Glass Walls: Experimental Evidence on Access Constraints Faced by Women

Individual progress often requires being able to access opportunities. Yet many, especially women, face significant barriers in doing so. This paper examines access constraints in the context of skill acquisition. Using experimental evidence from rural Pakistan, we show that physical distance poses a significant hurdle. Women whose villages are randomly selected to receive a training center are four times as likely to complete a skills development course than women who have to travel just a few kilometers. Half of this penalty is paid simply upon crossing the (virtual) village boundary and therefore cannot be readily reconciled with time or economic costs associated with travel. Instead, this boundary effect likely reflects the social costs women face when temporarily leaving their village. This constraint is costly to compensate. Using exogenous variation in stipend offered, we estimate that over half of monthly household expenditure would need to be paid to allow women to cross this boundary. In examining interventions to lower this barrier, we find that while informational and social interventions have little impact, providing reliable group transportation partly addresses the access constraint. Our results further suggest the boundary effect is due to social perceptions that constrain women's agency and mobility: It is lower for women who enjoy more influence over domestic affairs, have fewer dependents, hold lower socioeconomic status, and live in more ethnically diverse communities. Our work suggests that while non-economic obstacles faced by women are indeed substantial, interventions attuned to the local context can offer feasible ways to …