Iodine Deficiency and Gender Attitudes in Tanzania

描述（由申请人提供）：尽管近年来取得了进展，但在世界许多地方，女孩和妇女相对于男孩仍然处于不利地位，具有多重负面潜在影响。性别不平等的核心是关于性别的社会规范和态度，这些规范和态度产生并延续了歧视性制度，最终阻碍了制度和行为的变革。尽管如此，人们对性别规范和态度是如何演变和适应的知之甚少。一个重要的问题是，为什么性别不平等在某些社会中严重且持续存在，而在其他社会中却没有？一个相关的问题是，当妇女获得更多的晋升机会，从而影响人们对妇女相对能力的看法时，性别态度的演变有多容易？该项目将收集新的、独特的数据，有助于我们对这两个问题的理解，这些数据将用于调查性别态度对坦桑尼亚女童教育改善和因胎儿碘缺乏症减少而导致的认知能力性别差距缩小的反应。特别是,

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Despite progress in recent years, girls and women remain disadvantaged relative to boys in many parts of the world, with multiple negative potential implications. At the heart of gender inequality are social norms and attitudes about gender that give rise to and perpetuate discriminatory institutions, and ultimately inhibit institutional and behavioral change. Despite this, little is understood about the how gender norms and attitudes evolve and adapt. One important question is why is gender inequality acute and persistent in particular societies but not others? A related question is how readily do gender attitudes evolve when women are given more opportunities to advance and thereby influence perceptions about women's relative ability? This project will contribute to our understanding of both questions by collecting new and unique data that will be used to investigate how gender attitudes respond to improvements in girls' schooling and a narrowing of the gender gap in cognitive ability that arose from reductions in fetal iodine deficiency in Tanzania. In particular, data from a previous evaluation of the Tanzania maternal iodine supplementation program showed that girls born during the program had achieved nearly a year of additional schooling attainment by ages 12-15, whereas boys benefited very little, consistent with scientific evidence that iodine deficiency is more acute for females at early stages of brain development. The study will track 1200 households from 16 districts of Tanzania that benefited from the program and collect data on gender attitudes of mothers and fathers of children born during the program using Implicit Association Tests (IATs), and data on economic outcomes of their children. The study aims to: (1) Develop culturally appropriate IATs to measure gender attitudes and stereotyping, and develop and test survey questions to measure explicit beliefs about male and female relative ability and gender stereotyping; (2) Assess the causal effect of reductions in feta iodine deficiency among girls on maternal and paternal gender attitudes by making use of quasi-experimental variation in program exposure that has been established in previous research in conjunction with the data we collect from parents on gender attitudes and preferences; and (3) Assess the feasibility of conducting a survey of children who benefited from in utero supplementation by collecting location information and gathering proxy data on kids' long-run outcomes. The proposed study will be the first to use rigorous, recently developed approaches to assess the causal association between girls' susceptibility to fetal iodine deficiency and parental gender attitudes.