Jobs of the Future and Gender Norms in India

This project will evaluate whether digital persuasion can shift entrenched gender and masculinity norms among adult men and women in India. The experiment is embedded within jobs provided by Karya, a digital labor firm offering supplementary employment to approximately 50,000 economically marginalized individuals across India. These jobs involve voice recording, audio transcription, and image labeling on a mobile-based platform, with the resulting data used to train large language models in Indian languages.  

As part of the study, male and female workers on the Karya platform will be randomly assigned to a month-long intervention where the content they read, transcribe, evaluate, or annotate will be designed to challenge gender norms. The treatment group will be divided into two experimental arms: one exposed to implicit gender-equality cues (latent persuasion) and the other to explicit gender-equality messages (explicit persuasion). A control group of workers will complete identical tasks with gender-neutral content. The experimental design is grounded in a theoretical framework suggesting that individuals respond differentially to latent versus explicit persuasion as a function of alignment of these signals with their pre-existing beliefs. Study outcomes will include changes in self-reported gender beliefs, women's agency, gendered time allocation in housework, workplace gender discrimination, men's support for wives’ employment, and spousal participation in work.

From a policy perspective, this study will provide evidence on the efficacy of a scalable, light-touch digital intervention aimed at reshaping gender norms in contexts with persistent social and economic gender inequalities.