How do safety concerns shape women’s opportunities in developing countries?

Women constantly face the possibility of becoming victims of sexual assault in public spaces and at work. This may deter them from pursuing better education and career opportunities. Ensuring that women are secure helps to guarantee that they will have better futures.

The rape and murder of a trainee doctor as she rested in a seminar room after a late-night shift highlights the dangers that women face at work. This incident, which took place on 9 August 2024 in Kolkata, is not the first of its kind: it follows the harrowing rape and murder of a young student on a bus in New Delhi in December 2012.

Empirical research shows that the dangers that women face in public spaces and at work can influence their decisions on where to study, which job to take up and whether to work at all.

Figure 1: Female participation rate, 15-64

Source: World Bank

Unfortunately, by choosing safer options, women often end up with a lower-quality education, a lower-paying job or no job at all. These decisions relegate women to lifetimes of severely reduced financial independence.

Over the long term, this has negative implications for their own and their children’s prospects. The trend of women being misallocated away from work for which they have an innate talent also has implications for the broader economy. Aggregate productivity and, in turn, long-run growth of the economy are lower than they could be if women were able to pursue high-quality education and maximise their career opportunities (Hsieh et al, 2019).

Safety in public spaces: why is it important?

Consider first the safety of women in public spaces. One piece of research looked at the choices on where to study made by male and female students, and the impact of safety considerations on their decisions.

The study analysed data collected in 2016 from 3,800 male and female students who had been admitted to Delhi University, which is made up of 77 colleges spread across the city. This work showed that women students are more likely than their male peers to factor safety into decisions about their education.

Specifically, male students are willing to choose a college in the top 30% of the quality distribution rather than the top 20% for a travel route perceived to be safer (by one standard deviation, equivalent to a 3.1% decrease in the rapes reported annually). In contrast, women students are willing to choose a college in the bottom half of the quality distribution over a college in the top 20% for the same change in perceived route safety.

The author of the study estimates that ‘women are willing to incur an additional expense of 17,500 Indian rupees (INR) ($250) per year to travel by a route that is one standard deviation safer. This is a significant sum of money, double the average annual tuition in Delhi University and 7% of the average annual per capita income in Delhi’ (Borker, 2021).

The perception of safety in public spaces also affects women’s decisions on whether to work at all. Analysis of data collected as part of the 2005 India Human Development Survey finds that urban Indian women are far less likely to seek employment outside their homes in neighbourhoods where the self-reported level of sexual harassment against women is high (Chakraborty et al, 2018).

Figure 2: Proportion of women subjected to physical and/or sexual violence in the last 12 months, modelled estimate

Source: World Bank

Media reporting of sexual assault incidents, such as those in Kolkata and New Delhi, may also have an impact on women’s decisions to work. An unintended consequence of such reporting is that it makes the extreme consequences of becoming a victim of violence salient for women and can deter them from leaving their homes to work due to fear.

More recent research explores this further by combining data on decisions to seek employment outside the home by urban men and women respondents to the Indian National Sample Surveys between 2009 and 2012, with media reports of sexual and physical assaults that took place in the area where respondents live (Siddique, 2022).

This work finds that greater media reporting of sexual assaults in a local area consistently reduces the probability that women living there are employed outside their home.

In contrast, there is no effect of physical (non-sexual) assaults in a local area on women’s employment. Nor does reporting of sexual assaults in a local area have an effect on men’s employment.

What’s more, the negative effect of media-reported sexual assaults on women’s work decisions is stronger among younger women. This could either be because the stigma costs of being a victim are higher for younger women in India compared with older generations, or because sexual assault victims are just far more likely to be younger women.

Analysis of data on local crimes against women reported to the police (rapes, assaults and insults) shows that women are less likely to work when there is higher media reporting of sexual assaults even when the underlying probability of becoming a victim of violence in their local area remains unchanged. This suggests a behavioural effect driven by fear.

How can women’s safety in public spaces be improved?

A number of recent experimentally-tested interventions in different developing countries provide some answers on how women’s safety in public spaces may be improved.

In one intervention, providing women-only transport that is considered safe and socially acceptable in Lahore, Pakistan has a large and positive impact on job search behaviour (Field and Vyborny, 2022).

In a different context (in Dhaka, Bangladesh), providing women with a safe transport option at the end of a night shift job increases their chances of working (Buchmann et al, 2023). The researchers on this study also find that employers become more likely to hire women workers when the safe transport option is available. In this case, employers behave as paternalistic discriminators, hiring more women as their perception of the job cost to those workers decreases.

A third study finds that visible police patrols to target sexual harassment in public spaces led to a reduction in severe sexual harassment by as much as 27% in the city of Hyderabad, India (Amaral et al, 2023).

Safety at work: why is it important and how can it be improved?

Safety at work also plays an important role in shaping women’s futures. Unfortunately, there is little empirical research on workplace sexual harassment in developing countries. This is due in part to a lack of good quality data.

Research using data from developed countries indicates that workplace sexual harassment relegates women to low-paying jobs. One recent study finds that women workers in Sweden are more likely to face workplace sexual harassment when they are in high-paid male-dominated jobs rather than low-paid female-dominated jobs (Folke and Rickne, 2022).

Workplace sexual harassment increases wage inequality between men and women by deterring women from applying for high-paid male-dominated jobs and by inducing women who are victims of harassment to switch into low-paid female-dominated jobs. In other words, workplace sexual harassment increases gender wage inequality by increasing gender segregation.

Another study uses data from police reports in Finland to identify instances of violence between colleagues (Adams-Prassl et al, 2024). As in the Swedish study, the researchers find that violence by a male perpetrator against a female victim causes a decline in the proportion of women at a firm. This happens both as fewer new women are hired at the firm and as existing employees who are women leave.

Importantly, the gender composition of a firm’s management plays a key role. While firms managed by men lose women who are victims, firms that are managed by women are less likely to retain male perpetrators. An implication is that promoting women into management positions is likely to improve a firm’s workplace environment for all women employees.

While the Kolkata incident highlights the dangers that women continue to face in public spaces and at work, there is also growing evidence on how to tackle these dangers and to improve women’s safety in different settings. Given the importance of safety and security in shaping women’s future, the time to act is now.