In Simple Words
Imagine planting two types of fruit trees in a garden where fruit tree A sells for high prices in the future market while tree B sells for nothing. Gardeners naturally water, fertilize, and prune tree A far more diligently long before it bears fruit because they anticipate harvesting a lucrative crop years down the road.
Girls aged six to seventeen
- No study recruiter visits
- Group used for comparison
- Annual recruiter visits
- 5 percentage points more enrolled
Ages measured at three-year follow-up. Girls were mostly too young to take the advertised jobs.
See source →Research question
Severe gender gaps in education and health exist in developing regions because parents expect lower labor market returns for daughters relative to sons. Without clear financial returns to female education and health, households underinvest in young girls' schooling and nutrition.
Participants
2,264 girls aged 6–17 for school enrollment and 2,031 girls aged 5–15 for anthropometric body mass index (BMI) measurements across 160 villages.
Study Design
Three-year randomized trial measuring school enrollment (verified with school records) and physical height/weight measurements converted to World Health Organization BMI-for-age z-scores.
Results
School enrollment for girls aged 6–17 increased by 5.0 percentage points (p < 0.01), closing about 60% of the baseline boy-girl schooling gap, while BMI-for-age z-score increased by 0.24 standard deviations (p < 0.01) for girls aged 5–15.
Takeaway
Increase visible future career opportunities for women to motivate parents to immediately invest more resources in young daughters' health and education.
Source and citation
See source →Read alongside the research
Plain-English glossary
Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.
- Baseline
The starting measurements in a study. Researchers use these to compare what participants were like at the start with what happens later.
ExampleBefore a training programme starts, researchers measure workers’ earnings. That first measurement is the baseline.
GET-IT glossary · Baseline characteristics ↗Read more about baseline →- Percentage points
The difference between two percentages.
ExampleA rise from 40% to 50% is 10 percentage points. Relative to the starting value, that is a 25% increase.
Office for National Statistics · Percentages ↗Read more about percentage points →