Women Disrupting the Workplace: Employer Attitudes Against Hiring Women in South Asia

Afra R. Chowdhury, Asif Islam and Aphichoke Kotikula

Review of Development Economics, 2026, vol. 30, issue 4, 2547-2564

Abstract: This study explores the prevalence of employer attitudes towards women workers and whether such attitudes influence women employment in South Asia. The study leverages firm‐level data with a survey instrument that included questions on employer perceptions of hiring women. It investigates whether employers' belief that hiring women could cause disruption in the working environment is associated with lower women employment. Using data for about 11,000 firms surveyed between 2012 and 2013 across five South Asian countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, the study finds that 30% of firms perceive women workers as disruptive to the working environment. Firms that perceive female workers as disruptive to the working environment are negatively associated with women employment. The link between employer perception of women disrupting the work environment and firm performance is less robust and challenging to identify, although when the attitudes are captured at a more aggregate level, some negative associations are uncovered.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/rode.70126

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:rdevec:v:30:y:2026:i:4:p:2547-2564

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1363-6669

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Development Economics is currently edited by E. Kwan Choi

More articles in Review of Development Economics from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().