UMass Economist Ina Ganguli Addresses World Bank Middle East and North Africa Seminar Series
Ina Ganguli, professor of economics and director of the UMass Computational Social Science Institute, presented a talk on the low rates of female participation in the workforce in conservative societies to the World Bank’s Office of the Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa region on Sept. 21, as part of a seminar series. Ganguli is corresponding author of a paper that explores the labor market aspirations of women in Saudi Arabia.
“Things are changing very rapidly.” Ganguli says. “This paper is a way to try to understand what’s going on in the Saudi labor market, particularly looking at female labor force participation.”
Using a survey of about 1,000 female university students in Saudi Arabia conducted in 2018, Ganguli and her co-authors show that females attending college in the kingdom appear to have much higher expectations of future employment than older generations of women in the workforce. They also show that learning about peers’ aspirations leads to higher expectations of future employment among female students — apparently the result of students underestimating the aspirations of their peers.
In addition, the research indicates that parents’ expectations do not appear to hinder their daughters’ employment aspirations but can help to shape them. Parental influence can steer women in the direction of working in education and the public sector, to jobs that are typically more socially acceptable in Saudi Arabia given that they are often segregated by gender.
The results signal an opportunity to inform women’s decisions about career paths by providing information about occupations in other fields and the pace of social change to female students and their parents.
“Interventions that can persuade families that careers outside of education and the public sector are socially acceptable and can lead to higher earnings are likely to be effective,” the paper concludes.
Ganguli says there are many areas ripe for future research, particularly related to parents’ beliefs about their daughters’ participation in the labor force and who is ultimately making decisions about what type of employment they pursue.