Promoting the economic empowerment of women requires more than just helping them get a foot in the door and hoping for the best. We need women to remain in the workplace, to thrive in their work environments, job descriptions and careers, and to derive the self-efficacy and emotional fulfillment that comes from work. To achieve this, we need to recognize that few workplaces are gender neutral. Instead, they harbor norms and protocols that accommodate male preferences and emotional needs, while neglecting those of women. This bias will push women out or undermine their success. Unfortunately, we feel that the international development agenda has not paid sufficient attention to the importance of female workplace retention or the emotional toil that mismatched norms can inflict. This research agenda hopes to address this failing by outlining ways we can identify, understand, and correct norms and patterns that make it difficult for women to continue working. We feel that this is particularly important in many workplaces of the Global South, where norms prevail over formal procedures, and it will become more relevant as businesses in LICs formalize and establish organizational rules.

Data-driven policy-making is the most effective way to alleviate poverty and improve human welfare. However, these policies are only as good as the data they are based on, and it appears that much of this data is systematically biased against women. This poses a crucial problem not just for policy design, but for the practice of science itself. Unfortunately, resolving this gendered research gap has remained a low priority in science, and many researchers treat it as an extraneous nuisance to their work. But women represent half of the world, so any effective and accurate scientific contribution must prioritize understanding and incorporating their experiences into the research process. Otherwise, we risk reinforcing a “world designed for men.” This research agenda outlines questions and topics to help us improve our understanding of gender bias in the research process.

The Busara Center for Behavioral Economics is an advisory and research organization focused on the evaluation and implementation of behavioral, economic, and social interventions in the Global South. Busara’s mission involves the application of rigorous research methods and evaluation tools to enable partners to improve program design, assess existing interventions, and optimize internal processes. Busara was founded in 2013 and has active operations in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda and India. To enhance our ability to conduct rapid behavioral experiments and develop quick insights, we have constructed an exhaustive panel that can be easily drawn from. Our primary sampling pool encompasses respondents from across Kenya, but we place a particular emphasis on low-income residents in Nairobi. We are also constructing comparable sampling frames in low-income areas of Lagos, Nigeria and New Delhi, India.A key question for research is the representativeness of the experimental sample. To better understand the generalizability and characteristics of Busara’s sampling pool, we analyzed its comparability to the 2016 Integrated Household Budget Survey (IHBS), a nationally-representative survey prepared by the Kenyan National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS). Given Busara’s emphasis on poverty alleviation, our sample is expected to lean towards a low-income demographic. Appendix available upon request.