3ie- International Initiative for Impact Evaluation

3ie promotes the assessment of difference of developmental intervention has made to

social and economic outcomes.

What are we trying to understand? Impact of Breakthrough (a Human Rights Non- profit
Organization) school-based gender attitude change programme in Haryana.

What is the issue? Conditions are unfavorable for women (or worst) with regards to
education, mobility, labor and career wise.

How to tackle this?

Design program for brining by creating – Gender attitude Change Program
Target – adolescent males and females, from 7th to 10th grade
Pilot project for 2 and half year in 150 government schools which were randomly selected
from districts of Haryana. (Sonipat, Panipat, Rohtak, Jhajjar)

Why Haryana? lot of gender discrimination happens

Introduction –
As Mentioned earlier conditions are unfavorable for women.
Evidence for this is from the school enrollment data. Boys and girls enroll equally but by
tertiary there are many dropouts as they get married early and have kids. So, their
education takes a permanent halt and they don’t get a chance to think about career either.
Another issue is of infanticide. In 2011 the child sex ratio was 834 girls per 1000 boys. Which
suggests widespread elimination of female fetuses.

This study is focusing on social attitudes towards women, opinions about women, points of
view or evaluation about them. It suggests that gender equitable attitudes could shape
women’s outcomes both in short and long run. For example. An attitude that it is socially
unacceptable for women to work outside the home will decrease a woman’s workforce
participation and earnings even when she is educated and potentially more productive than
men.
The study also suggest that even when try to include cost benefits there still will be some
discriminatory behavior as the attitudes are rooted in the minds. It also suggest that we
should have small interventions which are targeted at attitudes and behavior’s so as to
bring improvements in outcomes for women even when the intervention is withdrawn.

Breakthrough has created an innovative school based sensitization program aimed a t

gender equality.
How they did? using media, community engagement and training to change gender norms.
Participants – students and teachers

Breakthrough wanted to highlight 2 things – they wanted ti have human rghts casefor
gender equity and to underscore pragmatic reasons to value women.
Advantages according t Breakthrough –
1. Changing attitude of adolescents can help as they are on the verge of having more
stable attitudes about anything. And hence it can sustain longer
2. Attitude change program is more cost effective. Since attitude change program can
be included in school curriculum.
3. Finally attitude change program can avoid problems of graft or gaming associated
with financial incentives.

This is the first study to do rigorous examination of whether gender attitudes can be
changed with school based intervention targeting adolescents.

This evaluation studies the impact of a gender attitude change programme in government-
run secondary schools in four districts of Haryana. The mixed methods study finds that
students in treatment schools are likely to have more progressive gender attitudes as
measured by attitude towards girls’ opportunity for education, women’s employment
outside home, women’s role in society and fertility behaviour.

This study also contributes to the literature on gender bias in developing countries. This
study is trying to understand the root cause of gender inequality.