Women in Fish Farming: Unveiling the mechanisms for women empowerment

Project Peces para la Vida has implemented a program in three phases over ten years, with activities involving technical training and gender sensitization, among others. Our experiment will try to validate the mechanisms by which these actions lead to women's empowerment by assigning the participants to majority men or majority women groups and making them listen to audios that nudge the training and sensitization received from the program.

2024-11-25

2025-02-28

The increase in empowerment, measured as the willingness to lead a group.

It is a lab-in-the-field experiment where the basic experimental task is a group exercise that consists of finding the best input combination for fish production. During the task, each group will have to choose a leader with a final say on the group’s decision. All tasks are incentivized. The group closest to the expert’s opinion will receive the highest compensation. The experiment involves a factorial design with two arms: group gender composition and leadership-related messages. Participants will be grouped into triads. The treatment arm addressing group gender composition will have two treatments: predominantly male groups (2 men and one woman) and predominantly female groups (2 women and one man). Each group will be assigned to one of three possible treatments of the second experiment’s arm with equal probability: placebo message, the importance of technical knowledge for leadership, and gender sensitization for female leadership.

Experimental Tasks: The planned activities for a typical session are detailed below. Participants will be registered and surveyed before the experiment. Each participant will receive a notebook containing instructions, a pen, and other necessary documents. An icebreaker activity will be conducted to facilitate interaction between participants and facilitators. The Peces Para la Vida team will lead this activity to enhance familiarity among participants, making subsequent activities run more smoothly and naturally. Following this, a facilitator will go over the rules, explain how participants' answers will be graded, and outline the expected monetary incentive, concluding with a control question. The rules for the first task will then be introduced, and each participant will need to solve it while noting their confidence level regarding their answer in their notebooks individually.
Before the next activities, random three-person groups will be formed.
The second task will start with an explanation of the rules. Next, participants will listen to an audio recording. Facilitators will record the group discussion regarding the audio content and the solution for Task 1. After the recording stops, each participant will work on Task 2, identical to Task 1, to either correct or validate the answer from Task 1.
The third task starts with the guided selection of a group coordinator, where the facilitator clarifies that the coordinator will be chosen from the two most motivated group members. Each participant will privately indicate their motivation level on a scale of one to ten to the facilitator, who will then inform everyone about the candidates. Participants will vote on how much they support each candidate for coordinator. Afterward, each participant will complete task 3, similar to tasks 1 and 2, and present their answers to the chosen coordinator.
For task 4, the elected coordinator will decide on a group answer based on each member's answers to task 3.
At the end of the tasks, participants are asked to go through the registration area to return the material provided and choose the activity for which they will be paid.
Treatments: We will have two treatment arms.
1) Group composition treatment: we will assign participants to a three-person group with a majority of women or a group with a majority of men to uncover how being in a group composed of more or less women can impact women’s empowerment.
2) Leadership-related messages: participants will listen to randomly assigned audios with a story of a fish farmer with (i) technical knowledge content on fish farming, (ii) gender sensitization content, or (iii) a neutral story of a Bolivian holiday.

Complete block randomization by gender, done in the field with a computer using Excel.

Individual randomization to groups (composition treatment) and group randomization for the audio treatment.

No

Around 66 groups between men and women

99 men and 99 women approximately

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms:
22 groups to control
22 groups to technical knowledge audio
22 groups to gender sensitization audio
66 women and 33 men to women majority group treatment (WWM)
33 women and 66 men to men majority group treatment (WMM)