With or without him? Experimental evidence on cash grants and gender-sensitive trainings in Tunisia
通过2000名突尼斯女性的随机实验，发现提供现金补助和性别敏感培训能刺激女性创收活动，但只有不邀请丈夫参与时才有效，且对女性自主权无后续影响。
Is it possible to stimulate women’s income-generating activities by relaxing their financial and human capital constraints? Does involving husbands help or hinder the effort? We examine these questions using a three-arm randomized-controlled trial with 2000 women in Tunisia. Women in the two treatment arms were offered a large cash grant (worth USD768 in PPP terms) and a gender-sensitive financial training. In one of the treatment arms, women were additionally encouraged to bring their male partner to the training. Two years after the program, we show that the treatments stimulated women’s income-generating activities, but only when partners were not involved, and with no downstream effects on women’s agency. Independently of partners’ participation, impacts on household living standards were overwhelmingly positive, suggesting that the program was highly cost-effective. Overall, our results highlight the difficulty of stimulating women’s agency in traditional societies, and suggest that involving men in women’s empowerment programs can backfire.