Reshaping Adolescents' Gender Attitudes: Evidence From a School-Based Experiment in India (WP-19-08)
Diva Dhar, Tarun Jain, and Seema Jayachandran
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, the researchers find that the program made attitudes more supportive of gender equality by 0.18 standard deviations, or, equivalently, converted 16% of regressive attitudes. When they 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 the authors find weak evidence that it affected two revealed-preference measures.
This paper is published in the American Economic Review.