Abstract
There exist many social norms that prescribe the behaviour of women and girls. While private benefits of changing this behaviour may be larger for women than for men, women’s concerns about social repercussions in case they deviate from the norm may still make them more reluctant to change than men. We ask whether it is more effective to target men, women, or both, with the same intervention in the same context to improve women’s outcomes when behaviour is governed by gendered social norms. We conduct a cluster-randomized control trial of an edutainment intervention in Pakistan aimed at delaying marriage of adolescent girls. In our context, community age-of marriage norms favour early marriage for girls. We find that targeting men, either alone or jointly, reduces child marriages in households directly targeted by the intervention. Targeting women, however, either alone or jointly leads to sustained reductions in child marriages at village-level. To rationalize this pattern of results across treatment arms in target households versus at village level we extend a model of Bayesian persuasion in which women are more hesitant to deviate from gendered social norms and information is transmitted by targeted spouses to other households in the village via gender-segregated information transmission.
Local Organizer: Pietro Biroli