Empowering Women through Data: Economics Research at the Intersection of Development, Governance and Gender

Despite India’s sustained economic growth, Indian women are being left behind, and they are consistently ranked as some of the worst-off in the world on a variety of measures related to health and economic participation. For example, even as fertility has declined and education increased, women have been dropping out of the labor force at precipitous rates. Even with respect to resources as commonplace as mobile phones, women lag: India’s gender gap in mobile phone ownership – at 46% - is quite large compared to countries with similar levels of development and mobile costs. Why aren’t Indian women reaping the benefits of economic growth, and how can policy intervene to close these gender gaps?

The candidate selected for this RA-ship will leverage large-scale datasets across one or more gender-focused studies to answer questions focused on how to increase women’s economic well-being and participation. These studies may include randomized control trials focused on empowering women to hold local authorities accountable for delivery of social protection programs to trials focused on delivery of social protection programs. Depending on timing of our studies, they may also include quasi-experimental studies examining the impact of female-focused government initiatives on women’s well-being and broader socioeconomic outcomes.

This position is data heavy and may require the selected candidate to process and clean large administrative data sets; scrape administrative data from websites; process and analyze networks data; code data processing files for ongoing survey data collection; and/or produce tables or figures such as heat maps from primary or secondary data. The candidate’s exact responsibilities will be determined based on the selected candidate’s skill set and current study tasks.