320
WO R L D D E V E LO P M E N T R E P O RT 2 0 1 2
part of the calculation in compensating workers for their lost jobs.147 One year after separation, women were more likely than men to rate their well-being as better or the same.148 Taking account of the allocation of resources within the household As seen earlier in the Report, couples do not always (or even often) act as a single unit. They might have different preferences and might not completely share their income—and, in the end, their different bargaining power will drive the outcome of household decisions. Changing the bargaining power within households can result from a range of policies from direct transfers to changes in income-earning opportunities. How will bargaining power change, and how will that affect program design? A female-targeted village savings and loan program of the International Rescue Committee in Burundi aimed to increase women’s control over the resources that the program would bring into households. It piloted a six-session course for participants and their spouses analyzing household decision making. Women who participated in this course reported greater autonomy in decision making and less violence at home than those in the microfinance program who did not get this additional course. Thinking on this type of policy can evolve. Initially, many conditional cash transfer programs targeted women, in part because women were likely to spend more of the transfer on children’s endowments. However, these transfers themselves changed bargaining power within the household and, in some cases, such as Mexico, resulted in short-term increases in domestic violence.149 While this effect can disappear or change in the longer term, a number of these transfer programs took proactive action to tackle domestic violence and broader issues within household relations by including conditions to discourage domestic violence (Brazil), training and awareness of these issues for mothers and families (Colombia, Peru), and even dedicated social workers (Chile).150
WANTED: BETTER EVIDENCE To better understand whether policies to address gender inequalities are working, two actions are needed. First, programs and projects need to put
in place effective monitoring systems to capture the gender dimensions of the problems they are addressing and the effects of their activities. This step requires, among other things, not only clear sex-disaggregated data from baseline surveys but also attention in those surveys to the causes of gender inequality that may matter for project design (for example, barriers in accessing services the project provides). As the project progresses, sex-disaggregated data on beneficiaries can help monitor progress and identify the need for mid-course corrections. Second, there needs to be a focus on understanding whether specific interventions work. Evaluations are the only way this question can be answered. Different types of evaluations will provide answers to different questions. Welldesigned impact evaluations can be especially helpful because they use a well-defined comparison group to measure the effects on program beneficiaries. In this regard, much remains to be done. For example, in the realm of economic opportunity, the effects of active labor market policies have been subject to impact evaluations. But very little is known about policies to improve women’s networks. And while a lot is known from impact evaluations about the effects of conditional cash transfers on a host of outcomes, less rigorous evidence is available on the effects of such programs that address maternal mortality. Finally, while the effects of political reservations in local governments in India have been well studied, there is less evidence about the effects of reservations for parliamentary seats or on the impacts of improving women’s access to justice. The good news is that more evidence of this type is available today than existed even 10 years ago. But more needs to be done. Evaluations need to be built into projects as they are designed, which means planning for them. And additional resources will be needed. While knowledge gaps in individual areas are evident, two overarching themes deserve particular attention. First, efforts should focus on contrasting the impact of incremental interventions (those that work within existing gender norms) and transformative interventions (those that seek to transform gender roles), particularly when they focus on the same policy area, as in vocational education. Second, given that multiple constraints underlie many “sticky” gender gaps, emphasis should be placed on evaluating