Project description
Harnessing data and experimental designs towards empowerment of women
Violence against women (VAW) is both a cause of and a manifestation of gender inequality. The evidence base for policy has been limited by both a scarcity of data and a paucity of causal research. The EU-funded Evidence-VAW project will explore behavioural activation and institutional designs to address the challenges of encouraging reporting of violence, and delivery of justice in this domain. To this end, it will conduct lab and field experiments, gathering unique data on beliefs, norms and social networks, and analyse administrative judicial and political data. Evidence-VAW will consistently use techniques for causal identification to produce rich scientific evidence to guide policy and further scholarship.
Objective
Violence against women (VAW) is a fundamental cause of gender inequality and a substantial constraint on womens lives, but it has drawn significantly less intellectual curiosity from economists than aspects of gender inequality such as the pay gap. I propose to redress this by acquiring, generating and analysing unavailable or under-used data using techniques for causal identification with a view to producing a rich tapestry of scientific evidence to guide policy and further scholarship. This is an important time to do this as there is a growing consensus around prioritizing VAW in international policymaking but the evidence base is thin. There are no systematic data on VAW, partly because women are inhibited in reporting. Creative new strategies are being used in many countries to reduce VAW, but without scientific evaluation.
This project will investigate institutional designs to encourage women reporting VAW and to deliver justice on VAW (including penalties for firms, feminization of the criminal justice system and the use of mobile phone apps and social media to provide women information and facilitate their coordination); it will implement and evaluate grassroots interventions designed to address VAW by inducing behavioural change among men and women; it will analyse the likely value of policies addressing proximate causes (alcohol ban, unemployment insurance); the potential of womens political mobilisation; and the role of UN discourse on VAW.
Some projects use randomized control trials (RCTs), others leverage natural experimental variation from policy reform or institutional features. Many use longitudinal administrative data providing unparalleled opportunities for research. Within the RCTs, I will gather unique data on social norms, beliefs and social networks. Although focused on womens rights, it addresses issues on the frontier of economics research, including inequality, productivity, institutional design, political economy, and legislative
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryalcohols
- social sciencespolitical sciencespolitical policiescivil society
- social sciencessociologysocial issuesunemployment
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Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantHost institution
CV4 8UW COVENTRY
United Kingdom