Funded by: International Growth Center (IGC).
Jordan has achieved remarkable gains in girls' education—yet women's labour force participation remains stalled at just 14 percent, one of the world's lowest rates and a stark barrier to achieving SDG 5 and SDG 8. Our study in Amman looks beyond economics to the social norms shaping women's choices. Across nine focus groups, we found these norms are not uniformly restrictive but actively contested: women strongly associate paid work with financial independence, greater voice within the household, and self-realisation. Men's support is real but conditional on job attributes—sector, safety, commuting time, hours, and workplace gender composition—while employers still openly question women's marital and motherhood status during hiring. Our second stage (ongoing) uses a discrete choice experiment to reveal how wage and non-wage conditions drive women's decisions to work. With this we hope to obtain actionable evidence to help policymakers and partners design interventions that unlock women's economic empowerment and inclusive growth.
