Women in wage labour: A systematic review of the effectiveness and design features of interventions supporting women's participation in wage labour in higher growth and/or male-dominated sectors in low and middle-income countries

Protocol for a systematic review

Abstract

Women’s participation in wage labour markets in Low- and Middle-Income Countries lags far behind men’s participation. What is more, wage labour markets are highly segregated by gender with women’s participation being particularly low in high-growth economic sectors such as finance, IT, and construction. Public and private sector organisations in LMICs have invested a significant amount of resources to increase women’s labour market participation, but it is unclear which of their programmes work and why. Evaluations of individual programmes such as labour market skills training vary in their assessments, as do the programmes themselves with a variety of designs and approaches being implemented.

This systematic review aims to bring together all the available evidence on impact evaluations investigating the effects of interventions supporting women’s participation in wage labour in higher growth and/or male-dominated economic sectors. The review will conduct an evidence map of impact evaluation research before using meta-analysis and qualitative comparative analysis to synthesise the evaluations’ findings. In this, the review will follow an aggregative approach and only include counterfactual impact evaluations, whose combined effect size will be calculated using random effects meta-analysis. Qualitative comparative analysis will be applied to unpack the variety of design features of interventions associated with impacts on wage labour market participation. The systematic review will be completed by December 2017.

The systematic review was publised in June 2018

Citation

Langer L, Tripney J, Erasmus Y, Tannous N, Chisoro C, Opondo M, Zigana L, Obuku E, van Rooyen C, Stewart R (2017) Women in wage labour: A systematic review of the effectiveness and design features of interventions supporting women’s participation in wage labour in higher growth and/or male-dominated sectors in LMICs. A systematic Review Protocol. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.

Women in wage labour: A systematic review of the effectiveness and design features of interventions supporting women’s participation in wage labour in higher growth and/or male-dominated sectors in low and middle-income countries

Published 1 May 2017