another intervention gone wrong: decreasing women’s civic participation

…this paper investigates two potential explanations for the gender gap in participation: asymmetric costs to participation and deficits of civic information…I examine whether increasing civic information and skills can close the gender gap in civic participation. I find it cannot – and the particular intervention I study even exacerbates the problem. Experimental evidence reveals that a randomly assigned civic education intervention in Mali increased civic participation among men while causing a decrease among women. Focus groups and interviews suggest that, in a place where women are traditionally unwelcome actors in the public sphere, the intervention heightened the salience of women’s participation thus increasing social costs to participation. As evidence of a more general phenomenon, I show that socio-economic determinants of gender discrimination within Mali help explain cross-country variation in the gender gap in civic participation on the African continent.

That is from the introduction of a working paper, Why women participate less in civic activity: Evidence from Mali, by Jessica Gottlieb to be discussed at next week’s MGAPE (Midwest Group in African Political Economy) meeting, hosted by Indiana University care of Jen Brass, one of MGAPE’s founding members.

I hope to be updating from the meeting next Friday. The other papers on the docket are:

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