Reshaping Adolescents' Gender Attitudes: Evidence from a School-Based Experiment in India

By Diva Dhar, Tarun Jain, S. Jayachandran. The American Economic Review, 2018

283 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper evaluates an intervention in India that engaged adolescent girls and boys in classroom discussions about gender equality for two years, aiming to reduce their support for societal norms that restrict women's and girls' opportunities. Using a randomized controlled trial, we find that the program made attitudes more supportive of gender equality by 0.18 standard deviations, or, equivalently, converted 16 percent of regressive attitudes. When we resurveyed study participants two years after the intervention had ended, the effects had persisted. The program also led to more gender-equal self-reported behavior, and we find weak evidence that it affected two revealed-preference measures. (JEL D63, D91, I21, J13, J16, 012)

Subfields: Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/138042c7e37cd26a81e3210d61a041be77200db8

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In Safety Research

1. Hui Du
2. Yun Xiao
3. Liqiu Zhao
4. Elliot Bendoly
5. S. Jayachandran
6. Ritam Chaurey
7. Cynthia Kinnan
8. Emily Breza

Citations in the corpus

• Social Norms as a Barrier to Women’s Employment in Developing Countries (2020, background): “Media campaigns and school-based programs like the one studied by Dhar et al. (2020) could be a valuable complement to more standard governmental strategies such as using the legal system to promote equality.”
• Education and gender role attitudes (2020, background): “Dhar et al. (2018) demonstrate that school-based intervention that engaged adolescents in classroom discussions about gender equality, made gender attitudes more progressive and produced more gender-equal behavior.”
• On making experimental design choices: Discussions on the use and challenges of demand effects, incentives, deception, samples, and vignettes (2020, background): “For example, Dhar, Jain, and Jayachandran (2018), concerned that socially desirable responses might interact with their treatment in a field experiment, incorporated a short-form Marlow-Crowne module to measure respondents’ propensity to offer socially desirable baselines.2 Similarly, researchers…”