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.

Our dataset contains two dependent variables: “presence” and “committee”. Presence measures the percentage of women present during the community meeting. Committee measures the percentage of women on the committee. The independent variable is the treatment, with 0 as control group and 1 as treatment group.

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Based on earlier work (Beaman et al. 2009, Beath et al. 2013), van der Windt (2018) hypothesizes that IPRESO should have positively impacted the presence and committee variables. You are tasked to evaluate these hypotheses. You are also asked to examine how the presence and committee variables relate.

You need to write a research report AND submit the data analysis you conducted in Excel. You submit two files: one word or pdf with the research report and one .xlsx file with the original dataset and your analyses. If one of these files is missing, we will not grade your submission.

Please note that every student has their own personal dataset. Your teacher will be able to see which dataset was assigned to you, so you cannot use the dataset that another student received.

Now write your own research report on the basis of your analysis of the data:

• Start the report by introducing the program and the hypotheses you will test. Note that your reader is not aware of the program or the existing research.
• Describe the treatment variable. Also, describe the ‘presence’ and ‘committee’ variables by making a box plot. Discuss the box plot.
• A bar plot that displays the means and 95% confidence intervals of both experimental conditions (or you may choose to display the difference between the two conditions). Make sure to also report the confidence interval(s) in the text.Based on the output, draw an initial conclusion about the difference between the two experimental conditions.
• Report and interpret the results of t-tests that test whether the two experimental conditions differ.
• Produce a scatterplot of presence and committee.
• Report and interpret the correlation between the two continuous variables.
• Finish with an overall conclusion, also in relation to the existing literature.

In terms of style, your report:

• Should not exceed a 1000 words. We do not use 10% margins. The goal is to learn to express yourself concisely.
• Should follow the political science citation guidelines.
• Should be clear in writing. Please use 1.5 line spacing and follow the other requirements from the writing checklist.
• Should report visualizations and tests using the criteria we have discussed in class.

We recommend to read the short article by van der Windt (2018) to get more acquainted with the literature and the research you will do for this assignment.