Important progress toward gender equality has been made in the past decades, but inequalities linked to gender norms, stereotypes, and the unequal distribution of housework and childcare responsibilities persist. Lifetime events such as marriage and parenthood bring substantial changes in time...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on the existence and impact of gender discriminatory laws on women's outcomes across various domains (categories) that constitute the Women in Business and the Law measure of gender inequality. The evidence to date suggests that there are significant...

In patriarchal societies, sticky norms affect married women's social circles, their autonomy, and the outcomes of intra-household bargaining. This paper uses primary data on women's social networks in Uttarakhand, India; the modal woman has only three friends, and over 80 percent do not have any...

This paper assesses how household context and characteristics shape the welfare trajectory and more specifically the accumulation of productive assets among beneficiaries of the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme in Rwanda, the government's flagship social assistance program. The analysis is based...

Sectoral segregation is often used to explain a large part of a well-documented gender earnings gap in business profits. Women tend to sort into different sectors than men, and the sectors dominated by women tend to be less profitable. This paper investigates the horizontal dimension of sectoral...

Is there a mindset gap holding women back in business? Can entrepreneurship training instill a set of attitudes, behaviors, and strategies that are thought to underpin success in business such as motivation, perseverance, and self-confidence? This study conducted two randomized controlled trials...

This study reports results from a randomized evaluation of a mandatory six-month Internet-based sexual education course implemented across public junior high schools in 21 Colombian cities. Six months after finishing the course, the study finds a 0.4 standard deviation improvement in knowledge,...

Rural economies are in transition around the world; in many countries, improved technology and linkages across sectors have expanded access to markets and accelerated production for some farmers. At the same time, rural areas globally are facing a growing base of landless and smallholder farmers,...

In parts of Asia, South Caucasus, and the Balkans, son preference is strong enough to trigger significant levels of sex selection, result in the excess mortality of girls, and skew child sex ratios in favor of boys. Every year, 1.8 million girls under the age of five go "missing" because of the...