Two Sides of Gender: Sex, Power, and Adolescence

Tuesday, May 23, 2023
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
(Pacific)
Speaker: 
  • Manisha Shah
Event Card for AHPP May 23 event "Two Sides of Gender"

Co-sponsored by Peking University Institute for Global Health and Development, and the Asia Health Policy Program

Adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa have some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence across the globe. This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized controlled trial that offers females a goal setting activity to improve their sexual and reproductive health outcomes and offers their male partners a soccer intervention, which educates and inspires young men to make better sexual and reproductive health choices. Both interventions reduce female reports of intimate partner violence. Impacts are larger among females who were already sexually active at baseline. We develop a model to understand the mechanisms at play. The soccer intervention improves male attitudes around violence and risky sexual behaviors. Females in the goal setting arm take more control of their sexual and reproductive health by exiting violent relationships. Both of these mechanisms drive reductions in IPV.

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Manisha Shah

Manisha Shah is the Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., Endowed Chair in Social Justice and Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and Founding Director of the Global Lab for Research in Action. She is an affiliate of NBER, CEGA, JPAL, BREAD, and IZA. Her research focuses on development economics, particularly applied microeconomics, health, and development. She has written several papers on the economics of sex markets in order to learn how more effective policies and programs can be deployed to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. She also works in the area of child health and education. . Shah has been the PI on various impact evaluations and randomized controlled trials and is currently leading projects in Tanzania, Indonesia, and India. She has also worked extensively in Ecuador and Mexico. Her research has been supported by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the World Bank, and the National Science Foundation among others. She is an editor at Journal of Health Economics and an Associate Editor at The Review of Economics and Statistics. Shah received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.