Human Capital

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Human Capital July 2026 Dear SAR GIL-WEESA Members and Colleagues, Human capital—education, skills, and health—is a critical building block for women’s economic empowerment. Yet investments in human capital do not automatically translate into more and better jobs for women unless other factors that undermine women’s economic opportunities—such as restrictive social norms, marriage-market dynamics, and unequal caregiving responsibilities—are also addressed. Help us expand conversations on women's economic empowerment. Please forward this email to anyone who may be interested. Do you have any new reports, blogs, publications, or events you would like to share with our community? We welcome member submissions. Email us at weesacop@worldbank.org. Happy reading! Team WEESA WEESA is the community of practice (CoP) of the World Bank’s South Asia Gender Innovation Lab (SAR GIL), an evidence-based solutions platform for gender equality and women’s economic empowerment in South Asia.

News from SAR GIL

This Journal of Public Economics article by SAR GIL’s Kate Vyborny and co-authors examines what happens when women unexpectedly exit Pakistan's largest female-targeted cash transfer program after receiving benefits for a decade. Using a regression discontinuity-in-differences design, they find no evidence that program exit reduced women's empowerment, well-being, or safety one year later. This Center for Global Development blog by SAR GIL's Sofia Amaral and co-authors identifies 6 research priorities to strengthen efforts to prevent school-related violence, arguing that closing key evidence gaps is essential to scaling effective interventions and improving children's safety and learning. This International Growth Centre (IGC) blog co-authored by SAR GIL’s Kate Vyborny finds that digitizing land records in Pakistan increased daughters' chances of inheriting land by more than 50%, but also triggered unintended effects—including earlier marriage and lower school attendance—highlighting the need to pair property rights reforms with broader support for women's well-being.

Spotlight 💡

Masculinity Norms and Their Economic Implications (2026) Economists have long examined gender norms affecting women, but masculinity norms have received far less attention. This Annual Review of Economics article—incorporating comments from SAR GIL’s Sofia Amaral—draws on multiple disciplines and new survey data from 70 countries to show how expectations of masculinity shape men’s health behaviors, labor market choices, aggression, and political preferences. It also documents wide global variations with strong predictive power for socioeconomic and political outcomes.

What We're Watching and Listening To

Gender inequality in Labor Markets: Why Growth and Education Are not Enough (2026) On this episode of VoxDevTalks, Barbara Petrongolo and Ashwini Deshpande examine whether any country has truly closed the gender gap in the labor market. Petrongolo’s answer is a firm no: earnings gaps remain wide even in high-income countries, and Deshpande’s India perspective reinforces a recurrent finding in this newsletter—growth and education help, but unpaid care burdens, restrictive social norms, and male-centered labor markets continue to hold women back.

Why Paternity Leave Benefits Everyone (2026) Paternity leave is far more than a benefit for new fathers—it strengthens families, workplaces, and economies. In this TED Talk, Japanese author Shu Matsuo Post reflects on his 7 months of leave, arguing that equitable parental leave fosters more equal workplaces, boosts productivity, and is associated with higher female labor force participation, narrower pay gaps, better long-term outcomes for children, and stronger employee retention and morale.

William Easterly Still Believes Development Is Freedom (2026) In this Devex Theory of Change podcast, economist William Easterly posits that technocratic, top-down development strategies often sideline the people they are intended to serve. He traces the historical roots of this approach and its influence on modern development, contending that lasting progress depends on strategies grounded in freedom, local decision-making, and individual agency.

Featured Resources on South Asia

Although women across South Asia are making strides in educational attainment, they remain far from parity in economic participation.

Source: World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2025 Note: Includes Pakistan and Afghanistan

Featured Resources on South Asia

Going the Distance: Hybrid Vocational Training for Women in Nepal (2025) In contexts where women face mobility, safety, and caregiving constraints, how skills training is delivered can matter as much as what is taught. This randomized study conducted in Nepal evaluates a hybrid distance-learning model designed to ease the geographic and time barriers that keep women out of vocational and professional programs. The findings provide causal evidence that flexible, technology-enabled training can expand women's access to skills and strengthen the pathway from human capital gains to paid employment. The study offers timely guidance for policymakers and practitioners seeking scalable ways to boost women's workforce participation in South Asia.

Quality Higher Education for Jobs and Prosperity: Sri Lanka's AHEAD Project (2026) Sri Lanka has long led South Asia in girls' educational attainment and gender parity in schooling. However, women remain underrepresented in many STEM fields, particularly engineering, mathematics, and technology. This World Bank brief reports on the implementation of the Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development (AHEAD) project, which sought to expand STEM access, improve degree quality, and strengthen university-industry links. More than 120,000 students—including about 70,000 women—benefited from curriculum reforms, employer partnerships, and English-language training designed to better align graduates' skills with labor market needs.

Smart Skilling: Experimental Evidence on Vocational Training Design (2025) This randomized trial in India reveals that adding digital and project-based experiential learning to standard vocational training significantly improves women’s employment outcomes. Researchers assigned applicants to conventional training, an enhanced training with digital and experiential components, or no training at all. After nearly a year, women in the enhanced program were more likely to work in their preferred sector, become self-employed, earn higher incomes, work more hours, and use social media to grow their businesses. The study also finds improvements in well-being and job satisfaction, suggesting that stronger labor market opportunities translated into broader gains. The results highlight digital skills as a critical ingredient in turning training into economic opportunity.

Corporate Practices: Shaping Livelihoods in Pakistan: A Landscape Analysis (2026) The Pakistan Business Council’s Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business (CERB) has published its Spring 2026 Creating Livelihoods Survey, offering a close look at how 72 major firms are translating human-capital commitments into practice. The survey measures performance across 40 indicators, including employee health and safety, skills development, decent work, diversity and inclusion, and responsible supply-chain practices. Spanning multiple industries, this landscape analysis report establishes a benchmark for how Pakistan's private sector is building more inclusive and resilient workplaces. Its findings showcase emerging corporate practices that are strengthening livelihoods and advancing responsible business.

Evidence from Elsewhere

Closing the Gender Gap in Education and Employment (2025) This IFC and UNESCO report explores a persistent paradox in human capital: women increasingly outnumber men in tertiary education, yet continue to face gaps in employment, earnings, and career advancement. Drawing on graduate tracer surveys from IFC’s Vitae Employability program across lower- and middle-income countries, it finds that while women’s concentration in lower-paying fields and underrepresentation in STEM contribute to these disparities, gaps persist even among graduates with similar qualifications and experience. The analysis shifts the focus from educational access to lifelong employability, emphasizing stronger career guidance, STEM pathways, employer engagement, and efforts to address the workplace norms and barriers that devalue women's credentials and limit the returns to their education.

Child Penalty Atlas (2025) This report presents the first global atlas of motherhood penalties in employment, documenting how motherhood reshapes women's economic opportunities across 134 countries. Using a pseudo-event-study approach based on widely available cross-sectional data, the authors find that women's employment and earnings decline sharply after the birth of a first child, while men's labor market trajectories remain largely unchanged. As economies shift toward salaried work, motherhood penalties emerge as a leading driver of gender inequality. The findings suggest that improving women's educational attainment alone is unlikely to close labor market gaps without policies that support caregiving, reduce career interruptions, and promote social norm change to help women remain attached to the workforce during the transition to parenthood.

The Return on Education and the Gender Wage Gap in China: A Sector Perspective (2025) Grounded in human capital theory, this study examines how education shapes earnings and intersects with China’s gender wage gap across public and private sectors. It finds that schooling raises pay for both men and women, but the returns to education—and the gender gaps in those returns—vary sharply by sector. Well-educated women continue to gravitate toward the more stable public sector, where gender disparities are narrower, while the private sector's greater volatility and labor-intensive jobs are associated with wider gaps, especially among middle- and lower-wage workers. The research underscores a broader lesson for policymakers: education alone cannot eliminate gender disparities because the institutions and sectors that employ women ultimately determine how their human capital is rewarded.

Gender Equality and Decent Work Environment in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Review (2025) This peer-reviewed scoping review of research published between 2018 and 2024 finds that sub-Saharan Africa has made meaningful progress in girls' education, women's labor force participation, and legal reforms, yet major barriers to decent work remain. Women continue to earn significantly less than men, and young women experience higher unemployment than their male peers despite comparable or higher levels of education. The review concludes that education and skills translate into better jobs only when supported by equal-pay enforcement, childcare infrastructure, financial inclusion, and efforts to shift restrictive social norms. It also highlights scalable solutions—including public-private skills partnerships and digital financial tools—that can help translate women's human capital into better employment and higher earnings.

Blogs

South Asia's Women are an Economic Boom in Waiting. Here's How to Unlock It (2026) This World Economic Forum (WEF) blog argues that the nearly 400 million working-age women missing from South Asia’s labor force represent one of the region’s greatest untapped economic assets. However, skilling women and addressing biased hiring won’t matter unless governments also invest in enabling infrastructure, including safe transport, childcare, protections against harassment, and pathways back to work after career breaks. Childcare emerges as the strongest predictor of women's employment, with 44% of Indian women outside the workforce citing caregiving as their main barrier. The authors point to Chile's subsidized childcare and extended school days, along with Kenya's Ajira digital program—which has connected more than one million young people, many of them women, to paid online work—as models that could be adapted across South Asia.

South Asian Nations and UN Women Advance Regional Cooperation on Care to Boost Women’s Labor Force Participation in the Region (2026) In May 2026, SAARC member states met in Kathmandu for the region's first ministerial dialogue on the care economy, producing a draft regional action plan to transform care systems and expand women's labor force participation. The initiative reflects growing recognition that women's disproportionate unpaid caregiving responsibilities continue to limit the effectiveness of workforce training and employment programs. UN Women views care investment as the solution. Its Transform Care Investment Initiative for Asia-Pacific aims to reach 100 million women and girls, create 125 million care jobs by 2035, and free up two billion hours of unpaid care.

Investing in Girls' Education: An Economic and Moral Imperative (2025) This WEF blog makes the macroeconomic case for investing in girls' education, arguing that universal secondary school completion could generate an additional US$15–30 trillion in lifetime productivity and earnings. It notes that roughly half of global economic growth over the past three decades can be attributed to investments in education, even as education aid declines and low-income countries face a worsening learning crisis. The implications are particularly relevant for South Asia, where girls' education remains one of the highest-return human capital investments available. Protecting that pipeline through scholarships, safe schools, and gender-sensitive infrastructure lays the foundation for later gains in skills and labor force participation.

Advancing Development by Investing in the Early Years (2025) Reporting from the 2025 World Bank–IMF Spring Meetings, this Center for Global Development blog argues that early childhood development, education, and care are not only investments in children but powerful drivers for women’s workforce participation and economic growth. It notes that some 350 million young children worldwide lack access to essential childcare, a gap that depresses children’s development and women’s employment. The piece also previews a proposed 2026 global financing summit focused on the early years. The relevance for South Asia is clear: expanding access to childcare is one of the most effective ways to translate gains in girls' education into sustained participation in paid work.

From Our Members

Jean Pierre Muhayiman, an independent researcher based in Rwanda and WEESA CoP member for the past 7 months, expressed his appreciation for WEESA's commitment to advancing sustainable development through women's economic empowerment, saying: “Women’s economic empowerment can drive sustainable national development when rural women are organized into land based agricultural groups that raise productivity and household incomes. Investing in rural girls through village talent programs can expand leadership and employment opportunities. And partnerships between urban women investors and rural women’s groups can mobilize resources, broaden economic opportunities, and build a more inclusive, resilient economy.” Rafiu Olaore, Executive Director of Youths Enterprise Development & Innovation Society (YEDIS), shares several community-led initiatives advancing women's economic empowerment in Nigeria, including: palm oil production; agro-food gari processing; waste management enterprises; capacity-building for grassroots women and youth-led Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Founded in 2020, YEDIS delivers entrepreneurship, digital skills, agriculture, and youth employment programs, primarily among underserved communities across Osun State. Thank you so much, Jean Pierre and Rafiu! We appreciate your comments and contributions.  Warm regards, Team WEESA Jobs and Other Opportunities Akina Mama wa Afrika – Executive Director Location: Kampala, Uganda – Deadline: 2 August 2026 Pacific Community (SPC) - Gender, Environmental and Social Safeguards Officer Location: Suva, Fiji – Deadline: 2 August 2026 Palladium Group - Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Program Coordinator Location: Brisbane or Canberra, Australia or Suva, Fiji – Deadline: 2 August 2026 Pollicy – Executive Director, Africa Location: Remote (global) – Deadline: 7 August 2026 Malala Fund - Senior Manager, Principal Communications & Strategic Engagements Location: London, New York, and Washington, D.C. (Hybid) – Deadline: 8 August 2026 University of Gothenburg – Gender & Quantitative Methods Associate Researchers Location: Sweden – Deadline: 10 August 2026 One Acre Fund - Technical Assistance Success Specialist: Youth and Young Women Location: Kigali, Rwanda – Deadline: 9 September 2026 Equimundo – Director of Institutional Partnerships Location: Washington, D.C. (hybrid) – Deadline: Open until filled Malala Fund – Director, Global Policy & Advocacy (Education Financing) Location: London, New York, and Washington, D.C. (Hybid) – Deadline: Open until filled Malala Fund - Officer, Logistics & Project Management Location: London and Washington, D.C. (Hybrid) – Deadline: Open until filled Safetipin - Communications Manager Location: Gurgaon, India – Deadline: Open until filled

About WEESA The South Asia Gender Innovation Lab's WEESA Community of Practice fosters regional exchange, dialogue, and capacity building on women's economic empowerment (WEE) by strengthening links between evidence and action. Members are researchers, policymakers, development practitioners, and other stakeholders interested in accelerating WEE and gender equality in South Asia and elsewhere. Launched in January 2022, our dynamic community has expanded to 7,000+ members based in over 100 countries, drawing together individuals who work outside and within the World Bank. The World Bank’s South Asia Gender Innovation Lab (SAR GIL) is a platform that promotes evidence-based solutions to address gender gaps in South Asia. SAR GIL is supported by the Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality (UFGE) of the World Bank in partnership with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). The UFGE is supported with generous contributions from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Gates Foundation, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund. SAR GIL previously benefited from years of support provided by Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) through the South Asia Regional Trade Facilitation Program (SARTFP), as well as by the Gates Foundation.     JOIN WEESA Would you recommend our content? YES - NO

Coordinator: Talajeh Livani; Editor: Charla Britt; Researcher: Gyanu Sharma; Designer: Veronica Del Motto; Copy Editor: Feriel Ramoul Unsubscribe from this list