Laura Doering

The Effects of Gendered Occupational Roles on Men’s and Women’s Workplace Authority: Evidence from Microfinance:

The gendering of occupational roles affects a variety of outcomes for workers and organizations. We examine how the gender of an initial role occupant influences the authority enjoyed by individuals who subsequently fill that role. We use data from a microfinance bank in Central America to examine how working initially with a male or female loan manager shapes borrowers’ compliance with future managers’ directives. First, we show that borrowers originally paired with female managers continue to be less compliant with subsequent managers, regardless of subsequent managers’ gender. Next, we demonstrate how compliance is shaped by the gender-typing of the role and the gender of the individual who fills that role. We find that men enjoy significantly greater compliance in male-typed roles, but male and female managers experience similar levels of compliance in female-typed roles. Further analyses reveal that these gendered patterns become especially pronounced after managers demonstrate their authority by disciplining borrowers. Overall, we show how quickly gendered expectations become inscribed into occupational roles, and we identify their lasting organizational consequences. More broadly, we suggest authority mechanisms that may contribute to the “stalled” gender revolution in the workplace.

The Financialization of Everyday Life: Mobile Money and (In)Formal Activity in a Developing Context

This paper contributes to the literature on the financialization of everyday life by studying the relationship between mobile money products and financialized practices in Kenya. We first outline a theoretical approach to studying financialization in developing countries that is consistent with research in developed countries but accommodates the differing motivations and operationalizations of financialized practices in the Global South. In part, this is accomplished by drawing explicit parallels to research on formal financial sector inclusion in developing countries. We extend research by considering how mobile money products may facilitate shifts toward financialized behaviors for individuals in the informal sector. Using nationally representative cross-sectional survey data measuring all financial products and practices used by 13,000 Kenyans, we find that mobile money use is positively related to increased inclusion in the formal financial sector, and formal sector inclusion is also related to the direct measures of financialized behaviors of saving for future needs and investing in productive assets. Additionally, we find that mobile money is also positively related to these financialized behaviors for Kenyans operating entirely in the informal sector. Additionally, we find that women and rural residents are less likely to pair mobile money with formal sector financial products but are no less likely to engage in savings and investment practices. Causal pathways to our correlational results are discussed. Beyond our specific findings, we advocate for an expanded research program on financialization in developing contexts and financialization in the informal sector.

Risks, Returns, and Relational Lending: Personal Ties in Microfinance

Personal relationships often facilitate credit transactions. However, existing research provides different expectations about whether personal ties prove detrimental or beneficial for lenders. Economic sociology highlights the advantages lenders accrue when they have personal ties with borrowers. Yet research from social psychology suggests that personal ties can be costly because lenders may “escalate commitment” to poor performers. This study uses data from a microfinance bank to ask, When are personal relationships detrimental or beneficial for lenders? It shows that lenders with personal ties to borrowers are less likely to cut those ties and their borrowers miss fewer payments. However, these trends vary with frequency of contract. When lenders and borrowers interact infrequently, lenders continue to show strong commitment, but borrowers become less compliant, creating potential problems for lenders. This study integrates theories from economic sociology and social psychology to offer a more nuanced, temporally informed understanding of personal ties in finance.

Doing Well and Doing Good? Employee Exit in Social Enterprise

The literature on hybrid organizations offers a number of strategies designed to avoid destabilizing, internal tensions within such organizations. We argue, however, that in implementing these prac...

From the Ground Up: Gender, Self-Employment, and Space in a Colombian Housing Project

Researchers have documented a persistent wage gap between self-employed men and women. In this paper, we identify a novel intervention that boosts women’s earnings and reduces this gap in an inform...

Is Kenya's Digital Revolution Informalising Financial Inclusion?

This paper uses FinAccess data to provide an alternative accounting of mobile money’s contribution to formal financial inclusion and explores how this powerful new financial tool enables informal as well as formal financial action. The paper argues that the access strand framework employed in Kenya’s financial inclusion reporting places too much emphasis on a supply-side perspective which concentrates on institutional formality, rather than the underlying behaviours and functions which financial products enable. In the development lexicon, it is the latter which are of interest, rather than the former. Financial sector development initiatives rest on the understanding that financial tools can improve the capacity individuals and institutions to manage liquidity, invest productively, pool risk effectively and transact efficiently, with consequent impacts on livelihoods and growth. For households (and to an extent businesses) these benefits can be delivered through informal as well as formal institutions, with their differing attributes of flexibility, security, cost, value addition and so forth. The increasing trend exhibited by Kenyans towards diverse financial portfolios that encompass formal and informal products, demonstrates the value which many Kenyan’s see in formal institutions as well as institutions that are currently classified as ‘informal’ or even ‘excluded’. If savings, credit, and investment are positive financial actions, and these actions can be enacted in both the formal and informal institutions, then the goal of our analysis is to start a larger dialogue about the impact of mobile money as a tool for stimulating beneficial financial activity, without limiting the conversation to activity in the formal sector.