Policies and programmes must change restrictive gender norms in order to meaningfully impact the lives of women and girls.
In many societies, women’s choices around education, marriage, employment, and childbearing are severely limited and often prescriptive. Within homes, schools, work, and public places, critical life decisions are underpinned by social and gender norms that contribute to a widespread acceptance of discriminatory practices against women. Broadly understood, gender norms are ‘informal rules that impose expectations about behaviour that are dependent on gender’. Not only do these define socially acceptable behaviour, but they also have the power to influence expectations for men and women—directly affecting their choices, freedoms, and capabilities.
Restrictive norms which fuel gender biases have been examined in social science research for the role they play in obstructing gender equality across multiple dimensions of politics, education, economics, and physical integrity ie. freedom from intimate partner violence and access to reproductive rights. Researchers also find that gender gaps favouring men over women are wider in developing countries.
An important consequence of unequal gender norms is that they have the potential to minimise the positive impacts of a range of programmes designed to improve women’s health, educational attainment, employment, and financial inclusion, among others.
Evidence from randomised evaluations suggests that to make meaningful changes in the fight against gender inequality, stakeholders must directly intervene to change biased gender norms in policy and programme design.
Why early marriage among girls persists
Norms favouring the early marriage of girls have resulted in its widespread practice and are correlated with negative health and education outcomes for women. One possible approach to successfully curb early marriage practices is accounting for the influence of parents on marital decisions.
A study in rural Bangladesh tested whether providing conditional incentives for parents to delay their daughters’ marriage, empowering adolescents, or a combined approach could reduce child marriage, teenage childbearing, and increase educational attainment among adolescent girls. Girls whose families received conditional incentives (such as cooking oil), were 23 percent less likely to marry before the age of 18 and 13 percent less likely to have children during their teenage years, relative to girls in communities without any programming. In comparison, while the adolescent empowerment programme—providing training in life skills, reproductive health, and financial literacy—had a positive impact on girls’ education, it failed to delay the age of marriage and childbearing.
The limited impact of the adolescent empowerment programme on the age of marriage suggests that parental preferences and underlying gender norms are still relevant factors in marital decisions. Programmes that seek to end child marriage must leverage parents’ influence while approaches to empower adolescent girls may work better in contexts where young people have more control over their marriage choices.