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of current safety standards and practices, while increasing protections for both male and female employees. Where the original concerns motivating these policies continue to be valid, for example, where transport safety issues restrict women’s movement, governments can undertake measures such as providing safe and reliable transport infrastructure to ensure that women are able to overcome these concerns. Gaps in the coverage of labor protections imply that certain groups may be at risk of exploitation. Addressing the lack of labor protections covering these groups can help to reduce these infringements. Female migrants in the region tend to be segregated into informal occupations such as domestic work, where they have few labor protections and are more at risk for becoming victims of exploitation. Improving the legal and social protections of female migrants working abroad will better protect those women in isolating and informal positions. Approaches to improve the well-being of migrants are discussed in greater detail later in this chapter. Establishing active labor market policies Active labor market policies can be used to overcome gender-based differences in access to job opportunities. For example, wage subsidies may allow individuals to signal their abilities to future employers and reduce employers’ costs to hire female workers whom they may not otherwise have considered, albeit temporarily. This incentive for hiring gives employers the opportunity to reduce stereotypes by directly observing their female workers’ skills, and also gives women valuable labor market experience. Promoting female participation in all sectors and in all jobs, at management level and below, is likely to increase information on the competencies of women as leaders within an organization, and may also be a way to establish environments that are more attuned to the issues faced by women. Skills training programs can be used to reduce occupational segregation by encouraging women and men to move into professions outside of gender stereotypes, particularly when paired
with apprenticeship opportunities. Evidence within the East Asia and Pacific region on these programs remains limited; however, evidence from other regions suggests some promising lessons (box 6.4). Efforts to promote female participation and gender equality in the private sector—by training women in leadership and giving them a space to be activists for gender equality—can also play an important role in strengthening women’s voice. The Adolescent Girls Initiative (AGI) in countries worldwide is a public partnership with a core focus on leadership that helps young women transition from school to productive employment and active economic participation (World Bank 2011d). In Lao PDR, the AGI has led to the creation of career counseling offices where young women can get information on entering the labor force and long-term career planning. Using affirmative action policies Affirmative action policies, both voluntary and mandatory, can be used as a mechanism to increase the representation of women at all levels of the hierarchy, from entry-level to managerial positions. Evidence on affirmative action from developed countries suggests that voluntary programs may have limited effects on female employment and that, to be effective, programs need to be mandatory and have a credible enforcement mechanism (Holzer and Neumark 2000, World Bank 2011f). In Korea, affirmative action policies were introduced to expand women’s employment and to reduce discriminatory practices in 2006. They were initially implemented for public enterprises and private firms with more than a thousand employees, and was extended after a two year grace period to smaller private firms (Jung and Sung 2012). Firms who failed to meet the specified female employment or female manager ratio criteria were asked to submit an implementation plan, with the goal of raising female representation within the firm. An empirical evaluation of the program has found that it had no significant effect on female participation or on firm performance. The limited impact on female managerial or