Gender Norms, Women’s Executive Function, and Anti-Poverty Programs: Experimental Evidence from India
Sociocultural norms and executive function are powerful factors in an individual’s agency, decision-making, and development. Gender norms, for example, mediate the relationship between economic development and women’s labor market outcomes. Executive functions make it possible for a person to live, work, and learn. They are important for taking simple to complex actions, from cooking, shopping, nurturing children, planning, and to execution. Low executive functions can frustrate the success of anti-poverty and empowerment programs through participants’ inadequate planning, improper utilization of resources, and the lack of timely actions. In developing countries, among the fundamental obstacles to poverty alleviation and women’s empowerment are gender norms and women’s low executive functions.
In this talk, Prof. Rahman will describe a women’s anti-poverty program in India and present evidence on its causal effects on gender norms and women’ executive function. The policy implications of the findings for anti-poverty programs and women’s empowerment will also be discussed.
About the speaker
Prof. Tauhidur Rahman is a development economist and an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Arizona. He is the Founding Director of the Initiative for Agency and Development (IfAD), a state-of-the art experimentation initiative housed at the University of Arizona that discovers and promotes solutions to the problems of agency, and development. He was a visiting professor of law and economics at University of Oslo, Norway in 2011. He has been a regular visiting researcher at the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank, Washington, DC. He was trained as an applied econometrician, with research interests in development economics, behavioral economics, law and economics, and program evaluation. He has studied issues such as measurements and analysis of human well-being, child labor, child and elderly health, environmental justice and environmental regulations, and impacts of community-driven anti-poverty programs. His current research projects include measurements of poverty and well-being, agency, behavioral impacts of anti-poverty programs, and climate information services for climate-resilient development. He has served on panels of USDA, EPA and NSF, and has collaborated with USAID and UN institutions. He is the co-author of Environmental Justice and Federalism (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013), and author of two-volume book (in progress), Empowering the Poor.
16h00-16h05: Welcome and Introduction of AFAERE
Charles Nhemachena, Secretary General, AFAERE
16h05-16h10: Introduction of Speaker
Selma Karuaihe, President, AFAERE
16h10-16h40: “Gender Norms, Women’s Executive Function, and Anti-Poverty Programs:
Experimental Evidence from India”
Professor Tauhidur Rahman, PhD
Founding Director: The Initiative for Agency and Development (IfAD)
Associate Professor, Dept. of Agricultural and Resource Economics
Associate Professor, Department of Economics (Courtesy)
The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
16h40-16h50: Discussion (Q & A)
16h50-17h00: Vote of Thanks
Wisdom Akpalu, Former President, AFAERE
Webinar Format
30 Minutes presentations by the speaker. (We follow South African time – same as CAT)
10 minutes of Q&A at the end of the presentation.
Zoom Link: https://up-ac-za.zoom.us/j/91349589841?pwd=TjF5dFNiVFlHekVwV0RPT05ZcjZEUT09