Lost in Transition: Organizational Practices and Formal
Employment of Women in India
Aruna Ranganathan
∗
December 24, 2015
Abstract
This paper develops and empirically evaluates a theory explaining women’s
persistently low labor force participation in developing economies. I argue that local organizational practices affect labor force participation by influencing whether
first-time women workers successfully transition into formal employment. I examine the effect of one organizational practice, the assignment of different trainers
to women joining a large garment factory in India, on whether the women sustain their employment. Using a combination of archival, survey and ethnographic
data and exogenous variation in trainer assignment, I find that women assigned to
experienced trainers are 20% more likely to remain employed after three months
of entering the workforce than women assigned to inexperienced trainers. I show
that experienced trainers impact women’s transition into formal employment not
by imparting job-related skills or organizational identification, but by inculcating “work readiness” skills needed to survive at work including self-presentation,
interpersonal communication, work-life separation and self-reliance. This paper
contributes to our understanding of female labor force participation in developing economies by problematizing women’s transition into formal employment,
illustrating the role of organizational practices and uncovering the mechanism of
“work readiness” affecting women’s transition to formal work.
∗
Direct all correspondence to arunar@stanford.edu. This is a preliminary draft - please do not circulate.
Introduction
In spite of rising job opportunities in fast-growing developing countries, women’s participation in the labor force in many of these countries remains remarkably low (ILO 2012; IZA
2014; NYTimes 2015). For example, in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, the
female labor force participation rate1 in 2012 was 32%, almost 50 percentage points lower
than the male labor force participation rate (ILO 2015). It is crucial to understand the
drivers of this persistently low female labor participation in the developing world because
increased participation of women in the workforce results in better health and life outcomes
for women and their families, and is associated with superior firm performance and economic
growth. (Kabeer 2002; Goldin 2006).
In order to explain this persistently low female labor force participation rate in developing
countries, existing research has predominantly focused on factors that impede women’s entry
into the workforce such as traditional gender norms that discourage women from working
outside the home (Cha and Thebaud 2009; Thebaud 2010; Zhao and Wry 2011), lack of
supportive work/family institutional arrangements like childcare and part-time work opportunities (Thebaud 2015; Mair, Mart, and Ventresca 2012; Hughes and Jennings 2012;
Jennings, Eddleston, Jennings, and Sarathy 2015) and lack of access to capital to enter selfemployment (Singh and Dutt 2015; Zhao and Wry 2011; Cobb, Zhao, and Wry 2015; Doering
2013; Canales 2013). However, in this paper, I present a case where women in a developing
country seem to be overcoming these barriers and entering the labor force in large numbers.
While the women in this context are foraying into formal employment, they struggle to sustain this employment and within just three months of starting their jobs, 40% of the women
drop out of the labor force. This key observation suggests that instead of focusing only on
factors that impede women’s entry into the workforce, it is important to also investigate
factors that influence women’s transition into formal employment to help explain women’s
low labor force participation in developing countries. Therefore this article asks: under what
conditions do first-time women workers in developing economies successfully transition into
formal employment and why?
1
Labor force participation rate is defined as the proportion of the population ages 15 and older that is
economically active, supplying labor for the production of goods and services.
2
While the current literature on the employment of women in developing economies gives
us little sense of the factors influencing women’s transition into formal employment, a disparate body of research in organizational theory offers some hints. This research asserts
that conditions within organizations, in particular organizational practices and procedures,
significantly affect employees’ career transitions. For example, this research documents how
organizational practices affect employees’ transitions to more senior positions within their
organizations (Dobbin et al. 2015; Kalev et al. 2006; Kalev and Dobbin 2006; Castilla and
Benard 2010; Castilla 2008), transitions from full-time work to part-time work (Briscoe and
Kellogg 2011; Kellogg 2009; Briscoe 2006; Kelly and Kalev 2006; Kelly and Moen 2007) and
transitions to new organizations (McEvily et al. 2012; Burton and Beckman 2007; Dokko
et al. 2009; Azoulay et al. 2009). While this research demonstrates that organizational
practices play an important role in influencing employees’ career transitions once they enter the workforce, the literature is silent on the impact of organizational practices on employees’ transition into formal employment, which is arguably the first and foremost step
to establishing a career. Also, by focusing on white-collar settings in Western economies
where employees have, for the most part, already adapted to working life, this research has
missed the opportunity to study a fundamental career outcome in the context of developing economies, namely transition into formal employment, and illuminate new mechanisms
especially relevant in these settings. Therefore in this paper, I investigate the impact of
local organizational practices on women’s transition into formal employment and thereby,
bring insights from organizational theory to the study of female labor force participation in
developing economies.
To my knowledge, no prior studies have systematically studied the impact of within-firm
organizational practices on women’s transition into formal employment in the developing
world and investigated mechanisms for the same. First, it is hard to obtain access to firms
in developing countries because these firms are often part of complex supply chains and
are subject to intense public scrutiny (Bartley 2007; Locke et al. 2009). Without access
to these firms, it is impossible to secure fine-grained, longitudinal administrative records,
qualitative and survey data on individual employees from the time that they are hired to
the time that they might drop out of the workforce in order to measure employees’ exposure
to organizational practices as well as their transition into formal employment. Second, it
3
is difficult to causally identify the impact of organizational practices on women’s transition
into formal employment because women’s exposure to organizational practices may not be
random and could depend significantly on their background and skills. An ideal experiment
would require exogenous variation in how women joining an organization experience the same
organizational practice, which is hard to achieve in practice. These challenges pertaining to
data and causal identification pose significant barriers to the study of how employer practices
affect women’s transition into formal employment in developing countries.
In this paper, I am able to overcome these challenges and causally estimate the impact of
one organizational practice on women’s transition into formal employment within a single
organization to explain women’s low labor force participation. First, I obtained unrestricted
access to a large garment factory in India that employs women in large numbers. In this
factory, I used unique longitudinal personnel data over a two year period to track individual new joiners from the time they are hired to the point they might leave the factory. I
also supplemented this quantitative data with one year of ethnographic observation and a
detailed hand-collected survey. Second, I obtained causal identification by focusing on an
organizational practice that exogenously varies at the level of the new joiner. In particular,
I studied the organizational practice of assignment of trainers to women joining the factory,
exploiting the fact that new joiners in this setting are assigned to trainers of varying experience levels in a quasi-random manner. Using this combination of unique data along with
exogenous variation in trainer assignment, I show that assignment to experienced trainers
increases the likelihood of women sustaining formal employment by 20%, thus revealing that
organizational practices significantly impact women’s transition into formal employment in
developing countries.
I further investigate the mechanism underlying this large and positive effect of assignment to
experienced trainers on women’s transition into formal employment by testing three possible
explanations. Specifically, I test whether experienced trainers affect new joiners by imparting
a) superior job-related skills (Becker 1964), b) higher levels of organizational identification
(Van Maanen and Schein 1979), or c) better “work-readiness” skills, a novel mechanism
which I define as essential skills needed to survive at work including self-presentation, interpersonal communication, work-life separation and self-reliance. I find that experienced
trainers impact women’s transition into formal employment not by imparting job-related
4
skills or organizational identification, but by inculcating general “work readiness” skills and
thereby better preparing first-time women workers for the world of work. Further, my analyses reveal that the effect of assignment to experienced trainers diminishes for groups of
new joiners who are likely to already be “work-ready” such as female new joiners with prior
work experience, female new joiners referred to the firm and male new joiners, thus instilling
further confidence in the “work readiness” mechanism.
In what follows, I first review the relevant literature and describe my research setting and
data. I then present present my observational, survey and ethnographic results. I end by
discussing the implications of this research. In particular, I argue that this paper contributes
to our understanding of female labor force participation in developing economies by problematizing women’s transition into formal employment, illustrating the role of organizational
practices and uncovering the mechanism of “work readiness” affecting women’s transition to
formal work.
Employment of Women in Developing Countries
Women’s participation in the labor force is remarkably low in developing economies (ILO
2012; IZA 2014). Usually, economic growth in lower- and middle-income countries creates
more jobs for women and yet, despite strong economic growth of over 5 percent facilitated by
industrialization and globalization in regions like South Asia, female labor force participation
in these regions has stagnated. For example, female labor force participation rates in Sri
Lanka, a representative country in this group, have remained fairly stable, averaging around
33% between 2003 and 2012 (IZA 2014). The situation in India is even more stark. Despite
economic liberalization in the 1990s, female labor force participation rates fell from 34% in
1999 to 27% in 2012 (NYTimes 2015). Understanding the different factors that could be at
play in explaining these trends is crucial because exposure to formal and self-employment
has the potential to transform the lives of women and the organizations that they could serve
in developing countries. For example, entering the workforce offers women the opportunity
to become financially independent, delay marriage and fertility decisions and have more
bargaining power at home (Villarreal 2007; Kabeer 2002; Jensen 2012). Women’s entry
into the workforce could also have positive spillover effects on the health and educational
5
outcomes of their children (Luke and Munshi 2011; Heath and Mobarak 2012; Atkin 2009).
More broadly, studies of women’s employment in the Western world suggest that increased
labor force participation of women improves organizational performance as well (Dezso and
Ross 2012).
Barriers to Women’s Entry into the Workforce
Given the many benefits that accrue from the employment of women, it is crucial to understand the drivers of the persistently low female labor force participation in developing
economies. In order to explain this puzzle, existing research has predominantly focused on
factors that impede women’s entry into the workforce through formal or self-employment.
In particular, three different explanations have been studied - traditional gender norms,
availability of work/family institutional arrangements and access to capital. First, the developing world has traditionally been associated with conservative gender ideology where
men are foremost oriented towards the paid labor market and women to unpaid household
labor, which could discourage women from working outside the home. For example, Cha
and Thebaud (2009) and Thebaud (2010) document that in the developed world (countries
like Germany, UK and the US), the measured level of “gender egalitarianism” is almost 1.5
times greater than in developing countries (like Mexico and the Philippines) and that these
cultural differences in gender norms could be important in understanding women’s decision
to enter paid employment. Not only do these gender norms directly affect women’s entry
into the workforce, Zhao and Wry (2011) suggest that patriarchal beliefs also suppress the
creation of work and economic opportunities for women in the developing world.
Second, existing research has found that the lack of availability of supportive work/family
institutional arrangements also prevents women from participating in the workforce in developing economies. For example, in contexts where institutional arrangements that could mitigate work-family conflict (such as paid leave, subsidized childcare, healthcare, and part-time
employment opportunities) are not available, women are less likely to start new businesses
(Thebaud 2015; Hughes and Jennings 2012). More broadly, Jennings et al. (2015) argue that
the role of the family as an institution in helping women to balance work-life conflict is an
important determinant of female employment. Further, in a qualitative study in Bangladesh,
Mair et al. (2012) demonstrate that in many developing countries, formal legal institutions
6
such as laws preventing women from work at night and the lack of enforcement of other laws
mandating the provision of childcare facilities at work also significantly deter women from
participating in the labor force.
Finally, a large and developed literature has examined the conditions under which access to
financial capital could prevent women’s entry into the labor force through self-employment.
In a study of loans provided to a largely female population, Singh and Dutt (2015) document
that income-generating loans play an important role in helping women start new businesses,
thus facilitating their entry into the labor force. However, the availability of such microfinancing opportunities depends on levels of political risk and norms around patriarchy and
therefore, in many contexts, women might not have access to such financial capital that
could help them participate in the workforce (Zhao and Wry 2011; Cobb et al. 2015). Apart
from the existence of financial institutions, more micro-level factors such as the design of the
loan and characteristics of the loan officers also affect whether women entrepreneurs are able
to access financial capital, repay their loans, and successfully participate in the workforce
(Doering and Thebaud 2015; Canales 2013; Canales and Greenberg 2015).
Limitation of Previous Studies: Lack of Focus on Transition into Formal Employment
As discussed above, the literature on employment of women in developing countries has
identified three important barriers to women’s entry into the workforce. However, in this
paper, I present a case where women in a developing country seem to be overcoming these
barriers and entering the labor force in large numbers. While the women in this context
are foraying into formal employment, they struggle to sustain this employment and within
just three months of starting their jobs, 40% of the women drop out of the labor force. The
challenge is therefore not whether women can enter formal employment but whether they
can sustain it. A few other studies also indicate that voluntary employee turnover in the
sectors employing women in large numbers is extremely high (Yu 2005; Ranganathan and
Kuruvilla 2008; Batt et al. 2009). This suggests that instead of focusing only on factors that
impede women’s entry into the workforce, it is important to also investigate factors that
influence women’s transition into formal employment.
The literature has paid less attention to the process of transitioning into formal employment,
7
which is a key step before women can successfully participate in the labor force. In reality,
it is reasonable to think that the transition into formal employment is likely to be difficult
for women in developing economies. These women are typically first-time workers who have
never been exposed to the culture and routines of working life. Therefore, the adjustment
from helping with household chores to working full-time in a formal organization can be quite
significant. Additionally, these women have historically been subordinated in their societies
and have had restricted voice and mobility. As such, the shift to becoming an employee or
owner of an organization with a specific role and responsibilities is substantial. Therefore, it
is imperative to identify the conditions under which women are able to successfully transition
into formal employment, as this is a first step to understanding how to improve female labor
force participation in the developing world. While there could be many factors affecting
first-time women workers’ transition into formal employment, a natural starting point is
investigating conditions within organizations that could prevent these workers from holding
on to their jobs. Research in organizational theory, which I review below, offers some hints
into this issue.
The Role of Organizational Practices in Career Transitions
Research in organizational theory asserts that conditions within organizations significantly
impact employees’ career transitions (Barnett et al. 2000; Podolny and Baron 1997; Baron
et al. 1991). In particular, this research has highlighted how organizational practices and
procedures affect three important transitions in individuals’ careers: transitions to more
senior positions, transitions in work status and transitions to new organizations.
First, organizational practices have been shown to affect employees’ transitions to more
senior positions within their organizations. For example, Dobbin et al. (2015) show that
management training facilitates white women’s transition into management positions. Similarly, Kalev et al. (2006) and Kalev and Dobbin (2006) demonstrate that instituting diversity
committees and task forces responsible for implementing anti-discrimination and affirmative
action policies also influence the transition of minorities into management positions. Other
scholars have likewise shown that the adoption of merit-based organizational practices can
influence employees’ transitions to more senior positions in the corporate hierarchy (Castilla
and Benard 2010; Castilla 2008).
8
Second, organizational practices have also been shown to affect employees’ transitions from
full-time work to part-time work. For example, Briscoe and Kellogg (2011) highlight that
initial assignment to powerful supervisors facilitates employees’ transitions to reduced-hours
work programs without negatively impacting the employees’ pay and work tenure. Some
other scholars have shown that assignment to “good” supervisors at the time of moving to
part-time work also plays an important role in influencing employees’ transition to reducedhour roles in their organizations (Kelly and Kalev 2006; Briscoe 2006). Further, scholars
have demonstrated that instituting “relational spaces” in organizations (Kellogg 2009) and
having clear and transparent work-family policies (Kelly and Moen 2007) can also facilitate
employees’ transitions to part-time work.
Third, organizational practices have further been shown to affect employees’ transitions to
new organizations. For example, referral programs - the hiring of new workers through
employee referrals - significantly smoothens the transition of new hires into an organization
(Fernandez and Weinberg 1997; Fernandez et al. 2000; Castilla 2005). Similarly, Burton and
Beckman (2007) demonstrate how formal and informal job descriptions of incumbents’ role
in their new organizations can influence their transition into their new roles. In addition
to these examples highlighting how practices in the organization being joined can facilitate
transition into the new organization, some other studies also demonstrate how practices in
the organization being left can leave “imprints” and influence individuals’ transitions from
these organizations to different organizations (McEvily et al. 2012; Azoulay et al. 2009;
Dokko et al. 2009).
While this research is insightful about the role of organizational practices in influencing employees’ career transitions once they enter the workforce, the literature has less to say about
what can be called the first and foremost step in building a career, namely transitioning into
formal employment, which is especially important in the context of developing economies.
Further, this research is predominantly focused on white-collar settings in Western economies
where employees have, for the most part, already transitioned into formal employment and
as such, this research has missed the opportunity to investigate mechanisms that might
be particularly salient when individuals are transitioning into working life within organizations. In this paper, I fill this gap in the existing literature by investigating the impact of
local employer practices on women’s transition into formal employment and in this way, I
9
bring insights from organizational theory to the study of female labor force participation in
developing economies.
One Organizational Practice: Assignment to Experienced Trainers
In order to test the question of how organizational practices could affect the transition of
women into formal employment in developing countries, I study the impact of one organizational practice, namely the assignment of experienced trainers to new joiners, on women’s
experiences in formal employment. My motivation for focusing on training programs stems
from recent insights in organizational theory showing that differences in initial conditions at
the time of entering organizations could have a large impact on employee career outcomes
(Briscoe 2006; Sorensen 2004; DiPrete and Eirich 2006). In particular, many organizations
have training or onboarding programs that allow employees to make smooth transitions into
new organizations and accumulate the required human capital to be successful in their new
roles (Doeringer and Piore 1971; Dobbin and Kalev 2008). In my research setting as well, the
training program is the first organizational interface through which first-time women workers
experience formal employment. Therefore, it is natural to investigate the role of training
programs as one key organizational practice that could either impede or enable women’s
transition into formal employment in the developing world.
In particular, in this paper, I will focus on one feature of training programs i.e. the experience level of the trainer assigned to any given employee. An extensive literature in education
has highlighted the role of experience as one important characteristic that predicts whether
trainers are effective in improving student outcomes (Rice 2010, 2003). This research has
found that when students are assigned to experienced teachers, not only do they experience
improved educational achievements such as higher test scores, but they also experience improved labor market outcomes later in life (Chetty et al. 2013; Boyd et al. 2008). Motivated
by this literature, I hypothesize that assignment to experienced trainers could be one important channel through which women successfully transitioning into formal employment. In
addition, I test three mechanisms through which experienced trainers could influence firsttime women workers’ transition into formal employment. In the next section, I discuss these
mechanisms that I test later in the paper.
10
Mechanism: How Organizational Practices Influence Transition into Formal Employment
In this paper, I test three possible mechanisms underlying the effect of assignment to experienced trainers on women’s transition into formal employment, where the first two build
directly on existing literature and the third is a novel mechanism that might be particularly
relevant to “first-time workers,” namely workers entering the labor market with limited prior
exposure to formal employment.
First, I test whether experienced trainers impart superior job-related skills to their trainees
which can increase their output and help them transition into formal employment. Some
management research suggests that the main purpose of training programs is to teach jobrelated skills and that experienced trainers might be more effective at imparting these skills
(Cappelli et al. 1997; Osterman 1995, 1984; Becker 1964). Because employees assigned
to experienced trainers may gain access to better learning opportunities, these employees
may develop superior skills that allow them to perform their jobs better and thereby more
seamlessly transition into formal employment.
Second, I test if experienced trainers inculcate organizational identification in their trainees
such that the trainees become committed to the organization and are retained in formal
employment. Research in micro sociology indicates that trainers are agents of socialization
into an organization’s “way of doing things;” some studies suggest that experienced trainers
might be more effective in socializing new entrants because they are steeped in the organizational culture (Van Maanen and Schein 1979; Van Maanen 1976; Schein 1978). Therefore
employees assigned to experienced trainers may develop more identification and commitment
to the organization and as a result, more easily transition into formal employment.
And third, I test whether experienced trainers impart general skills needed to survive at
work, what I call “work readiness,” which could affect the transition of first-time women
workers into formal employment. I posit that in order to successfully sustain formal employment, individuals need to learn about the culture of work, internalize work rules and
routines, understand what it means to be a worker, learn how to enact the role of a worker,
and develop good work habits. I argue that such training in work-readiness is especially
important among first-time women workers in developing economies who have limited ex-
11
posure to formal work environments, minimal experience with formal education, a dearth
of female “working women” role models, and little desire to work apart from the economic
need to support their families. Some policy briefs on welfare-to-work programs for rural and
disadvantaged communities in the United States also highlight the importance of being work
ready (Heckman, LaLonde, and Smith 1999). Qualitative evidence suggests that experienced
trainers are more likely to look beyond job-related skills and focus on making their trainees
work-ready because of their experience with a greater number of cohorts of new joiners and
their foresight into the kinds of skills that really matter in being successful at work. As
such, employees assigned to experienced trainers might become more work-ready and have
a smoother transition into formal employment.
To assess which of the three postulated mechanisms best explains the main effect, I draw on
a mix of archival, ethnographic and survey data. In the next section, I describe this data as
well as the setting where I test the impact of assignment to experienced trainers on women’s
transition into formal employment.
Method
Research Setting
My unique longitudinal data come from a large garment manufacturing firm in India that
reported several hundred million dollars in annual revenues. This firm operates nine factories
around the city of Bangalore and specializes in producing menswear including shirts, trousers
and jackets for both the domestic and export markets. For this study, I focus on the largest
of the firm’s factories, which was established in 2001. This factory currently employs 2,000
workers and produces on average 100,000 trousers and 50,000 jackets per month.2
Existing reports suggest that this factory has had a measurable impact on the lives of women
in villages surrounding the factory. First, the factory has offered employment to several
rural women and anecdotal evidence suggests that these women, who typically come from
impoverished backgrounds and have limited prior exposure to formal employment, are able
to earn a stable income for the first time in their lives and help support their households.
2
The mean factory employs 1,000 workers and produces 60,000 pieces per month.
12
Second, the factory has earnestly tried to retain all the women who join the organization
since employee churn is expensive. For this reason, the factory has consistently offered an
above market wage and other benefits like child care that make the job attractive to new
joiners.
The opportunity to join this factory and earn an income is valued by women in the area as
well. In fact, five to ten women “walk-in” to the factory on a daily basis seeking employment
as entry-level sewing operators. And yet, out of every five women joining the factory, two
quit and voluntarily drop out of the workforce within only three months of working on the
job. This suggests that not all first-time women workers are able to successfully transition
into formal employment. While those who manage to hold on to their jobs are fundamentally
transformed by their formal employment experiences, there are also several women who are
simply unable to transition into formal employment, despite being interested in work and
seeing the benefits of regular employment. Therefore, even though the factory is interested
in hiring more women and expanding in the region, because of the difficulties that women
experience in sustaining their jobs, labor force participation in this region is depressed.
In an effort to begin to investigate the conditions under which women are able to successfully
transition into formal employment, I examine the impact of one organizational practice
within this factory on the transition of first-time women workers into formal employment.
In particular, the practice that I study is the assignment of trainers to new joiners entering
the factory. In the next section, I describe this training program in more detail.
Training Program
New joiners in this setting undergo a training program after they are hired where they
learn a specific garment operation. This training program is individualized, meaning that
new joiners are trained individually by specific trainers, and the focus of the program is on
practical, on-the-job skills. Therefore, throughout the training program, new joiners interact
almost exclusively with their trainers. Trainees are allocated empty sewing machines on the
lines that they will eventually work in and it is here, on the lines, that the training is
conducted. For the most part, trainees sit at their designated machines while the trainers
13
stand beside them offering instructions and suggestions.3
On average, this training process lasts about three weeks. Trainees first learn how to operate
a sewing machine and once they are comfortable with basic machine controls, they are taught
a specific operation such as stitching a shirt collar. Trainees then practice their operation
on several “mock pieces,” first to execute the operation at a desired level of quality and
later to increase the speed at which they execute this operation. Once they achieve “80%
efficiency” in their operation, which is a measure used internally to evaluate the number of
pieces produced in an hour, they graduate from training and are deployed on the production
line.
In this factory, the training was conducted by eleven trainers who varied in the amount
of work experience that they brought to the job. Ethnographic observation revealed that
the pedagogical approach of experienced trainers, in particular, was quite different to that
of inexperienced trainers in this setting and given that individual trainers had considerable
autonomy over their training in this setting, the resulting training experiences of women
assigned to experienced versus inexperienced trainers were quite different. For example, I
observed that inexperienced trainers focused strictly on teaching on-the-job skills whereas
experienced trainers taught their new joiners about work more broadly. This variation in
training approaches between experienced and inexperienced trainers is a key feature that
I exploit in studying the impact of local employer practices on women’s transition into
formal employment. In particular, I test whether women new joiners assigned to experienced
trainers have a different likelihood of transitioning into formal employment as compared to
those assigned to inexperienced trainers to help investigate how organizational practices
might influence women’s labor force participation in developing countries. The next section
describes my identification strategy that allows me to causally investigate this question.
Identification Strategy
In order to test the effect of experienced trainer assignment on new joiners’ transition into
formal employment, a first step would be to compare the careers of new joiners assigned to
experienced trainers to the careers of those assigned to inexperienced trainers. However, in
3
Note that training is not conducted in classrooms or in batches and hence, peer or cohort effects are less
relevant in this context.
14
most settings, this comparison would be insufficient because assignment of trainers to new
joiners could be correlated with specific characteristics of the new joiners. For example,
if unskilled new joiners were systematically assigned to experienced trainers, it would be
difficult to identify whether their transition into formal employment resulted from their
trainer assignment or their initial skill level.
However, a unique feature of my setting is that the assignment of trainers to new joiners is
as-good-as-random in this factory and depends on the new joiner’s timing of entry into the
organization. The assignment of trainers to new joiners is made by an industrial engineering
(IE) manager at the factory who never actually meets the new joiners and in fact, sits in
the managerial wing of the factory far away from the training room and shop floor. This IE
manager keeps a running tab of the number of trainees being taught by each trainer. Then,
when a new joiner enters the factory, the IE manager assigns this new joiner to the trainer
who has the least number of trainees under them at the time of assignment. All trainers in
the factory train, on average, seven new joiners in a month but since training is individualized
and not conducted in batches, trainers can have varying numbers of trainees under them at
any given point in time, in such a way that some trainers have room to take on new students
whereas others do not. This trainer assignment based on new joiners’ timing of entry into
the organization is therefore quasi-random and uncorrelated with characteristics of the new
joiners. To mitigate any remaining concerns about selection in the new joiners assigned
to experienced versus inexperienced trainers, in my results, I will additionally show that
women assigned to experienced trainers are no different that women assigned to inexperienced
trainers on all pre-hire dimensions that I have data on.
In this way, my setting offers exogenous variation in how women entering this factory experience the organizational practice of assignment to trainers. In this paper, I thus test
the impact of assignment to experienced trainers on women’s transition into formal employment by comparing mean career outcomes among new joiners assigned to experienced versus
inexperienced trainers.
15
Data
The data encompasses 703 new joiners who entered the firm over a two year period, between
October 2012 and September 2014. Out of these 703 new joiners, 510 of them were women
with no prior work experience before entering this factory, as revealed from their applications
for employment. For most analyses in this study, I focus on these 510 new joiners given
my interest in first-time women workers. I obtained a vast array of personnel data from
this factory including details on new joiners’ baseline characteristics captured at the time
of entering the factory such as their age and educational level, specific information from
training records such as trainer assignment and length of training and workplace outcomes
such as daily output and attrition. Data on daily output, in particular, is typically hard to
capture and is quite rare even within the garment manufacturing sector - the factory that I
studied captured this data using sophisticated RFID technology that monitors each piece as
it moves along the production line.
In addition to these quantitative data, I conducted a detailed (15 page) survey of a sample
of new joiners in the factory. The survey was administered to fifty female new joiners at the
time of their graduating from training and entering the lines.4 All fifty of these new joiners
graduated from training in January and February 2015. The survey captured data on the
training experiences of these new joiners and in particular, was useful to measure their
level of organizational identification using a standard scale from the academic literature,
as well as their “work readiness” using a scale that I constructed from my ethnographic
observation.
And finally, I supplemented the archival and survey data with one year of ethnographic observation conducted by the author along with two research assistants, which produced more
than 200 single-spaced pages of fieldnotes about the training process alone and 45 in-depth
interviews with all eleven trainers, a subsample of new joiners, supervisors, industrial engineers and human resource managers at this factory. The observation focused on new joiners’
experiences from the time that they “walked-in” to the factory, through the recruitment and
training processes, all the way upto the time that they were deployed on the lines. I used
the in-depth interviews to understand the stresses that new joiners faced at the workplace
4
The survey sample was no different from the overall population of new joiners along all observable
demographic characteristics.
16
as well as their dilemmas regarding whether to continue working at the factory or to quit
the workforce, and also to understand individual trainers’ approaches to training. I also
conducted five “home visits” where I visited new joiners in their villages on holidays and on
weekends to better understand their home lives and also interact with their family members.
I analyzed this qualitative data inductively using Atlas.ti (Glaser and Strauss 1967).
Analytic Strategy
I begin my analysis of the impact of the organizational practice of assignment of trainers
to new joiners on women’s transition to formal employment by first producing descriptive
statistics. I then test quantitatively that the random assignment of trainers to new joiners
was achieved in practice. Following this, I turn to my primary question of interest - modeling
the impact of assignment to experienced trainers on new joiners’ likelihood of successfully
transitioning into formal employment. As the final step in my analysis, I investigate possible
mechanisms that underlie the trainer assignment effect.
Dependent Variable: Successful Transition to Formal Employment
I measure successful transition into formal employment in three ways in this study - a)
probability of remaining in formal employment after three months of entering the workforce
b) probability of remaining in formal employment after one month of entering the workforce
and c) long-term probability of remaining in formal employment.
For each worker, I code whether they are still employed by the factory in three months,
one month and two years from their date of joining. I compute this measure using attrition
data captured by the firm. Three facts give me confidence that attrition from the firm is a
reasonable measure of quitting the workforce. First, this firm is widely-regarded as being one
of the best employers in the garment manufacturing space, offering unprecedented benefits
like transportation to and from the factory and access to healthcare and childcare - this makes
it unlikely that a new joiner would leave this factory and move to another manufacturer.
Second, during my ethnographic observation, I followed up with 27 new joiners who left the
firm soon after joining. These followups were conducted either on the phone or by visiting
the new joiners in their homes. The followups revealed that all 27 of the new joiners had
17
dropped out of the workforce and had resumed spending their days taking care of household
chores. And third, I used data on employees’ reasons for quitting the firm which had begun
to be captured by the factory from September 20145 - while I have this data for only a
small subset of employees, the results are illustrative - only 2% of the employees who left the
firm after September 2014 reported leaving in order to seek alternative employment. This
suggests that attrition from the firm is a reasonable measure for quitting the workforce.
Another point to note is that attrition in this setting is voluntary - there are no cases of the
firm firing any new joiners during the two year period of my observation. Even if a particular
worker was found to be consistently under-performing, the firm’s strategy was to transfer
the worker from stitching to a lower skilled job rather than fire them.
My first measure of successful transition into formal employment is the probability of remaining in formal employment after three months of entering the workforce, which is used
in the bulk of my reported analyses for this paper. The new joiners in my dataset have
different start dates over the two year period between October 2012 and September 2014
- as a result of this, I observe new joiners’ careers for different lengths of time. If a new
joiner entered the organization in October 2012, I can measure their transition into formal
employment for 24 months whereas if a new joiner entered the factory in September 2014, I
can measure their transition into formal employment for less than a month. To equalize the
comparison being made across all new joiners irrespective of their start date, I calculate a
standard measure of transition into formal employment, namely the probability of remaining
in formal employment after three months of entering the workforce. To compute this probability, I use attrition data between October 2012 and December 2014 and observe each new
joiner for three months after they join the organization to check if they left the workforce in
that period. This approach mitigates concerns of right censoring of my dependent variable.
Further, I use a cutoff of three months based on my interviews with trainers, supervisors and
managers in the factory, which revealed a popular belief that if a new joiner could survive
their first three months in the factory, they would sustain formal employment.
I similarly construct my second measure, namely new joiners’ probability of remaining in
formal employment after one month of entering the workforce, using attrition data between
5
This data was captured by the welfare officer at the factory, who is seen as a representative of the
employees rather than as part of management - therefore, the data is likely to be accurate.
18
October 2012 and October 2014. This measure allows me to test if trainer assignment matters
in just a few weeks of joining the workforce. Finally, I use a non-parametric measure of
successful transition into formal employment, namely a hazard rate measuring probability of
remaining in formal employment in the long-term. This measure accounts for the fact that
different employees enter my data set at different points and allows me to use all two years
of attrition data that I have. I test this measure using survival models, including Kaplan
Meier curves and Cox hazard models.
Independent Variable: Exposure to Experienced Trainers
Trainers in this factory were similar along most observable dimensions other than their level
of work experience.6 Trainers in this factory, however, varied widely in their level of work
experience. Trainers had on average 9.6 years of work experience [standard deviation = 3.3]
and the median trainer had 9 years of work experience. To simplify matters for the next
step, I define experienced trainers in my setting as those whose total number of years of
work experience was above the median. Therefore, experienced trainers had over 9 years of
work experience and inexperienced, or less experienced, trainers had nine or fewer years of
work experience. Based on this criteria, five out of the eleven trainers in my factory were
classified as “experienced.”
In this study, I measure work experience as total number of years that a trainer had worked
in their life. Other measures, such as number of years worked as a trainer or number of years
worked at this factory, yield only minor differences. Similarly, using different thresholds to
measure experience such as being in the top quartile of the experience distribution as well
as coding experience as a continuous variable did not alter the results significantly.
Control Variables
A key strength of my study is that trainers were randomly assigned to new joiners, allowing
me to compare mean career outcomes of new joiners assigned to experienced versus inexpe6
The trainers were all women, Hindu, were 70% likely to be from the state of Karnataka, were 90% likely
to be married, had family sizes of about 4 members, had 1.5 children on average, were 32 years old on
average, had about 10 years of formal education and earned about Rs. 425 ($8.50) per day. They took about
20 days to train a new joiner and they trained 7 trainees on average in a month.
19
rienced trainers without the need for extensive controls. However, in certain models, I also
include a set of control variables to my analysis to ensure the exogeneity of my main independent variable. I control for the following baseline characteristics of the new joiners: marital
status, family size, number of children, age, years of education, hometown and religion. In
addition, I am able to control for new joiners’ inherent sewing skills using a unique feature
of the recruitment process where all new joiners are asked to operate a sewing machine and
stitch two identical pieces of cloth together on three sides and are graded on this exercise
called the “bag test.”7
Mechanism Variables
In this paper, I also test three mechanisms through which experienced trainers might be
able to influence first-time women workers transition into formal employment. As described
below, I measure the first mechanism of job-related skills using data obtained from the
factory on employee daily output8 and I measure the other two mechanisms - organizational
identification and work readiness - using data from a survey that I administered to 50 new
joiners who completed their training in January and February 2015.9
Superior Job-Related Skills. I measure job-related skills as new joiners’ average daily
output produced after graduating from training.10 The idea here is that the more technically
skilled a new joiner is, the higher his or her output would be. This output data is captured
by the firm using RFID technology. An RFID tag is attached to each garment produced
in the factory and employees are asked to scan this tag against an RFID reader on their
7
New joiners are graded an A for good performance on the bag test, a B for medium performance on the
bag test and a C for poor performance on the bag test.
8
This data is available for only 90 out of the 510 new joiners since the factory started collecting this data
only in January 2013 and only for three out of eleven lines.
9
These new joiners are not part of my main dataset.
10
This measure averages a new joiner’s daily output from their first day on the job after they graduate
from training till the last day that they appear in the dataset. My results are also robust to using these
other measures of job-related skills: average daily output in the first month after graduating from training,
average daily output in the first three months after graduating from training, daily output on the first day
after graduating from training, daily output on the last day that any given new joiner is in the dataset. In
the event that a new joiner leaves in the first month or in the first three months after they graduate, their
daily output is averaged from their first day on the job till the day that they leave the organization.
20
desk after they have finished working on the garment. In this way, the factory can track the
number of pieces that any individual worker had produced real-time.
Superior Organizational Identification. I measure organizational identification using
a standard scale developed by Mael and Ashforth (1992). This scale consists of six statements
that respondents rate on a five-point Likert scale (from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree),
enabling me to assess how connected they feel to the organization that they work for. Sample
statements include “my organization’s success is my success” and “when someone criticizes
my organization, it feels like a personal insult.” The Cronbach’s alpha for this organizational
identification measure was 0.73. Individual items were scored from 1 to 5 and total scores
were derived by averaging across the six items. Higher scores indicate superior organizational
identification. Please see Appendix A for the scale.
Superior Work Readiness. I measure “work readiness” using a scale I created based on
ethnographic observation of non-job related factors that seemed to be important for surviving
in the workplace and dealing with working life among first-time women workers. The scale
consists of twenty statements on four broad dimensions - self-presentation, interpersonal
communication, work-life separation and self-reliance - that respondents rate on a five point
Likert scale (from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree), allowing me to measure their level
of work readiness.
Self-presentation refers to the ability to present an appropriate persona or image at the
workplace that allows one to “fit-in” and also be liked by peers and supervisors; this includes
statements like “I know how to dress to work” and “I present myself confidently at work.”
Interpersonal communication refers to basic skills that allow one to exchange information and
thoughts with peers and supervisors and thereby connect with one’s coworkers; this includes
statements like “I ask questions when in doubt” and “I have made friends at work.” Worklife separation refers to being able to create barriers between one’s work commitments and
home priorities in such a way that one achieves a balance and is productive in both spheres
of their lives; this includes statements like “I worry about my children and family while at
work (reverse-coded)” and “I struggle to balance work and home life (reverse-coded).” And
finally, self-reliance refers to the ability to rely on one’s own capabilities and judgements to
21
take care of oneself in the workplace; this includes statements like “I go to the bathroom
when I need to do at work” and “I skip meals at work (reverse-coded).”
The Cronbach’s alpha for this work readiness measure was 0.73. Individual items were scored
from 1 to 5 and total scores were derived by averaging across the twenty items. Higher scores
indicate superior work readiness. Please see Appendix A for the scale.
Results
My findings show a large and significant effect of assignment to experienced trainers on
transition into formal employment for first-time women workers. Assignment to experienced
trainers is associated with a higher probability of remaining in formal employment in onemonth, three-months and over two years. This finding is robust to a range of modeling
choices. I also find support for one particular mechanism underlying the assignment effect:
I find that exposure to experienced trainers helps first-time women workers become “workready,” enabling them to acquire essential skills needed to survive at work. In line with this,
I find that assignment to experienced trainers is less salient for women referred to the firm,
women with prior work experience and male workers, all of whom are likely to already be
“work-ready.”
Demographics of Program Users
I begin by examining my sample of new joiners and the trainer assignment process before
turning to my main focus, transition into formal employment for new joiners. The main
sample of 510 new joiners consists of women with no prior work experience by definition.
Table 1 provides a summary of descriptive characteristics of these new joiners as well as
other variables used in my analyses. Of particular interest is that 42% of the new joiners
in my sample were assigned to experienced trainers, a key feature that I will exploit in my
analytic strategy. Further, only 64% of the new joiners remained in formal employment after
3 months of working in this job and 88% of them remained in formal employment after 1
month of working on the job. Before testing whether assignment to experienced trainers
affects new joiners’ probability of remaining in formal employment, I check if the assignment
22
to experienced was indeed as-good-as-random in this setting.
INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE
Exogenous Trainer Assignment Process
Qualitative and quantitative evidence indicate that the trainer assignment process at this
firm was random with respect to new joiner characteristics. In an interview with the industrial engineer who matches trainers to new joiners, he said “all my trainers are very skilled,
so I have no reason to match certain new joiners with certain trainers.” To investigate this
quantitatively, I also use descriptive characteristics of new joiners to compare the new joiners
who were assigned to experienced trainers versus those assigned to inexperienced trainers
after they were recruited into the firm to check if there are any systematic differences. For
this analysis, I use all pre-hire characteristics of new joiners from Table 1 that could, in
theory, influence successful transition into the workplace.11 In particular, I present basic
mean comparisons for a series of human capital and demographic variables across the two
groups of new joiners and also test if the difference between these two groups is statistically
significant for any of the variables.12
Table 2 shows the results. Along most descriptive variables, including marital status, number
of children, family size, years of education, hometown location, religion, referrals and skills
on initial test, female new joiners assigned to experienced trainers were no different than
the ones assigned to the inexperienced trainers. It does seem like new joiners assigned to
experienced trainers were slightly older than those assigned to inexperienced trainers but this
difference could simply be by chance. The development economics literature demonstrates
that when you compare two random groups across enough variables, it is possible that that
the two groups will be statistically different from each other along one variable, simply by
chance (Duflo et al. 2007). In any case, I also explicitly control for age along with all other
pre-hire variables in my regressions.
11
After presenting my main regression results, I also check that these results are robust to post-hire
characteristics of new joiners, where these characteristics are added as control variables in my main regressions
- see Appendix B for details.
12
This is better than regressing assignment to experienced trainers on a panel of covariates because a
regression could obscure associations through collinearity.
23
INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE
In this way, the quantitative data on pre-hire characteristics and the qualitative evidence that
I have from interviews do not point to a systematic sorting process in trainer assignment.
These results are consistent with the notion that new joiners’ assignment to experienced
trainers is not correlated with observable characteristics in such a way that could influence
new joiners’ success in formal employment.
Assignment to Experienced Trainers and New Joiners’ Transition into Formal
Employment
This section presents the main results of the analyses, namely the effect of trainer assignment on first-time women workers’ transition into formal employment. First, Figures 1 and
2 present basic mean comparisons of new joiner’s probability of remaining in formal employment in 3 months and 1 month based on assignment to experienced versus inexperienced
trainers. Table 3 then presents least-squares models of the same analyses, but is able to
include a host of pre-hire controls. Following this, Figure 3 shows a Kaplan Meier curve for
the effect of trainer assignment on long-term probability of remaining in formal employment,
while accounting for right-censoring of the data. And finally, Table 4 similarly presents Cox
hazard models to show the hazard ratio of remaining in formal employment in the long-term
based on experienced trainer assignment.
Figure 1 shows the effect of trainer assignment on first-time female workers’ probability of
remaining in formal employment after three months of entering the workforce. This effect
is shown as a basic means comparison of probability of remaining in formal employment in
three months for the new joiners assigned to experienced versus inexperienced trainers. The
figure shows that female new joiners assigned to inexperienced trainers had a 55% probability
of remaining in formal employment in 3 months of entering the workforce whereas similar
new joiners assigned to experienced trainers had a 75% probability of remaining in formal
employment in the same time period. The figure also includes confidence interval bars around
the means, which indicates that these probabilities of remaining in formal employment across
the two groups of new joiners are statistically different from one another. In this way, Figure
1 reveals that the probability of remaining in formal employment for women assigned to
24
experienced versus inexperienced trainers differs by 20 percentage points.
INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE
Next, Figure 2 replicates Figure 1 for a more restricted time period of one month after
joining the organization and provides additional evidence that trainer assignment impacted
women’s transition into formal employment even in this shorter time frame.
INSERT FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE
While Figures 1 and 2 visually demonstrated variation in first-time women workers’ transition
into formal employment, Table 3 uses least-square models13 to more systematically test the
effect of training assignment on transition into formal employment in three months (Models
1 and 2) and one month (Models 3 and 4). These analyses use individual-level observations
with standard errors clustered by trainer. A key strength of my study is that trainers
were randomly assigned to new joiners - therefore Models 1 and 3 include only a dummy
variable for assignment to experienced trainers. However, in Models 2 and 4, I also include
a substantial set of control variables to my analysis to ensure the exogeneity of my main
independent variable, but my coefficients either do not change much or grow slightly bigger,
which gives me further confidence in the effect of experienced trainer assignment (Imai, King,
and Stuart 2008).
INSERT TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE
The sequence of models in this table are as follows. Model 1 estimates the effect of assignment to experienced trainers on new joiners’ probability of remaining employed in three
months. This model does not include control variables. Note that the coefficient is positive and statistically significant, showing that assignment to experienced trainers increases
first-time women workers’ probability of remaining in formal employment in three months
by 19.8%. In Model 2, I re-estimate this model including several pre-hire control variables
in my estimation. The coefficient on the experienced trainer assignment variable remains
positive and statistically significant, changing slightly to 19.5%. Models 3 and 4 replicate
Models 1 and 2 for the one-month probability of remaining in formal employment and find
13
The results are also robust to using probit or logit models.
25
consistent results. In this way, Table 3 shows that the effect of assignment to experienced
trainers on transition into formal employment is large, significant and robust to pre-hire
control variables.
The analyses presented so far measured transition into formal employment using probability
of remaining in formal employment in three months and one month after entering the workforce. These choices were made because they corresponded with heuristics used by managers
within the factory, but also because they offered a way of overcoming right censoring in my
dependent variable (given the differential timing of new joiners’ entry into the organization).
While the analyses using these measures is convincing, it cannot speak to the long-term
effects of assignment to experienced trainers. To get a full picture, this next set of analyses
use a different measure of transition into formal employment, namely probability of remaining in the organization in the long-term. I use event history models that exploit all two
years of the available attrition data while accounting for the fact that new joiners do not all
enter my dataset at the same time. First, I used the Kaplan-Meier estimation method in
Figure 3 to evaluate the survival function of remaining in formal employment for first-time
women workers by trainer assignment. The curves show that the survival rate is higher for
new joiners assigned to experienced trainers than for new joiners assigned to inexperienced
trainers throughout my observation period. After 10 months of tenure for example, less
than 30% of the new joiners assigned to inexperienced trainers remain in formal employment whereas this number is around 50% for new joiners assigned to experienced trainers.
These results are consistent with the previous models, suggesting that experienced trainer
assignment has a positive and significant impact on new joiners’ probability of remaining in
formal employment over two years.
INSERT FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE
I then fit Cox proportional hazard models in Table 4 because the literature suggests these as
the most flexible instrument to estimate survival data (Cleves et al 2004). Using Cox event
history modeling techniques, I estimate the odds of new joiners leaving formal employment
during the 2 year observation period. Like before, Model 1 relies on the random assignment of
trainers to new joiners and only has a dummy variable for assignment to experienced trainers
while Model 2 additionally includes pre-hire control variables. Table 4 shows that the hazard
26
ratio of leaving formal employment for experienced trainer assignment (the exponentiated
coefficients produced by Cox event history modeling) is 0.622 without control variables and
0.637 with control variables. Hazard ratios are interpreted liked odds ratios, where values
between zero and one suggest a reduced likelihood of leaving formal employment, and values
over one suggest an increased likelihood of leaving formal employment. Hazard ratios also
offer an easy percentage interpretation of the coefficients - Table 4 shows that female new
joiners assigned to experienced trainers are approximately 40% less likely to leave formal
employment in two years. These hazard models therefore provide evidence that assignment
to experienced trainers matters not just in the short-run but also has long-lasting implications
for female new joiners’ ability to transition to working life.
INSERT TABLE 4 ABOUT HERE
Mechanism: Why is There an Assignment Effect?
This next section of the paper explores three mechanisms that could explain the effect of
trainer assignment on first-time women workers’ probability of remaining in formal employment. In particular, the mechanisms that I consider are trainers’ provision of job-related
skills, organizational identification and work-readiness. Apart from these three hypothesized
mechanisms, Appendix B also helps rule out a few other explanations to account for the
experienced trainer effect.14
14
Appendix B helps rule out the following concerns - first, we might be worried that experienced trainers
spend more time on average with their new joiners as a result of which they train a fewer number of new
joiners and are more successful in retaining them in formal employment. Second, we might be worried
that experienced trainers affect transition to formal employment not because of how they implement their
training but because their new joiners work in better lines in the factory. Third, we might be worried that
experienced trainers affect transition to formal employment not because of how they enact their training
but because their new joiners work on more enjoyable operations in the garment production process. And
finally, we might be worried about seasonal effects, for example that new joiners entering the workforce in
certain months of the year are more motivated which influences their transition into formal employment.
Appendix B presents regression results that control for number of training days, working in jacket lines
(which are anecdotally considered more “successful” in the factory), working on assembly operations (which
are more complex and could be more enjoyable) and the specific month-year of a new joiner’s entry into the
organization (to be clear, there are separate dummies for June 2013 and June 2014). These results reveal
that the coefficient of experienced trainer assignment does not change much when these control variables are
added and thus help rule out these alternative explanations.
27
Direct Test of Mechanisms. As described earlier, I measure the first mechanism of
job-related skills using data on daily output, the second mechanism of organizational identification using the (Mael and Ashforth 1992) scale and the third mechanism of work-readiness
using a scale I created based on ethnographic observation. Table 5 fits a least squares model
to estimate the effect of experienced trainer assignment on new joiners’ average daily output
in Model 1, organizational identification in Model 2 and work readiness in Model 315 . The
models include the standard set of pre-hire control variables, but the results are robust to
not including them as well.
The table reveals that assignment to experienced trainers has no effect on daily output as
well as organizational identification but that this assignment has a positive and statistically
significant effect on work readiness. In particular, as Model 3 shows, new joiners assigned to
experienced trainers report a higher work readiness score than those new joiners assigned to
inexperienced trainers - the difference in scores is 0.148 which amounts to a 5% increase in
work readiness among new joiners assigned to experienced trainers. However, as Models 1
and 2 reveal, experienced trainer assignment does not seem to significantly affect either new
joiners’ daily output or their level of organizational identification. These results highlight
that the organizational practice of trainer assignment affects women’s ability to transition
into formal employment by imparting general “work-readiness” skills rather than job-related
skills or organizational identification.
INSERT TABLE 5 ABOUT HERE
Heterogeneity in Main Assignment Effect for Subsamples of New Joiners.
The previous analyses suggest that work readiness is the mechanism through which experienced trainers impact new joiners’ transition into formal employment. An additional test of
this work readiness mechanism would be to explore the effect of experienced trainer assignment on groups of new joiners who are likely to already be work-ready and see whether the
trainer assignment effect diminishes. In particular, I test the effect of trainer assignment on
three such groups of new joiners. The first group is female new joiners referred to the firm by
15
I use this approach rather than adding these mechanism variables to the main regressions presented in
Table 3 because data for these mechanisms is unavailable for the 510 new joiners in my main dataset.
28
existing employees, who presumably get mentored on work-readiness by the employees who
referred them. The second group is female new joiners with prior work experience, who are
likely to have become work-ready as a result of their previous employment experience. And
the third group is male new joiners who are also likely to be work-ready given that men are
primed, from a young age, towards being the primary breadwinner and working in formal
employment.
Table 6 fits a least squares model predicting the probability of remaining in formal employment in three months for these three “work-ready” subsamples of new joiners. Model 1 of
the table explores how the main positive and significant effect of assignment to experienced
trainers changes for female new joiners referred to the firm, Model 2 explores this for female
new joiners with prior work experience and Model 3 for male new joiners. To this end,
Model 1 uses the restricted sample of 510 female new joiners with no prior work experience,
exploiting the fact that 11% of these first-time women workers were referred to the firm. In
contrast, Models 2 and 3 use the full sample of 703 new joiners since new joiners with prior
work experience and men are not part of the restricted dataset. All three models include a
dummy variable for assignment to experienced trainers. In addition, Models 1,2 and 3 respectively include dummies for being referred to the firm, having prior work experience and
being male. And most importantly, Models 1, 2 and 3 respectively include variables interacting experienced trainer assignment with being referred, having work experience and being
male, allowing me to test how the main assignment effect changes for these “work-ready”
subsamples of new joiners. For robustness, all models also control for pre-hire characteristics
of new joiners.
The interaction terms in all three models of Table 6 have large and negative coefficients of
almost the same magnitude as the experienced trainer assignment coefficient in each of the
models. For example, as Model 1 shows, the coefficient for “experienced trainer assignment”
is 0.233, but when this variable is interacted with the “referred” variable, the coefficient is
-0.246. This suggests that even though experienced trainers have large and positive effects
on transition into formal employment for non-referred workers, for referred workers, their
impact is very close to zero. Overall, Table 6 suggests that the effect of experienced trainer
assignment is much smaller for these groups of new joiners who are likely to already be
work-ready, namely female new joiners referred to the firm, female new joiners with prior
29
work experience and male new joiners. These results gives us additional confidence in the
mechanism of work readiness underlying the effect of experienced trainers on successful
transition into formal employment.
INSERT TABLE 6 ABOUT HERE
Qualitative Evidence. Having quantitatively investigated the mechanism of work-readiness,
I finally present qualitative data that further substantiates the mechanism of work-readiness.
The qualitative evidence also illustrates how experienced trainers imparted knowledge on
each of the sub-dimensions of work-readiness, namely self-presentation, interpersonal communication, work-life separation and self-reliance to their new joiners in a way that inexperienced trainers did not.
First, I observed that experienced trainers offered advice to female new joiners on how
they should present themselves at work in a way that inexperienced trainers did not. This
included advice on a wide range of topics including “what to wear to work” and how to
“smile, be cheerful and appear confident” in one’s work tasks no matter how stressed or
confused one might be. With respect to what to wear, for example, an experienced trainer
said, “I advise my trainees that “saris or chudidars are the preferred work wear and [that
they should] not wear jeans to work” as Western clothing was considered unprofessional.
Another trainer also emphasized the importance of looking “neat and clean” and I observed
her advising a new joiner “not to leave her hair open,” suggesting instead that her hair
should “be neatly plaited always.” The value of this advice to adjusting to working life at
the factory was corroborated in my interviews with new joiners. One new joiner assigned to
an inexperienced trainer narrated how she felt “highly embarrassed” when she wore “an old,
torn sari ” to work on the day of an important Hindu festival when all her coworkers had
“shopped for saris for the occasion” and were “wearing gold jewelry.” She explained, “no
one has advised me on this issue and to this day, I’m always conscious about what I wear.”
On the contrary, a new joiner assigned to an experienced trainer said, “I’ve been advised
to dress very simply” and “not wear skirts and trousers” and “dress up only for occasions”
revealing that she seemed to have understood the work norms and was confident in how she
presented herself at work.
30
Second, I observed that experienced trainers inculcated interpersonal communication skills
in their new joiners during the training process. All trainers, whether experienced or inexperienced, emphasized that new joiners were “very shy,” “scared” and “barely talked” when
they first entered the organization. The trainers also seemed to agree that “if [new joiners]
don’t talk, they will not learn the operation properly” and more importantly “they will never
survive on the lines [where] there are lots of people around” and “supervisors often shout
and coworkers often comment on new joiners.” Therefore, experienced trainers used many
strategies get new joiners to “open up.” For example, one experienced trainer said, “I often
reveal personal information about myself and disclose how scared I was when I first joined
work in order to get trainees to talk.” Another experienced trainer revealed how “in the
midst of training, if she noticed a supervisor shouting at a particular operator, she drew her
trainee’s attention to the scene” and asked her trainee to “observe how the operator was
defending herself.” And I observed yet another experienced trainer explicitly introducing her
trainee to other workers on the line, encouraging her trainee to “make friends.” A new joiner
assigned to an experienced trainer corroborated, “my trainer taught me to see the people at
work like a second family” and “this made it much easier to talk to everyone” and “I’m much
happier at work as a result.” Inexperienced trainers, in contrast, argued that whether new
joiners acquired these interpersonal skills “depended on the nature of the trainee,” where
“some automatically pick it up while others don’t.”
Third, I observed that experienced trainers were constantly advising their trainees to strike
a balance between their home and work lives. One experienced trainer asserted that, “failing
to separate work and home lives was a key reason why women quit.” She went on to explain,
“these women face a lot of personal issues that affect them at work - they get up at 5am, do
everything at home, handle chores, cook, clean, take care of children and to top it all, they
often have financial problems and unsupportive family members.” Each experienced trainer
that I interviewed narrated many instances where their female new joiners “cried everyday
worrying about their family and personal problems.” Experienced trainers therefore thought
it crucial to understand each new joiner’s family background and personal situation and
“counsel these women on how to deal with balancing work and personal issues.” While they
broadly advised new joiners that “the best way is to leave behind personal issues back at
home and focus when at work,” they often had to ”draw on [their] own experience” to
31
offer specific solutions to the problems faced by each of their new joiners. For example,
one experienced trainer gave the example of a new joiner “who used cry in the line as her
husband was a wife-beater” and recounted how she “advised her to think about her own
future and more importantly her daughter’s [because] this would help her work harder and
sincerely.” Inexperienced trainers, on the contrary, “focused narrowly on job-based training”
and did not like getting into “messy personal issues.” As a result, new joiners assigned
to inexperienced trainers often reported being “exhausted” and “stressed” and one even
reported experiencing “brain freezes as a result of home and work pressures” whereas new
joiners assigned to experienced trainers more often reported that they were “getting used to
managing” both home and work.
Finally, experienced trainers saw making new joiners self-reliant so that they could take
care of themselves at the factory as an important part of their job. In the words of one
trainer, “when the new joiners come in, they are scared and nervous to be far away from
home and alone, and they don’t know what work means; they’ve never seen anything like a
factory before and everything is intimidating to them.” As a result, women forget “even the
basics” of “how to eat and go to the bathroom.” On top of this, “work pressure is something
completely new to the employee,” which makes them forget to take care of themselves even
more. Therefore, experienced trainers explained how they “needed to treat [new joiners]
like their own children at first” and “slowly build a rapport with trainees” and “eventually
make them learn to be independent.” For example, one experienced trainer said that she
“insists on [her new joiners] drinking water regularly, shows [them] around the line [so that]
operators know where the restrooms are” and she advices them “on eating right and on time
because some operators skip meals to catch up on work.” Another trainer emphasized that
new joiners need to learn how to manage their health at work; for example, she said “a few
young girls find it hard to work during their periods and in such cases, [they need to learn
how] to rest in the ambulance room and seek the help of the other operators to manage
production.” Inexperienced trainers, in contrast, argued that these issues were “too basic
and personal” and “cannot be taught.” Interviews with new joiners assigned to inexperienced
trainers revealed that many of them “did not know where the bathroom was” and some of
them did not even know that there was a clinic on-site whereas many new joiners assigned
to experienced trainers had “established a routine where they come into work at 9am, drink
32
water and visit the restroom at 10am, have tea at 11am and lunch at 12:30pm” and so
on.
This qualitative data thus instills further confidence that the mechanism through which
experienced trainers influence new joiners’ transition into formal employment is by providing
insights on self-presentation, interpersonal communication, work-life separation and selfreliance that are critical to successfully adjusting to working life.
Discussion
Organizational Practices and Successful Transition into Formal Employment
This paper examines the role of organizational practices in explaining the low female labor
force participation in the developing world. I found that the organizational practice of
assignment to experienced trainers facilitated successful transition into formal employment
for first-time female workers, and that the mechanism through which experienced trainers
affected this transition was by inculcating work-readiness in their trainees. Experienced
trainers were randomly assigned to new joiners in my setting, allowing me to causally estimate
the impact of trainer assignment on female new joiners’ probability of remaining in formal
employment after 3 months, 1 month and 2 years of joining the workforce. I found that
assignment to experienced trainers increased new joiners’ probability of remaining in formal
employment in three months of entering the workforce by 20% and similarly increased their
probability of remaining in formal employment in one month of entering the workforce by
10%. In line with this, I found that female new joiners assigned to experienced trainers were
also 40% less likely to leave formal employment in two years. I observed these effects with
and without the addition of a range of controls.
One important mechanism through which experienced trainers affected transition into formal employment was by providing new joiners “work-readiness,” which I define as essential
skills needed to survive at work including an understanding of self-presentation, interpersonal communication, work-life separation and self-reliance. Experienced trainers focused on
making their trainees work-ready in a way that inexperienced trainers did not. As a result,
by the time they had completed their training program, new joiners who had been assigned
33
to experienced trainers reported feeling 5% more work-ready that new joiners assigned to
inexperienced trainers. I posit that inculcating work-readiness is important because firsttime women workers in developing countries lack knowledge on how to conduct themselves
at work given their limited exposure to formal employment.
I further found that transition into formal employment was less affected by assignment to
experienced trainers for three sub-groups of new joiners - female new joiners referred to
the firm, female new joiners with prior work experience and male new joiners. These subgroups acquired work-readiness from the friends who referred them, prior co-workers and
family respectively and were therefore, less impacted by assignment to experienced trainers.
This finding, highlighting that experienced trainer assignment mattered for first-time women
workers but not for these already “work-ready” new joiners, provides additional confidence
in the mechanism of work-readiness through which experienced trainers impact first-time
women workers’ transition into formal employment.
Contributions to Our Understanding of Women’s Labor Force Participation in
Developing Economies
Scholars have long been interested in the persistently low labor force participation of women
in developing economies (Kabeer 2002; NYTimes 2015) because exposure to formal employment has the potential to transform the lives of women in these countries as well as the
organizations that they could serve (Jensen 2012; Villarreal 2007).
My findings contribute to our understanding of low female labor force participation in developing countries in three different ways. First, prior studies have predominantly focused
on studying barriers that prevent women from entering the labor force, either through selfemployment or by finding formal employment within organizations (Thebaud 2010; Zhao and
Wry 2011; Doering and Thebaud 2015; Canales 2013). However, in this paper, I highlight
that in many cases, women are able to overcome these barriers and enter new jobs but they
drop out of the workforce soon after joining, thus failing to successfully transition into formal
employment. In this way, for the first time in the literature, I problematize “transition into
formal employment” as an important channel to explain low female labor force participation
in developing economies. My findings suggest that in order to completely understand formal
or self-employment outcomes of women in developing economies, the literature needs to focus
34
as much on transition and sustenance of employment as on entry.
Second, while prior studies have not specifically investigated the conditions associated with
successful transition into formal employment, they suggest that women’s employment outcomes are likely affected by social, institutional or cultural factors like gender norms and
social welfare programs (Cha and Thebaud 2009; Zhao and Wry 2011; Thebaud 2015; Mair
et al. 2012; Hughes and Jennings 2012). In contrast, in this paper, I demonstrate that conditions within organizations, and specifically organizational practices, play a significant role
in influencing transition into formal employment. These findings suggest that in order to
completely understand women’s employment outcomes in developing economies, it is important to complement large-scale macro analyses (Thebaud 2015; Zhao and Wry 2011) with
field studies within organizations. This paper joins a growing group of studies that begin to
make progress on this issue (Doering and Thebaud 2015; Canales 2013).
And third, I identify a novel mechanism that could explain why despite economic growth,
women’s labor force participation has remained low. Specifically, I highlight the role of
“work-readiness” or essential skills needed to survive work, which seems to be an important
determinant facilitating successful transition into formal employment. While literature in the
field of education (Heckman et al. 2006) has taken seriously the importance of non-cognitive
skills for labor market success, the role of factors like work-readiness has not been considered
in explaining low levels of female labor force participation in developing economies. My
research not only provides a concrete scale to measure work-readiness but it also highlights
the importance of this factor in encouraging women to transition to formal employment.
In the US, organizations like the “National Work Readiness Council” and “Preparing for
Work” offer private and state-sponsored certificate courses and training programs in work
readiness. My research suggests that such programs could be particularly relevant among
women in developing economies.
Contributions to our Understanding of Employer Practices and their Effect on
Career Transitions
Research in organizational theory asserts that conditions within organizations impact employees’ career transitions (Barnett et al. 2000; Baron et al. 1991; Podolny and Baron 1997).
In particular, this research has shown how organizational practices and procedures affect the
35
successful transition of an employee from one job, organization or career to another.
My findings contribute to this understanding of employer practices and their effect on career
transitions in four different ways. First, existing studies have predominantly focused on
career transitions that employees make once their careers have already begun (Dobbin et al.
2015; Kalev et al. 2006; Castilla and Benard 2010; Briscoe and Kellogg 2011). However, the
literature is silent on perhaps one of the most important transitions that individuals make,
namely the transition into formal employment itself. This transition is particularly salient in
a number of different populations beyond first-time women workers in developing economies
such as among unemployed urban youth, war veterans and criminals integrating back into
society. Historically, too, this transition was observed among men transitioning from peasant
work to factory labor around the time of the Industrial Revolution as well as among women
in the United States joining the workforce as part of the war effort around World War
II (Bendix 1956; Myers 1958; Oppenheimer 1970). My paper shows that local employer
practices could be a particularly important tool encouraging the transition of these groups
of individuals into formal employment. Future research should also consider the impact of
other organizational practices on transition into formal employment.
Second, prior studies have predominantly focused on white-collar settings in Western countries and in these settings, have shown that local employer practices influence a variety of
career transitions. However, this research is silent on the impact of organizational practices on employee career transitions that are of particular relevance in the developing world,
such as transition into formal employment, given that employees in Western economies have
typically already transitioned into formal employment. In this paper, for the first time in
the literature, I look at the impact of local employer practices on first-time women workers’
transition into formal employment. By bringing core insights from organizational theory to
the study of organizations in the developing world, we can in this way study the impact of
organizational practices on many employee outcomes that are important, yet understudied,
because they are unique to the developing world.
Third, the literature on the impact of organizational practices has often struggled to make
causal claims because of the lack of random assignment of employees to organizational practices in Western organizations (Pager 2007). However, my study adds to a growing body
of causally identified research set in developing economies that achieves this random assign36
ment either through natural variation or through the use of field experiments (Bernstein
2012; Hasan and Koning 2015). These settings are particularly useful, not only because they
are substantively important, but also because they offer access to data, and the possibility of
random assignment that serves as an ideal lab to test organizational theories. Therefore these
settings offer the promise of new insights on hereto understudied employee outcomes as well
as the promise of more easily finding exogenous variation in the variables of interest.
Fourth, several studies in organizational theory have investigated the effect of training programs on a variety of different outcomes such as employee commitment and inequality within
firms (Knoke and Kalleberg 1994; Osterman 2006; Kalev 2009; Van Maanen 1975; Zbaracki
1998; Dobbin and Kelly 2007). My paper looks beyond the structure and content of training
programs and identifies the impact of specific trainers within a single training program on
new joiners’ probability of remaining in formal employment. In this way, my paper takes seriously the idea that the organizational actors implementing programs and procedures within
firms significantly influence the program outcomes (Castilla 2011). I find that assignment
to experienced trainers has a positive and significant impact on new joiners’ probability of
remaining in formal employment, suggesting that future research should consider not just
the structure of training programs but also the specific trainers conducting the training programs. These findings also contribute to an ongoing debate in the literature on whether
training programs can result in any meaningful behavioral change at all (Paluck and Green
2009; Dobbin and Kalev 2008). Unlike several studies in the literature, my paper shows that
assignment to experienced trainers can inculcate work-readiness skills in new joiners and in
this way, can be quite effective to career success.
Practical Implications
This study also offers several policy implications. For developing countries that implemented
economic liberalization policies hoping that opening up their markets to foreign direct investment would spur economic growth through job creation and a rise in labor force participation,
the practical implications of the findings presented here are clear: attracting foreign direct
investment is insufficient to increase labor force participation among sub-populations who
have never formal worked before including women, minorities and indigenous groups. These
countries would benefit from creating work readiness programs to facilitate the transition
37
of these sub-populations into formal employment. This is a necessary step before these
countries can reap the benefits of economic liberalization.
For organizations hiring first-time workers and facing severe attrition in this population,
there are two practical implications from the findings presented in this paper - first, the
paper highlights the importance of the first few months of employment for first-time workers
in organizations because they are critical to determining if the workers will adjust to working
life and survive formal employment. Second, the paper uncovers the importance of paying
attention to the design of training and orientation programs that workers experience when
they first enter organizations. As my results suggest, practices such as trainer assignment
have a huge impact on whether first-time workers transition into formal employment.
Finally, for individuals joining the workforce, the practical implications are quite stark.
Organizational factors outside of one’s control such as assignment to an inexperienced trainer
or manager (Lazear et al. 2015) could significantly hinder career success. My results suggests
that in such cases, first-time workers would do well to surround themselves with experienced
peers and mentors in their organization who can expose them to the norms of working life
and make them work-ready.
In summary, this study demonstrates that practices and procedures within organizations
have a significant role to play in influencing whether first-time women workers are able to
sustain formal employment and successfully enter the labor force. In particular, these firsttime women workers often lack “work-readiness” or the basic skills needed to survive and
deal with working life and the practices that these women are exposed to once they enter
organizations influence whether they become work-ready and can be successful in formal
employment. Given that about one billion such first-time women workers are now entering
formal employment in the developing world as a result of globalization and job creation,
these findings have the potential to shape policies that can facilitate their transition into
formal employment.
38
References
Atkin, David. 2009. “Working for the future: Female factory work and child health in
mexico.” Unpublished Manuscript, Yale University .
Azoulay, Pierre, Christopher Liu, and Toby Stuart. 2009. “Social influence given (partially)
deliberate matching: Career imprints in the creation of academic entrepreneurs.” Harvard
Business School Entrepreneurial Management Working Paper .
Barnett, William P., James N. Baron, and Toby E. Stuart. 2000. “Avenues of Attainment:
Occupational Demography and Organizational Careers in the California Civil Service.”
American Journal of Sociology 106:88–144.
Baron, James N., Brian S. Mittman, and Andrew E. Newman. 1991. “Targets of Opportunity: Organizational and Environmental Determinants of Gender Integration within the
California Civil Service, 1979-1985.” American Journal of Sociology 96:1362–1401.
Bartley, Tim. 2007. “Institutional Emergence in an Era of Globalization: The Rise of
Transnational Private Regulation of Labor and Environmental Conditions.” American
Journal of Sociology 113:297–351.
Batt, Rosemary, David Holman, and Ursula Holtgrewe. 2009. “The Globalization of Service
Work: Comparative Institutional Perspectives on Call Centers Introduction to a Special
Issue of the Industrial & Labor Relations Review.” Industrial & Labor Relations Review
62:453–488.
Becker, Gary S. 1964. “Human capital theory.” Columbia, New York .
Bendix, Reinhard. 1956. Work and authority in industry: managerial ideologies in the course
of industrialization. Transaction Publishers.
Bernstein, Ethan S. 2012. “The transparency paradox a role for privacy in organizational
learning and operational control.” Administrative Science Quarterly 57:181–216.
Boyd, Donald, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, Jonah Rockoff, and James Wyckoff. 2008.
“The narrowing gap in New York City teacher qualifications and its implications for stu-
39
dent achievement in high-poverty schools.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
27:793–818.
Briscoe, Forrest. 2006. “Temporal flexibility and careers: The role of large-scale organizations
for physicians.” Industrial & Labor Relations Review 60:88–104.
Briscoe, Forrest and Katherine C. Kellogg. 2011. “The Initial Assignment Effect Local Employer Practices and Positive Career Outcomes for Work-Family Program Users.” American Sociological Review 76:291–319.
Burton, M. Diane and Christine M. Beckman. 2007. “Leaving a legacy: Position imprints
and successor turnover in young firms.” American Sociological Review 72:239–266.
Canales, Rodrigo. 2013. “Weaving straw into gold: Managing organizational tensions between standardization and flexibility in microfinance.” Organization Science 25:1–28.
Canales, Rodrigo and Jason Greenberg. 2015. “A Matter of (Relational) Style: Loan Officer Consistency and Exchange Continuity in Microfinance.” Forthcoming, Management
Science .
Cappelli, Peter, Laurie Bassi, Harry Katz, David Knoke, Paul Osterman, and Michael Useem.
1997. Change at work. ERIC.
Castilla, Emilio J. 2005. “Social networks and employee performance in a call center.”
American journal of sociology 110:1243–1283.
Castilla, Emilio J. 2008. “Gender, race, and meritocracy in Organizational careers.” American Journal of Sociology 113:1479–1526.
Castilla, Emilio J. 2011. “Bringing Managers Back In: Managerial Influences on Workplace
Inequality.” American Sociological Review 76:667–694.
Castilla, Emilio J. and Stephen Benard. 2010. “The paradox of meritocracy in organizations.”
Administrative Science Quarterly 55:543–676.
Cha, Youngjoo and Sarah Thebaud. 2009. “Labor markets, breadwinning, and beliefs how
economic context shapes men’s gender ideology.” Gender & Society 23:215–243.
Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff. 2013. “Measuring the impacts of
40
teachers II: Teacher value-added and student outcomes in adulthood.” Technical report,
National Bureau of Economic Research.
Cobb, Adam, Eric Zhao, and Tyler Wry. 2015. “Chameleons at the Gate: How Instability
and Risk affect the Funding of Microfinance Organizations in the Developing World.”
Unpublished Manuscript .
Dezso, Cristian L. and David Gaddis Ross. 2012. “Does female representation in top management improve firm performance? A panel data investigation.” Strategic Management
Journal 33:1072–1089.
DiPrete, Thomas A. and Gregory M. Eirich. 2006. “Cumulative advantage as a mechanism
for inequality: A review of theoretical and empirical developments.” Annual review of
sociology pp. 271–297.
Dobbin, Frank and Alexandra Kalev. 2008. “Try and Make Me!: Why Corporate Diversity
Training Fails.” In Discoveries of the Discrimination Research Group Conference, Palo
Alto, CA.
Dobbin, Frank and ErinL. Kelly. 2007. “How to Stop Harassment: Professional Construction
of Legal Compliance in Organizations.” American Journal of Sociology 112:1203–1243.
Dobbin, Frank, Daniel Schrage, and Alexandra Kalev. 2015. “Rage against the Iron Cage
The Varied Effects of Bureaucratic Personnel Reforms on Diversity.” American Sociological
Review p. 0003122415596416.
Doering, Laura. 2013. “Necessity is the Mother of Isomorphism: Income Stratification and
the Provision of Novelty.” In Academy of Management Proceedings, volume 2013, p. 10553.
Academy of Management.
Doering, Laura and Sarah Thebaud. 2015. “The Effects of Gendered Occupational Roles on
Men’s and Women’s Workplace Authority: Evidence from Microfinance.” Working Paper
.
Doeringer, Peter and Michael J. Piore. 1971. “Internal labor markets and manpower adjustment.” New York: DC Heath and Company .
41
Dokko, Gina, Steffanie L. Wilk, and Nancy P. Rothbard. 2009. “Unpacking prior experience:
How career history affects job performance.” Organization Science 20:51–68.
Duflo, Esther, Rachel Glennerster, and Michael Kremer. 2007. “Using randomization in
development economics research: A toolkit.” Handbook of development economics 4:3895–
3962.
Fernandez, Roberto M., Emilio J. Castilla, and Paul Moore. 2000. “Social capital at work:
Networks and employment at a phone center.” American journal of sociology pp. 1288–
1356.
Fernandez, Roberto M. and Nancy Weinberg. 1997. “Sifting and Sorting: Personal Contacts
and Hiring in a Retail Bank.” American Sociological Review 62:883–902.
Glaser, Barney and Anselm Strauss. 1967. “The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies
for qualitative inquiry.” London, England: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson .
Goldin, Claudia. 2006. “The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Womens Employment.”
American Economic Review 96.
Hasan, Sharique and Rembrand Koning. 2015. “Randomizing Networks in the Field.” Working Paper .
Heath, Rachel and A. Mushfiq Mobarak. 2012. “Does demand or supply constrain investments in education? Evidence from garment sector jobs in Bangladesh.” Unpublished
manuscript .
Heckman, James J., Robert J. LaLonde, and Jeffrey A. Smith. 1999. “The economics and
econometrics of active labor market programs.” Handbook of labor economics 3:1865–2097.
Heckman, James J., Jora Stixrud, and Sergio Urzua. 2006. “The effects of cognitive and
noncognitive abilities on labor market outcomes and social behavior.” Technical report,
National Bureau of Economic Research.
Hughes, Karen D. and Jennifer E. Jennings. 2012. Global women’s entrepreneurship research:
diverse settings, questions, and approaches. Edward Elgar Publishing.
ILO. 2012. Global Employment Trends for Women. Geneva.
42
ILO. 2015. Key Indicators of the Labor Market. Geneva.
IZA. 2014. Female Labor Force Participation in Developing Countries. Germany.
Jennings, Jennifer, Kimberly Eddleston, P. Devereaux Jennings, and Ravi Sarathy. 2015.
Firms Within Families: Enterprising in Diverse Country Contexts. Place of publication
not identified: Edward Elgar Pub.
Jensen, Robert. 2012. “Do Labor Market Opportunities Affect Young Women’s Work and
Family Decisions? Experimental Evidence from India.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics pp. 1–40.
Kabeer, Naila. 2002. The power to choose: Bangladeshi women and labor market decisions
in London and Dhaka. Verso.
Kalev, Alexandra. 2009. “Cracking the Glass Cages? Restructuring and Ascriptive Inequality
at Work.” American Journal of Sociology 114:1591–1643.
Kalev, Alexandra and Frank Dobbin. 2006. “Enforcement of civil rights law in private
workplaces: The effects of compliance reviews and lawsuits over time.” Law & Social
Inquiry 31:855–903.
Kalev, Alexandra, Frank Dobbin, and Erin Kelly. 2006. “Best practices or best guesses?
Assessing the efficacy of corporate affirmative action and diversity policies.” American
sociological review 71:589–617.
Kellogg, Katherine C. 2009. “Operating room: Relational spaces and microinstitutional
change in Surgery1.” American Journal of Sociology 115:657–711.
Kelly, Erin L. and Alexandra Kalev. 2006. “Managing flexible work arrangements in US
organizations: formalized discretion or a right to ask.” Socio-Economic Review 4:379–
416.
Kelly, Erin L. and Phyllis Moen. 2007. “Rethinking the clockwork of work: Why schedule
control may pay off at work and at home.” Advances in Developing Human Resources
9:487–506.
43
Knoke, David and Arne L. Kalleberg. 1994. “Job Training in U.S. Organizations.” American
Sociological Review 59:537–546.
Lazear, Edward P., Kathryn L. Shaw, and Christopher T. Stanton. 2015. “The Value of
Bosses.” Journal of Labor Economics 33:823–861.
Locke, Richard, Matthew Amengual, and Akshay Mangla. 2009. “Virtue out of necessity? Compliance, commitment, and the improvement of labor conditions in global supply
chains.” Politics & Society 37:319–351.
Luke, Nancy and Kaivan Munshi. 2011. “Women as agents of change: Female income and
mobility in India.” Journal of Development Economics 94:1–17.
Mael, Fred and Blake E. Ashforth. 1992. “Alumni and their alma mater: A partial test of the
reformulated model of organizational identification.” Journal of organizational Behavior
13:103–123.
Mair, Johanna, Ignasi Mart, and Marc J. Ventresca. 2012. “Building inclusive markets in
rural Bangladesh: How intermediaries work institutional voids.” Academy of Management
Journal 55:819–850.
McEvily, Bill, Jonathan Jaffee, and Marco Tortoriello. 2012. “Not all bridging ties are
equal: Network imprinting and firm growth in the Nashville legal industry, 19331978.”
Organization science 23:547–563.
Myers, Charles Andrew. 1958. Labor problems in the industrialization of India. Harvard
University Press.
NYTimes. 2015. “Why Arent Indias Women Working?” The New York Times .
Oppenheimer, Valerie Kincade. 1970. “The Female Labor Force in the United States; Demographic and Economic Factors Concerning Its Growth and Changing Composition.”
Population Monograph Series, No. 5. .
Osterman, Paul. 1984. Internal labor markets, volume 1. The MIT Press.
Osterman, Paul. 1995. “Skill, training, and work organization in American establishments.”
Industrial relations: a journal of economy and society 34:125–146.
44
Osterman, Paul. 2006. “Overcoming oligarchy: Culture and agency in social movement
organizations.” Administrative Science Quarterly 51:622–649.
Pager, Devah. 2007. “The use of field experiments for studies of employment discrimination:
Contributions, critiques, and directions for the future.” The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 609:104–133.
Paluck, Elizabeth Levy and Donald P. Green. 2009. “Prejudice reduction: What works? A
review and assessment of research and practice.” Annual review of psychology 60:339–367.
Podolny, Joel M. and James N. Baron. 1997. “Resources and Relationships: Social Networks
and Mobility in the Workplace.” American Sociological Review 62:673–693.
Ranganathan, Aruna and Sarosh Kuruvilla. 2008. “Employee turnover in the business process
outsourcing industry in India.” Management practices in high-tech environments pp. 110–
132.
Rice, Jennifer King. 2003. Teacher quality: Understanding the effectiveness of teacher attributes. ERIC.
Rice, Jennifer King. 2010. “The Impact of Teacher Experience: Examining the Evidence
and Policy Implications. Brief No. 11.” National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data
in Education Research .
Schein, Edgar H. 1978. Career dynamics. Addison-Wesley.
Singh, Jasjit and Pushan Dutt. 2015. “Corporate Engagement at the Base of the Pyramid:
Commercial Microfinance and Entrepreneurship.” Unpublished Manuscript .
Sorensen, Jesper B. 2004. “The Organizational Demography of Racial Employment Segregation1.” American Journal of Sociology 110:626–671.
Thebaud, Sarah. 2010. “Masculinity, Bargaining, and Breadwinning Understanding Mens
Housework in the Cultural Context of Paid Work.” Gender & society 24:330–354.
Thebaud, Sarah. 2015. “Business as Plan B Institutional Foundations of Gender Inequality
in Entrepreneurship across 24 Industrialized Countries.” Administrative Science Quarterly
60:671–711.
45
Van Maanen, John. 1975. “Police Socialization: A Longitudinal Examination of Job Attitudes in an Urban Police Department.” Administrative Science Quarterly 20:207–228.
Van Maanen, John. 1976. Breaking in: Socialization to work. En: Robert Dubin (Ed.),
Handbook of work, organization and society. Chicago: Rand McNally.
Van Maanen, John and Edgar H. Schein. 1979. “Toward a theory of organizational socialization.” Research in organizational behavior 1:209–264.
Villarreal, Andrs. 2007. “Womens Employment Status, Coercive Control, and Intimate
Partner Violence in Mexico.” Journal of Marriage and Family 69:418–434.
Yu, Wei-Hsin. 2005. “Changes in Women’s Postmarital Employment in Japan and Taiwan.”
Demography 42:693–717.
Zbaracki, Mark J. 1998. “The Rhetoric and Reality of Total Quality Management.” Administrative Science Quarterly 43:602–636.
Zhao, Eric Yanfei and Tyler Earle Wry. 2011. “Societal patriarchal logics and the emergence
of microfinance organizations.” In Academy of Management Proceedings, volume 2011,
pp. 1–6. Academy of Management.
46
Figures and Tables
Table 1: Descriptive Characteristics of New Joiner Sample (n=510)
Fraction Female
Work Experience (years)
Fraction Married
Number of Children
Family Size
Age
Years of Education
Fraction from Karnataka
Fraction Hindu
Fraction with A Grade on Sewing Test
Fraction Referred to Work
Fraction Assigned to Experienced Trainers
Number of Days Spent in Training
Fraction Working in Jacket Lines
Fraction Working on Assembly Operations
Per Day Wages (Rupees)
Fraction Still Working in 3 Months
Fraction Still Working in 1 Month
47
mean
sd
1
0
0.371
0.392
3.075
24.18
7.751
0.786
0.971
0.239
0.116
0.425
21.51
0.659
0.625
252
0.637
0.888
0
0
0.483
0.697
1.278
5.311
3.268
0.410
0.169
0.427
0.320
0.495
13.72
0.475
0.484
0
0.481
0.315
48
293
0.341
(0.475)
0.352
(0.632)
2.997
(1.223)
23.77
(4.980)
7.863
(3.275)
0.775
(0.418)
0.973
(0.163)
0.256
(0.437)
0.116
(0.321)
mean coefficients; sd in parentheses
* p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01
Note: Experienced trainers have over 9 years of work experience (above the median)
Observations
Fraction Referred to Work
Fraction with A Grade on Sewing Test
Fraction Hindu
Fraction from Karnataka
Years of Education
Age
Family Size
Number of Children
Fraction Married
217
0.410
(0.493)
0.447
(0.775)
3.180
(1.344)
24.74
(5.691)
7.599
(3.259)
0.802
(0.400)
0.968
(0.177)
0.217
(0.413)
0.115
(0.320)
0.001
0.039
0.005
-0.027
0.264
-0.970∗∗
-0.183
-0.095
-0.069
Table 2: Pre-Hire Characteristics of New Joiners Assigned to Inexperienced versus Experienced Trainers
New Joiners by Assignment to
Inexperienced Trainers Experienced Trainers Difference
.45
Probability of Being Employed in 3 Months
.55
.65
.75
.85
.95
Figure 1: Effect of Trainer Assignment on First-Time Female Workers’ Probability of Remaining in Formal Employment after Three Months of Entering the Workforce
Inexperienced Trainers
Experienced Trainers
.45
Probability of Being Employed in 1 Month
.55
.65
.75
.85
.95
Figure 2: Effect of Trainer Assignment on First-Time Female Workers’ Probability of Remaining in Formal Employment after One Month of Entering the Workforce
Inexperienced Trainers
49
Experienced Trainers
Table 3: OLS Regression of Effect of Trainer Assignment on Probability of Remaining in
Formal Employment after Three Months and One Month of Entering the Workforce for
First-Time Female Workers
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
3-Month 3-Month 1-Month 1-Month
Experienced Trainer Assignment
0.198∗∗∗
(0.033)
0.195∗∗∗
(0.032)
0.098∗∗∗
(0.018)
0.100∗∗∗
(0.019)
Family Size
0.010
(0.019)
0.005
(0.007)
Number of Children
0.033
(0.022)
0.010
(0.017)
Married
0.161∗∗∗
(0.022)
0.019
(0.026)
Age
-0.013∗∗
(0.005)
-0.002
(0.002)
From Karnataka
-0.083
(0.071)
-0.059∗
(0.027)
Years of Education
-0.012∗
(0.006)
0.005
(0.006)
Hindu
0.067
(0.143)
0.020
(0.102)
A Grade on Sewing Test
0.006
(0.035)
-0.009
(0.028)
Constant
Observations
0.553∗∗∗
(0.021)
0.868∗∗∗
(0.236)
0.846∗∗∗
(0.016)
0.859∗∗∗
(0.091)
510
510
510
510
Standard errors clustered by trainer are in parentheses
* p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01
50
0.00
Survival in Formal Employment
0.25
0.50
0.75
1.00
Figure 3: Effect of Trainer Assignment on First-Time Female Workers’ Long-Term Survival
in Formal Employment (Kaplan-Meier)
0
10
20
Months Lapsed
Inexperienced Trainer Assignment
Experienced Trainer Assignment
51
30
Table 4: Cox Hazard Rate Model of Effect of Trainer Assignment on Hazard of Leaving
Formal Employment for First-Time Female Workers
(1)
(2)
Hazard Ratio Hazard Ratio
Experienced Trainer Assignment
0.622∗∗∗
(0.096)
0.637∗∗∗
(0.081)
Family Size
0.849∗∗∗
(0.051)
Number of Children
0.925
(0.107)
Married
0.431∗∗∗
(0.069)
Age
1.037∗∗
(0.016)
From Karnataka
1.250
(0.172)
Years of Education
1.027
(0.020)
Hindu
0.772
(0.183)
A Grade on Sewing Test
0.892
(0.106)
Observations
510
Exponentiated coefficients
Standard errors clustered by trainer are in parentheses
* p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01
52
510
Table 5: OLS Regression of Effect of Trainer Assignment on Three Possible Mechanisms for
First-Time Female Workers’ Continued Employment
(1)
(2)
(3)
Daily Output Org. Identification Work Readiness
2.065
(4.315)
-0.082
(0.057)
0.148∗∗
(0.038)
53.936∗∗∗
(8.971)
4.064∗∗∗
(0.208)
2.773∗∗∗
(0.230)
Pre-Hire Controls
Yes
Yes
Yes
Observations
Mean of DV
Std. Dev. of DV
90
46.920
16.736
50
3.783
0.330
50
3.285
0.231
Experienced Trainer Assignment
Constant
Standard errors clustered by trainer are in parentheses
* p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01
Pre-hire controls include marital status, number of children, family size,
age, education, hometown location, religion and sewing skills at time of entry
Note: Data for Model 1 comes from RFID output data on a subsample of new joiners;
Data for Models 2 and 3 come a survey of 50 new joiners;
Daily output is measured as number of pieces produced adjusted for standard time to produce
that piece so that the measure is comparable across workers producing different kinds of pieces;
Org. Identification and Work Readiness are measured on 5 point ascending Likert scales;
refer to Appendix A for detailed descriptions of the scales
53
Table 6: OLS Regression of Effect of Trainer Assignment on Probability of Remaining in
Formal Employment after Three Months for Referred, Experienced and Male New Joiners
(1)
(2)
(3)
3-Month 3-Month 3-Month
Experienced Trainer Assignment
0.223∗∗
(0.032)
Referred
0.150∗∗
(0.064)
Experienced Trainer * Referred
-0.246∗∗
(0.083)
0.177∗∗
(0.034)
Prior Work Experience
-0.012
(0.047)
Experienced Trainer * Prior Work Exp
-0.158∗
(0.079)
0.169∗∗
(0.024)
Male
-0.060
(0.056)
Experienced Trainer * Male
-0.197+
(0.148)
0.848∗∗
(0.245)
0.644∗∗
(0.201)
0.712∗∗
(0.186)
Pre-Hire Controls
Yes
Yes
Yes
Observations
510
703
703
Constant
Standard errors clustered by trainer are in parentheses
+p<0.2, * p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01
Pre-hire controls include marital status, number of children, family size,
age, education, hometown location, religion and sewing skills at time of entry
Note: Model 1 uses the restricted sample of female first-time new joiners whereas
Models 2 and 3 use the full sample of new joiners which includes
male new joiners as well as those with prior work experience;
7% of the full sample of 703 new joiners is male and 21% of this sample
has prior work experience.
54
Appendix A: Description of Scales
Scale Organizational Identification (Mael and Ashforth 1992) Work Readiness Variable Description When someone criticizes my organization, it feels like a personal insult I am very interested in what others think about my organization When I talk about my organization, I usually say “we” rather than “they” My organization’s success is my success When someone praises my organization, it feels like a personal compliment If a story in the media criticizes my organization, I would be embarrassed Self-­‐Presentation at Work I know how to dress for work I present myself confidently at work I am often late to work (reverse) I take responsibility for my tasks I am disciplined in meeting my targets each day Interpersonal Communication I have made friends at work I am scared of my supervisor (reverse) I reply back when I’m spoken to I ask questions when in doubt I defend myself when I’m criticized without reason Work-­‐Life Separation I struggle to balance work and home life (reverse) I worry about my children and family while at work (reverse) I am constantly tired (reverse) My work routine is stressful (reverse) I miss my family at work (reverse) Self-­‐Reliance I take care of my health at work I skip meals at work (reverse) I drink plenty of water at work I go to the bathroom when I need to at work I seek medical help when I am not feeling well 55
Values 1=Strongly Disagree 2=Disagree 3=Neither Agree nor Disagree 4=Agree 5-­‐Strongly Agree 1=Strongly Disagree 2=Disagree 3=Neither Agree nor Disagree 4=Agree 5-­‐Strongly Agree Appendix B: Robustness Checks
Table 7: OLS Regression of Effect of Trainer Assignment on Probability of Remaining in
Formal Employment after Three Months of Entering the Workforce for First-Time Female
Workers
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
3-Month 3-Month 3-Month 3-Month 3-Month
Experienced Trainer Assignment
0.196∗∗∗
(0.032)
Number of Days Spent in Training
0.003
(0.002)
Working in Jacket Lines
0.187∗∗∗
(0.033)
0.195∗∗∗
(0.031)
0.213∗∗∗
(0.035)
0.198∗∗∗
(0.033)
0.001
(0.002)
0.036
(0.036)
Working on Assembly Operations
0.067
(0.039)
0.014
(0.040)
0.007
(0.037)
0.738∗∗
(0.227)
0.871∗∗
(0.242)
0.856∗∗
(0.239)
0.820∗∗
(0.227)
0.792∗∗
(0.237)
Month-Year FE
No
No
No
Yes
Yes
Pre-Hire Controls
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Observations
510
510
510
510
510
Constant
Standard errors clustered by trainer are in parentheses
* p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01
Pre-hire controls include marital status, number of children, family size,
age, education, hometown location, religion and sewing skills at time of entry.
56