Empowering girls triggers their brothers to compete: Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment in Uganda

Abstract

The aim of this experiment was to test whether girl’s empowerment would have a direct impact on girls’ or boys’ competitiveness. To measure preferences for competition, we implemented the experimental protocol of Niederle and Vesterlund (2007). More specifically, participants were asked to select a compensation scheme before performing a simple task, from which we identified their taste to compete. They either chose to be paid according to a competitive tournament scheme or a non competitive piece-rate scheme. The experiment was designed to control for a host of factors such as individual differences in ability, overconfidence, risk aversion, and altruism. Our findings highlight the impact of gender equality on gender differences in competitiveness: when boys are faced with more empowered sisters, they increase their competitiveness. This suggests that the benefits of adolescent girls’ empowerment programs may spill over beyond the participating girls themselves to their brothers. More work needs to be done to understand if the changed behavior in brothers will have persistent effects on girls in the future. This work is part of the Closing the Gender Gap in Africa: evaluating new policies and programmes for women’s economic empowerment programme