Helping Women Thrive in the Workplace: The Busara Research Agenda on Changing Norms to Improve Female Workplace Retention and Wellbeing in the Global South

Promoting the economic empowerment of women requires more than just helping them get a foot in the door and hoping for the best. We need women to remain in the workplace, to thrive in their work environments, job descriptions and careers, and to derive the self-efficacy and emotional fulfillment that comes from work. To achieve this, we need to recognize that few workplaces are gender neutral. Instead, they harbor norms and protocols that accommodate male preferences and emotional needs, while neglecting those of women. This bias will push women out or undermine their success. Unfortunately, we feel that the international development agenda has not paid sufficient attention to the importance of female workplace retention or the emotional toil that mismatched norms can inflict. This research agenda hopes to address this failing by outlining ways we can identify, understand, and correct norms and patterns that make it difficult for women to continue working. We feel that this is particularly important in many workplaces of the Global South, where norms prevail over formal procedures, and it will become more relevant as businesses in LICs formalize and establish organizational rules.