In the last decade several international development programs have tried to empower women as a means to achieve the dual goal of spurring economic development and improving attitudes towards women. These programs were inspired by experimental evidence from India, which demonstrated that villages led by female leaders enjoyed improved gender relations (Beaman et al. 2009). More recent work in Afghanistan provided similar results (Beath et al. 2013). However, a recent study conducted in Congo shows that similar development programs did not at all or barely improved the position of women (van der Windt 2018). As such the effect of development programs that empower women is still unclear. You are tasked to evaluate a highly similar program in the context of Guatemala. This program is called IPRESO.

Specifically, you are given a dataset of villages. Like the study in Congo by van der Windt (2018), half of the villages were treated with the development program. This program gave women equal decision-making power over development projects. The other half was the control group and they received no program. Now, a few years later, we went back to these villages. We provided each village with the equivalent of €1000 to be spent on projects that would benefit the community, without any conditions. The villages were instructed to hold a community meeting where residents could discuss their preferences for potential projects. Afterwards, the villages were required to form a committee consisting of 2 to 8 individuals, who would decide on the project(s) that the funds would be allocated towards. There were no other constraints.