Seema Jayachandran

Reshaping adolescents’ gender attitudes

Seema Jayachandran, with Diva Dhar and Tarun Jain, has investigated how societal norms about gender roles contribute to the economic disadvantages facing women in many developing countries. The research evaluates an intervention aimed at eroding support for restrictive gender norms, specifically a school-based intervention in Haryana, India, that engaged adolescents in classroom discussions about gender equality. Using a randomized controlled trial, the researchers find that the intervention increased adolescents’ support for gender equality.

While visiting CESifo, Ms. Jayachandran will work on two projects. One is to examine the medium-term effects of an intervention in India that aimed to make adolescent boys and girls more supportive of gender equality, collecting a new round of follow-up data to assess if the program’s impacts persisted two years after the classroom-based program had ended. The second project is on access to pre-primary education (private kindergarten) in India. She will be working on a project that examines how attending two years of kindergarten affects performance in primary school.

Seema Jayachandran is a Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on economic issues in developing countries, including children’s health and education, environmental conservation, gender equality, labor markets and political economy. She is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Early Career Development grant. She currently serves as co-editor for the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and associate editor for the Quarterly Journal of Economics. She is also a board member and chair of the gender sector for the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and is co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Development Economics program. She is a contributing columnist for the New York Times business section. Prior to joining Northwestern, she was a faculty member at Stanford University. She earned a PhD in Economics from Harvard University, a master’s degree in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Oxford where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT.