Gender
A large group of researchers within TIME focus on gender issues and how they can economically impact daily life for many individuals around the world. Projects have been completed in Africa, Asia and South America.
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Gender Social Norms and the Mauritania Social Transfer Programme
| Researchers: |
Dr. Diana Milena Lopez Avila, Dr. Tara Bedi, Dr. Markus Goldstein, Prof. Michael King, Dr. Julia Vaillant |
| Partners: |
World Bank; Government of Mauritania |
| Location: | Mauritania |
| Sample: | 2,000 households |
| Timeline: | 2020–2022 |
| Theme: | Gender social norms |
| Description: |
To meet its long-term poverty reduction goals, the Government of Mauritania decided to complement its traditional food-based response with targeted interventions to protect the chronically poor and invest in their human capital. Tekavoul (Solidarity in Arabic), a nation-wide social cash transfer program, reached 100,000 extremely poor households to protect them from severe deprivation and to support human capital investments. Beneficiaries received MRO 15,000 (USD 50) every three months for a period of five years, conditional on participation in social promotion activities addressing hygiene, nutrition, education, civil registration, and child development. Payments were made to the person in charge of the daily health, nutrition and education of the children in the household, usually the first wife of the male household head or the female household head. The Trinity Impact Evaluation Unit and the Africa Gender Innovation Lab at the World Bank conduct a randomized control trial on the effects of adding to Tekavoul a) couples empowerment training and b) community interventions on female empowerment, spousal cohesion and ultimately, welfare outcomes. The objective of this research is to understand the impact of integrating interventions on gender social norms in anti-poverty programs on household welfare and gender empowerment. More specifically, it aims to test whether addressing gender social norms at the household- and community-level helps maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of a cash transfer program. The research collects and analyses data on women’s empowerment, intra-household cooperation, prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV), and welfare outcomes |
Kinship and Locality: How Marital Traditions Affect Violence
| Researchers: |
Tara Bedi, Markus Goldstein, Michael King, Alejandra Ramos, and Julia Vaillant |
| Partners: |
Concern Worldwide, IPA Malawi |
| Location: | In the districts of Nsanje and Mangochi, Southern rural Malawi |
| Sample: |
1,361 households |
| Timeline: | 2018–2022 |
| Theme: | Intimate partner violence |
| Description: | In this project, we explore the effects of marriage practices associated with kinship and locality on intimate partner violence (IPV). We do so in the context of Southern rural Malawi, where there is a high prevalence of IPV and remarriage is a common phenomenon. We collect a panel dataset on 1,361 households including primary data on kinship, locality, marriage practices, and IPV. We propose an analytical framework that separates the effects of kinship and locality on IPV and structurally estimates the gains of marriage. |
Enabling Sustainable Graduation out of Poverty for the Extreme Poor in Malawi
| Researchers: |
Dr. Michael King, Dr. Tara Bedi and Dr. Julia Vaillant |
| Location: | Malawi |
| Sample: | 3,300 households in Mangochi and Nsanje |
| Timeline: | 2017–2022 |
| Theme: |
Gender equality and poverty |
| Description: |
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To apply to access this dataset, please email Dr Michael King kingm4@tcd.ie
| Researchers: | Kjetil Bjorvatn (NHH), Denise Ferris (BRAC), Selim Gulesci, Arne Nasgowitz (NHH), Vincent Somville (NHH) and Lore Vandewalle (Graduate Institute) |
| Partners: | BRAC |
| Location: | Uganda |
| Sample: | 1,496 households |
| Timeline: | 2018–2022 |
| Theme: |
Childcare, Female labour supply, Entrepreneurship |
| Description: | Can providing access to childcare services for three to five years old children (i) improve children’s educational (and health) outcomes, (ii) stimulate the development of female businesses and (iii) improve the effectiveness of mainstream business development interventions, such as business grants? These are the key research questions that we plan to address in this project. To answer these questions, we are collaborating with BRAC in Uganda to conduct a randomized experiment that will provide randomly selected women with: (i) subsidized access to childcare (ii) a business grant (iii) childcare and a business grant together. A fourth group will be kept as control. We track the targeted households over 4 years. |
| Researchers: |
Dr. Tara Bedi, Prof. Michael King, and Anu Puthenmadathil Jose |
| Partners: |
This research project is funded by ING, Trinity College Dublin and the Irish Research Council and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 713279. |
| Location: | Kolkata, India |
| Sample: | 1,000 couples |
| Timeline: | 2020-2021 |
| Theme: | Financial Inclusion and Gender |
| Description: | This study revisits the topic of joint accounts and assesses how their terms, increasingly varied due to innovations in the fintech sector, affect allocation decisions. Through an experimental setting we assess the impact of labelling, transparency and spousal approval on expenditure allocations of spouses. We also assess the impact of personally earning money on subsequent expenditure decisions of couples under different joint account terms. To achieve this, we conduct a lab-in-the field experiment with a total of 1,000 couples. At the lab we collect behavioural/demographic characteristics (including preferences, decision making and bargaining power) for both spouses. Using a two-stage randomisation, we first randomise couples into a ‘task’ or a ‘gift’ stream, before randomising 200 couples into each of five treatment arms with differing joint account terms, under which spouses are asked to complete an allocation decision. We derive important insights in three ways as follows; (1) insights that inform consumers about how best to structure their finances between individual and joint accounts, (2) insights for traditional banks on how they might allow greater flexibility in terms and (3) insights for the fintech sector on how within account labelling, transparency and approval rules affect spousal decision making. |
To apply to access this dataset, please email Dr Michael King kingm4@tcd.ie
Gender-Based Violence in Schools in Mozambique
| Researchers: |
Sofia Amaral, Aixa Garcia-Ramos, Selim Gulesci, Alejandra Ramos, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi |
| Partners: | UNICEF Mozambique, GIZ Mozambique, Ministry of Education Mozambique, GRC Mozambique |
| Location: | Mozambique |
| Sample: |
9,520 pupils in 6th-7th Grade attending 340 schools in the Sofala Province, Mozambique |
| Timeline: |
2019-2021 |
| Theme: |
Gender-based violence at schools and education |
| Description: |
In this project, we investigate whether providing information about what is gender-based violence and how to respond to it can reduce the prevalence of violence at schools and improve educational outcomes. To address this question, we implement a randomized control trial (RCT) where we provide the information to girls only, boys only, or both boys and girls. We disseminate the information on gender-based violence at schools through a short-animated video followed by a discussion session. |
| Researchers: |
Selim Gulesci, Eliana La Ferrara (Bocconi), David Smerdon (University of Queensland), Munshi Sulaiman (BRAC) |
| Partners: |
Save the Children |
| Location: | Somalia |
| Sample: |
4,230 households from 141 communities |
| Timeline: | 2018-2020 |
| Theme: | Harmful gender norms |
| Description: | Female genital cutting (FGC) is the practice of cutting or removing part of the external or internal female genitalia for non-medical reasons. There can be several explanations for why a harmful practice, such as FGC, may continue being practiced. In this project, we aim to test for two of these explanations. First, FGC is often viewed as the result of a coordination failure. In a setting where individual choices are interdependent, multiple equilibria may exist and one reason for the persistence of bad norms can be a failure to coordinate to the “better” equilibrium. Individuals may know that others do not like FGC but no single individual may want to move unilaterally due to fear of social sanctions. To the extent that individuals worry about social stigma, they may even be hesitant to reveal their private views on FGC to others. Second, individuals may privately dislike FGC but think that others do and therefore they continue doing it. Social psychologists describe as pluralistic ignorance a setting in which a majority of the group privately want to change their behaviour, but mistakenly think that the majority of the other group members prefer to keep the existing behavior. In this project, we aim to test to what extent these two potential reasons may explain why FGC persists in Somalia. In particular, our experiment entails two key components: one directed at providing information (hence correcting misperceptions) by enabling the truthful revelation of attitudes towards FGC; and one directed at providing a coordination device that will facilitate collective action among those who privately support the abandonment of FGM. |
| Researchers: |
Martina Zanella and Jay Euijung Lee |
| Location: | South Korea |
| Sample: |
226 Municipal Councils |
| Timeline: |
1995-2018 |
| Theme: |
Quotas and Female Representation |
| Description: |
Although gender quotas in politics are one of the most common affirmative action policies worldwide, their merits remain an object of debate. Whether quotas turn out to be effective depends on the reasons behind the under-representation of women and whether the quota design creates the ``right'' incentives. In this paper, we contribute to the discussion on the optimal design of quotas by studying how highly male-dominated political parties react to the introduction of gender quotas in municipal council elections in South Korea – a country characterized by conservative gender roles where quotas are most needed but also face a higher risk of being ineffective. South Korea provides a particularly apt setting for several reasons: (i) we can exploit the discontinuity in the intensity of the quota's effect at given cut-offs of council size; (ii) gender quotas were implemented in only one of two independent election arms, leaving space for adjustment in the other arm, (iii) we can observe parties over fifteen years and compare immediate vs. follow-up responses. We find that political parties initially counteract the quota by putting forth fewer female candidates in the unaffected arm. However, this pattern gradually reverses over time. The evidence is consistent with parties initially selecting a suboptimally low number of women due to biased beliefs regarding their ability, but slowly revising their beliefs after exposure to competent women. This paper shows that affirmative action policies can still be effective despite initial backlashes, as long as they are designed appropriately -- in such a way as to create incentives for parties to select qualified women and make sure that these women get elected, opening the possibility for learning to take place. |
| Researchers: |
Alejandra Ramos |
| Partners: | IPA Bangladesh,Evidence Action, RDRS |
| Location: | Bangladesh |
| Sample: |
2,848 female |
| Timeline: | 2017-2018 |
| Theme: | Intimate partner violence and seasonal migration |
| Description: | This project studies the effects of seasonal migration incentives on intimate partner violence. To address the net effect of migration on violence, we collected data on intimate partner violence among the female respondents of the Evidence Action’s No Lean Season intervention endline survey of 2017. Our results indicate that 76 percent of these women have experienced violence by hands of an intimate partner during their lifetime. Almost one of every two women has been physically or sexually abused by her partner in the last six months, and in three of every four cases, the events occurred more than once. Our analysis suggests that migration incentives help to reduce violence as women of households receiving the migration loans are less likely to experience physical or sexual violence in the last six months. Violence, however, is higher in villages that did not receive the migration incentive but are surrounded by villages that received it. We hypothesize this increase is explained by the fact that, when the male head is less likely to migrate, the woman spends more time with her preparator. Overall, our evidence suggests that seasonal migration has the potential of improving well-being by providing women with periods of reduced violence throughout the year. Nonetheless, such improvements occur through a rather mechanical effect of reduced exposure. Whether or not violence returns to its original levels once the migration episode ends is still an empirical issue. |
| Researchers: |
Alejandra Ramos |
| Location: | Ecuador |
| Sample: |
1,230 households |
| Timeline: | 2015–2018 |
| Theme: | Intimate partner violence and transfers |
| Description: | This project portraits intimate partner violence as part of the household decision making process. In particular, I study how violence responds to transfers to women, and whether this response depends on the transfer being in-kind or in-cash. To this end, I develop and estimate a model of household decisions in which the spouses maximized a weighted sum of their utilities, and the weights are endogenously determined through violence. Only men can inflict violence to increase their relative weight, but at the cost of destroying female labour productivity. Under this framework, the utility gains that the husband can appropriate through violence are lower when the transfers are in-kind than when the transfer are in-cash. As any transfer is potentially extra-marginal, in-kind and cash transfers have different effects. I estimate the model using data from a randomized controlled trial which provides transfers, either in-kind or cash, to women of poor families in Ecuador. The results indicate that, on average, violence destroys 4% of female productivity with a market value of 10 dollars a month. Violence also reduces the female relative weight in the household utility by 12%. A cash transfer equivalent to 10% of the average household income would reduce the prevalence of violence from 17% to 10%. If the same transfer were in-kind, violence would decline by 3 additional percentage points. Such differential effect amplifies with the size of the transfer. |
| Researchers: | Patrick Lubega, Frances Nakakawa, Gaia Narciso and Carol Newman |
| Partners: |
Irish Aid and Higher Education Research and Institution. This project is part of NOURISH, Nutrition and Treatment Outcome: Development of a Ugandan-Irish HIV/Nutrition Research Cluster. |
| Location: | Uganda |
| Sample: |
2,121 women in 16 HIV clinics in rural areas |
| Timeline: | 2012–2016 |
| Theme: | Role models |
| Description: | This project investigates the impact of an entrepreneurship skills sharing intervention using role models on the empowerment and livelihoods of women living with HIV in rural Uganda. In a randomized control trial, participants in the treatment group were exposed to the screening of four 3-minute videos of inspiring women, i.e. women living in similar situations to the women in the study. In the videos, each of the inspiring women tells their story of the difficulties and rewards of setting up a business. The videos encompass personal stories along with practical advice on setting up and running a business. The four videos were screened at HIV clinics over the space of one year. Participants in the control group were (shown a different video?). The project provides evidence that the role models intervention has a positive effect on the probability of starting a business, personal income and income from enterprises and crops. Higher personal incomes lead to an increase in control over personal resources in the treatment clinics relative to the control. This has knock-on effects for the health of women and children and reduces the probability that children are absent from school. Moreover, the role models intervention affected informal savings of women. The latter two findings suggest that this simple, cost effective and easily scalable intervention could have long term effects on welfare outcomes. The findings show that providing vulnerable women with role models that empower them to start their own enterprise activities may be very effective in improving welfare outcomes. |