Enhancing the impacts of gender training: Encouraging men to share the load through repeated remote reinforcement messaging

We implement a behavior change communication experiment designed to decrease women's time and psychological burden of unpaid household work (chores and childcare) among very poor rural households in Ethiopia. Our primary target within each household is the household head or other age-eligible male. Men in the treatment group receive biweekly phone calls for 14 weeks in which an enumerator guides them to consider the heavy burden of unpaid work carried out by their wives or other age-eligible female household member; to imagine a scenario where they could be helpful; and to commit to performing a small task that could reduce the burden of time spent by others in unpaid household and care work. The control group receives calls on a similar timeline addressing an unrelated placebo topic, the man's own food consumption. We measure outcomes at baseline and endline using both recall and experience sampling methods.

Our pre-analysis plan describes hypotheses for evaluating the impact of the randomized intervention on five sets of outcomes: 1) performance of household chores and childcare by the primary female and male respondents, as well as other household members and/or non-members; 2) allocation of time to economic activities, household work and childcare, and other activities such as social, leisure, or travel time; 3) perceptions about the allocation of time to chores and other activities and the primary female's satisfaction with the help that she receives from others; 4) concordance of reports (on chores performance, intrahousehold allocation of tasks, and time allocation to different activities) by the primary male and primary female when self-reporting (for themselves) vs. proxy-reporting (for other person); and 5) scores and indicators of the presence, frequency, and severity of symptoms of depression.