EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Gender norms, violence and adolescent girls' trajectories: evidence from a field experiment in India

Alison Andrew, Sonya Krutikova, Gabriela Smarrelli and Hemlata Verma

No 984, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: Striking gender gaps persist in fundamental aspects of human welfare. In India, the setting of this paper, these gaps are particularly large. Interventions often target adolescent girls with the aim of empowering them to make choices that go against the status quo - to remain in school longer or marry later, for example. This approach may inadvertently expose girls, who are often marginalized within their communities, to new risks if it encourages them to violate prevailing gender norms. In this study, we design an experiment to compare the effectiveness of targeting only adolescent girls with an approach that additionally engages with the enforcers of gender norms in the wider community. We find that both arms of the trial led to a reduction in school dropout and early marriage. We see large improvements in girls' mental health but only in the arm which engages with the wider community. Improvements in mental health can be explained by community engagement causing gender norms to become more progressive and causing a reduction in the severity of sanctions that girls face for breaking norms. Both adolescent girls and their mothers perceived these shifts in norms and sanctions. Our results demonstrate that in settings where unequal outcomes are sustained through restrictive gender norms, change in the attitudes and behavior of the enforcers of these norms is critical for achieving meaningful improvements in womens well-being.

Date: 2022-09-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen, nep-hea and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:fd9e93fb-14a5-4fa8-9fc5-e7adbeaf3b52 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:wpaper:984

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen (facultyadmin@economics.ox.ac.uk this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).

 
Page updated 2025-01-02
Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:984