Honored to moderate this discussion on women’s agency and the power of group models. Join us tomorrow to learn more about what shapes women’s decision-making, how groups improve outcomes for women and girls, and why these insights should influence measurement, programming, and future research.

Our new working paper dives into the challenges rural women in Sub-Sahran Africa face in adapting to climate change and sets an agenda for future policy research. #AfricaGIL #ClimateJustice #GenderEquality #Africa #Adaptation documents.worldbank.org/en/publicati...

Excited to present our paper at the CSAE conference Tuesday! We’ll talk about the impacts of socioemotional skills trainings on economic empowerment for agribusiness owners in Nigeria. #AfricaGIL #EconSky #OxCSAE2025

Looking forward to being part of this UN CSW panel bringing together governments, researchers, and civil society on how social protection can advance gender equality across a woman’s life course This Thursday... Join us! #AfricaGIL #EconSky @unicef.org

The DHS Program is officially done. As I tell my statistics students, good data is ESSENTIAL to improve the world. We can’t make things better if we don’t know the current state of things. No new DHS data collection is an incalculable loss. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/h...

Does free sound too cheap? Here's new evidence on something that did not work to get young people enrolled in vocational training programs in Côte d’Ivoire: sending text messages highlighting that the program is free... #AfricaGIL #EconSky

2. A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:

Empowering women starts with engaging everyone. 🫂 Our recent GIL policy brief summarizes the evidence on engaging men for women's economic empowerment. openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/pub... #GenderEquality #WomenEmpowerment #SocialChange #EconSky #AfricaGIL @rajdevbrar.bsky.social

Men may behave more aggressively than they would want to if they wrongly believe this is what other men (and women) view as « manly » - not crying or using violence to get respect. Here is recent experimental evidence on this from Rio de Janeiro. #EconSky #gender blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

2025 ECON5k starts December 1! Details are here sites.google.com/view/econ5k, including how to get a t-shirt and how to upload your results. Please also feel free to post your results on BlueSky with the hashtag #ECON5k!

Over half of African girls ages 15 to 19 are out of school or married or have children. Our recent report dives into promising ways to address these challenges. EVENT LAUNCH is NOW!! Register here to join virtually or in person: www.worldbank.org/en/events/20... #africagil #EconSky #gender

Join us NOW for a rich discussion on new measures of goal-setting, self-efficacy and locus of control validated in various African countries. A prerequisite for informing policies seeking to improve women's agency! #AfricaGIL #EconSky @WBG_AfricaGIL

I'm again seeking to organize sessions on violence against women as well as mental health in LMICs for the 2025 Ashecon conference in Nashville. If you're interested, please contact me (drop a response here or email me - DMs are not open, but my email is on my website)

Join us for an insightful seminar on socioemotional skills, discrimination and hiring practices! #Skills4Dev #AfricaGIL #EconSky @yashodhan.bsky.social

Excited to share our recent brief on tweaks to social protection programs that work for improving gender equality in Africa: childcare, socio-emotional skills, engaging men, and more! Drawn from #AfricaGIL research #EconSky openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/c...

ungatedresearch.org is a wonderful public good being developed by Martin Abel and Susie Godlonton. It's a website with links to the latest ungated version of papers published in several economics journals. Especially valuable in LMICs where many scholars don't have access to the journals.

Giving smallholder farmers access to warrantage (storing their crops and, when they choose so, using that as a collateral to obtain credit) helps them invest more in human and farm capital. Sharing our recent experimental evidence from Burkina Faso #econsky

Our new paper shows that men benefit from couples' long-distance joint moves more than women do, in both Germany and Sweden. Is this just b/c men are usually the main breadwinner? No, it's hard to explain the patterns we see w/o a gender norm prioritizing men's careers. www.nber.org/papers/w32970

Still on that same topic of what drives women's fertility choices: sharing excellent recent work by my GIL colleagues showing that boosting women's income boosts their fertility too as a means to ensure long-term economic security: voxdev.org/topic/health...

Happening tomorrow! Discussing this great paper on the important topic of women's fertility choices in Burkina Faso #Econsky

And here: Unpacking Socio-Emotional Skills for Women’s Economic Empowerment [brief] documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/3... 11/11

Learn more about World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab’s SES research here. Which Socio-Emotional Skills Matter Most for Women’s Earnings? New Insights from Sub-Saharan Africa [brief] openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/pub... 10/n

🙏 Special thanks to our partners at BRAC Tanzania, IPA, IFC, Trinity College Dublin, & the teams that made this research possible. Thanks also to our funders (Wellspring, IDRC, FCDO, UFGE) for supporting this work. 9/n

You can download the full paper here: documents.worldbank.org/en/publicati... This paper is part of a larger #RCT testing the relative impact of different SES trainings targeted at young women and men in Tanzania. Stay tuned for those results in the near future! 8/n

Implications: This study challenges the use of self-reported SES data and calls for the use of better, behavior-based measures of SES which can improve the targeting and design of SES interventions. The findings also point to the potential to correct young men’s misperceptions of their own SES. 7/n

Third: Young men in this setting tend to over-estimate their skills, contributing to the mismatch between the self-reported gaps & behavioral measures of SES. This finding is consistent w/evidence from US lab experiments on overconfidence of young males in their math and science abilities. 6/n

🔎 So, what did we find? First: Self-reported SES gender gaps are large (0.2σ), but they virtually disappear when measured behaviorally. Second: The male advantage in self-reported SES correlates positively w/social desirability bias, lower cognitive skills levels, & less gender-equitable views. 5/n

The twist: Those results rely on self-reported SES. But are they reliable? We went a step further. Together with BRAC & IPA, we designed an innovative/validated set of behavioral measures to compare self-reported & observed SES among 4,000 youth in urban Tanzania. 4/n

The backstory: In an earlier paper, we teamed up with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) to examine SES in 17 countries in Africa. Men scored 0.15σ higher than women on aggregate SES—equivalent to gains from 5.6 yrs of schooling. Gender gaps in interpersonal SES actually grew w/education. 3/n

The basics: SES—like perseverance, emotional regulation, collaboration, & listening — are key for men’s & women’s earnings & career success. But how can we accurately measure these skills? This will be critical to closing large gender gaps in earnings & productivity. 2/n

🚨NEW WORKING PAPER🚨 Socio-emotional skills (SES) matter for labor market outcomes. There also appear to be large male-female gaps in these skills. But are these gender SES gaps real, or is something else at play? Our latest World Bank #AfricaGIL paper delves into this question. 👇 #EconSky 1/n