Overview
Women face multiple barriers during their entire life, resulting in gender gaps in education, skills, labor force participation, wages, wealth, and agency. Aligned with SDG 5's objective of achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls, the DIME Gender Program focuses on understanding the key challenges and constraints that women face throughout the life cycle, and exploring mechanisms that can bring about gender equity and empower women for better economic development. The main goal of the DIME Gender program is to design, implement, and disseminate a well-coordinated portfolio of gender-specific interventions targeting women, as well as study the effects of gender-neutral interventions on women’s outcomes.
Themes
The DIME Gender Program focuses on four thematic areas, representing some of the key obstacles that women face throughout the life cycle:
Social Norms and Behavioral Change
DIME focuses on examining community-based approaches and entertainment education programs to reshape harmful social norms surrounding roles and masculinities, particularly regarding sexual behavior, parental roles, aspirations of girls, and adolescent pregnancy. In Nigeria, DIME finds that exposure to the TV drama MTV Shuga, which provided information on HIV and risky sexual behavior, increased HIV testing and reduced sexually transmitted infections and gender-based violence. Similarly, in northern Nigeria, DIME finds that exposing parents to aspirational videos of roles models positively reshaped their attitudes and norms towards girls’ education. In India, a social media campaign to reshape gender norms and reduce social acceptability of violence against women demonstrated the potential and effectiveness of social media to combat these issues at scale.
Human Capital and Skills
DIME focuses on identifying barriers to girls’ education and explores mechanisms that promote gender equity and women’s socio-economic empowerment. In DRC, a comprehensive diagnostic identified constraints to girls’ education and provided policy recommendations for keeping girls in school. As a next step, DIME is collaborating with education projects in DRC and Nigeria to explore the effectiveness of life skills training (e.g., Girls Clubs) on school retention and learning outcomes. In collaboration with E3empower in Tanzania, DIME is testing whether programming literacy can increase interest in STEM and socioemotional learning among young women. In terms of economic opportunities. DIME's work in Nigeria demonstrates the employment and earning benefits of apprenticeship and vocational training programs for vulnerable female youth, while a multi-country partnership with the World Food Programme (WFP) evaluates the impact of public works programs on women's social and economic empowerment in El Salvador, Haiti, Kenya, and Rwanda.
Violence Against Women
DIME focuses on exploring innovative mechanisms and approaches for reducing violence against women in public spaces, such as police patrolling, access to subsidized public transit, digital reporting systems. In Delhi (India), one of the places with the highest rates of sexual harassment in public spaces, DIME shows that women choose lower-quality schools to avoid sexual violence while traveling to school, thereby lowering their labor force participation and expected earnings. Similarly, in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), DIME finds that women face harassment 1.5 times every week during their daily commute on public transit and are willing to pay a premium of 10 percent of daily travel fare to avoid harassment. In Tanzania, DIME is developing a safety response system mobile app to improve the measurement and reporting of violence against women in public transportation.
Legal and Institutional Factors
DIME evaluates legal and institutional factors that protect women against all forms of violence, promote their access to and control over assets, and increase their voice and agency. In Peru, DIME shows that improving women’s access to justice through Women’s Justice Centers reduced gender-based violence by 10 percent, and increased reporting and prosecutions for gender-specific crimes by 40 percent. Similarly, studying Bangladesh's garment industry, DIME finds that promoting women into management positions enhances their household decision-making power for both promoted women and their female subordinates, who viewed the promoted women as role models.
Partnerships
To bridge the gap between research and practice, the DIME Gender Program collaborates with governments and external partners to help countries develop, implement and test innovative solutions to address the multiple barriers that women face throughout the life cycle and close gender gaps. Key partners include the European Union (EU), UK's Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development office (FCDO), the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the World Food Programme (WFP), the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
