Generating New Evidence to Address Violence Against Women: Realizing Women’s Rights

Violence against women (VAW) is a fundamental cause of gender inequality and a substantial constraint on women’s 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 women’s 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 women’s rights, it addresses issues on the frontier of economics research, including inequality, productivity, institutional design, political economy, and legislative