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

"...the intervention succeeded in making attitudes more supportive of gender equality and coaxing more gender-equal behavior. Moreover, the impacts persisted..."

Gender inequality is rife in India. While boys and girls start secondary school at the same rate, only 0.80 girls enroll in tertiary schooling for every boy (World Bank 2011). Early marriage is common, and many women have limited agency. In this context, Breakthrough, a human rights organisation specialising in social change campaigns related to gender, implemented an intervention that engaged adolescent girls and boys in classroom discussions about gender equality, aiming to reduce their support for societal norms that restrict women's and girls' opportunities. This paper shares a randomised controlled trial (RCT) of the impact of the Taaron ki Toli, or Legion of Stars, initiative in terms of its ability to reshape gender attitudes in secondary schools in the state of Haryana, India.

The intervention, which ran from April 2014 to October 2016, engaged seventh- to tenth-graders in classroom discussions about gender equality, with a 45-minute session held every 3 weeks for 2.5 school years. (For more on Taaron ki Toli, see Related Summaries, below.) Secondary school students were specifically selected for the intervention because adolescence is a critical time in the development of morality and identity formation, with adolescents being young enough to still have malleable attitudes but mature enough to reflect on complex moral questions. The sessions taught facts and endorsed gender equality, and as importantly, prompted students to reflect on their own and society's views. Discussion topics included gender stereotypes, gender roles at home, girls' education, women's employment outside the home, and harassment. Some sessions taught communication skills to help students convey their views to others so that they can, for example, persuade their parents to permit them to marry at a later age.

The programme's messaging combined a human rights case for gender equity with pragmatic reasons to value women, such as their economic contributions. For example, the intervention informed participants that outcomes for children improve when their mother is more educated. The hypothesis is that this information causes updating of beliefs; girls want to stay in school longer, and both boys and girls will want to educate their daughters down the road. The programme aimed to ultimately influence a wide range of behaviours related to female education, mobility, work, marriage, and fertility, for both female participants and male participants' female family members (e.g., their future wives).

Other elements of the programme included a one-time training for one teacher per school, optional youth clubs, and school-wide activities such as street theatre performances held about once a year.

To ensure that the intervention would be widely accepted, Breakthrough engaged with multiple stakeholders at the state, district, and sub-district levels, gathering input from education officials, school principals, and teachers along the way. This approach helped them design a programme that might later be integrated into the standard school curriculum.

The RCT involved a sample of 314 government schools across Sonipat, Panipat, Rohtak, and Jhajjar districts, with 150 of the sample schools in the treatment group and 164 serving as control schools. Researchers conducted a baseline survey between August 2013 and January 2014, covering 14,809 students. They conducted a first endline survey shortly after the programme ended, between November 2016 and April 2017, and a second endline survey between January and July 2019, which was two to two and one-half years after the intervention had ended. The sample size for the second endline was 13,685 individuals.

To gauge primary outcomes for the first endline, the researchers combined 17 gender attitude variables into a variance-weighted index, assessed girls' aspirations with a variance-weighted index combining 5 questions about educational and career aspirations, and constructed an index of 6 questions, asked of both boys and girls, to measure self-reported gender-related behaviour. The second endline added two revealed-preference measures: girls' intent to pursue a college education, and both boys' and girls' willingness to publicly espouse a feminist position.

The RCT found that, in the short run (3.5 months after the programme ended), Taaron ki Toli made attitudes more supportive of gender equality by 0.18 standard deviations or, equivalently, converted 16% of regressive attitudes. Put another way: In the treatment group, on average, 29.9% of views are gender regressive, compared to 35.4% in the control group. These effects persisted: There was a continued large effect on attitudes - 0.16 standard deviations - in the medium run (2 years after the programme ended).

The programme also influenced participants' self-reported behaviour. An index of gender-equal behaviours increased by 0.20 to 0.23 standard deviations, in both the short run and medium run. With regard to the two objective measures of behaviour that were added to the second endline, the researchers found weak evidence of a treatment effect in the hypothesised direction for both behaviours. There was no evidence that the intervention increased girls' stated educational and career aspirations, which were quite high to begin with.

The researchers also investigated how the treatment effects vary based on student gender and parents' gender attitudes. There was no evidence of heterogeneity based on parents' attitudes: Overall, there is limited evidence that parental support for gender equality either facilitates or hinders the average success of the intervention. However, the researchers found differences in treatment effects between boys and girls. At the first endline, the effect size on attitudes was somewhat larger for boys than girls, but the researchers could not statistically reject that the effect size was identical for the two groups. By the second endline, the effect on attitudes was significantly larger for boys. In addition, behaviour change was significantly more pronounced among boys in both the short and medium run. For example, only boys report an increase in how much they encourage their older sisters to pursue a college education - a finding that suggests a broader phenomenon of girls facing more constraints on their behaviour. This pattern highlights that, because behaviour change requires not just the desire but also the ability to act differently, the very fact of boys' and men's greater power in society makes it important to include them in interventions aimed at increasing girls' and women's power.

Reflecting on this set of findings about the effects on boys, the researchers "speculate that the very problem the program aims to solve - that males have more power in society- means that they have more freedom to act on the gender-progressive views the program instilled in them....Of course, men also face familial constraints on their behavior and feel pressure to conform to traditional norms, so it is an open question whether" programme effects, such as whether male participants' future wives are more likely to be employed. In future work, the researchers hope to measure whether such potential actually materialises, as well as how the programme affects other adult outcomes such as higher education, age of marriage, and childbearing.

In conclusion: "North India has particularly strong gender discrimination, and gender norms are often highly dependent on the context. Thus, the exact programming would need to be adapted for other contexts, but this general approach of engaging adolescents, or even younger children, in school discussions could be a widely applicable way to change gender norms."