promising results. Students from schools where the program was implemented are about 10% more likely to plan to take an entrance exam in the future and 17% to consider their interests when choosing a desired occupation than students from schools where the program was not implemented.

When explaining the positive results, Asri points to two specific factors that have been of great importance. The most important factor has been that the career exploration program provides important information to students that they lacked before. Another factor is that the facilitators act as role models for the younger students.

Although the short-term results are promising, the researchers underscore that the findings are based on self-reporting and that it remains to be seen how the career guidance programme will affect the students’ lives in the future. The team recently completed a follow-up survey to see what the students actually ended up doing after receiving the career guidance programme.

-If the positive impacts on students’ plans and intentions translate into actions’, the career exploration program could become a valuable component of the school curriculum for the final years of secondary school. In the future, it could then be implemented in more and more schools in urban areas, addressing the lack of information that students face and encouraging especially young women to pursue their career objectives, concludes Viola Asri from CMI as co-principal investigator of UNLOCK.

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG – German Research Foundation) under Germany‘s Excellence Strategy – EXC-2035/1 – 390681379 and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.