Replication: Reshaping Adolescents' Gender Attitudes: Evidence from a School-Based Experiment in India
Dhar et al. (2022) examine the effect of a gender attitude change program in secondary schools in India. In their preferred specification, the authors show that the program made the students report more gender-egalitarian attitudes by 0.18 of a standard deviation, and shifted self-reported behaviors to be more aligned with gender-progressive norms by 0.20 standard deviations (both significant at 1% level). In contrast, they found no effect on girls’ aspirations, as these were already high before the intervention. The effects did not attenuate between the first end-line (right after the programme was completed) and the second (two years later). To put the paper’s results in perspective, we first comment on the authors’ deviations from their pre-registration and pre-analysis plans, provide detailed power calculations, and add multiple-hypothesis-testing-adjusted standard errors. Second, we show that the paper’s results are perfectly reproducible. Third, we show that the results are robust to excluding control variables, and alternative ways of constructing indices and dealing with non-response.