This is our seventh blog post for our Job Market Paper Series blog for 2024-2025.
Felix Rusche is a PhD student at the University of Mannheim. His research interests span labor, development, and political economy. You can find his JMP here.
In many developing countries, the interaction of early marriage, early motherhood, and low educational attainment disempowers women and limits their life opportunities. Even as countries grow richer, gender inequality is often sustained by social norms (Duflo, 2012). In my paper, I ask whether grassroots media can be used as a policy to empower women. I show that community radio stations in India are playing a transformative role in empowering women by shifting attitudes and behaviors related to education, marriage, fertility, and autonomy.
Community Radio: A Grassroots Approach to Development
In 2006, the Indian government enacted a new media policy aimed at fostering economic and social development. The policy enables educational institutions and NGOs to establish community radio stations to address local development issues through locally produced content. The stations are barred from producing political news but have editorial freedom within their mandate. By 2020 more than 250 stations were established with around 331 million people living in the radio stations’ coverage areas.
Women’s Empowerment Takes Center Stage
To understand the impact of these community radio stations, I collect and analyze over 5,000 audio recordings of radio shows in 11 different languages. I first transcribe and translate the recordings. Next, using topic modeling and GPT-based text analysis, I find that women’s empowerment and education are central themes in the programming. The stations actively advocate for girls’ education, family planning, and oppose child marriage and domestic violence. Additional analyses of radio stations’ content based on self-descriptions of radio stations confirm these findings.
The focus on women’s empowerment and education aligns with widespread concerns in India. According to the 2005 World Values Survey, more than a third of the population view women’s empowerment and education as among the country’s most serious development issues. Only poverty is more frequently cited.
Measuring the Impact
To measure the impact of community radio stations, I collect original data on radio tower locations and compute radio stations’ coverage areas. I combine coverage areas with the 2015-16 National Family Health Survey, which is part of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). After reducing the sample to those in the vicinity of a radio tower, a total of around 170k households across around 8,200 geolocated survey clusters remain. Around 17% of women and 30% of men surveyed report to regularly listen to radio, underlining a general gender gap in exposure to mass media.
To identify the effects of community radio, I exploit topography-driven variation in radio access, that is, variation in radio exposure after controlling for the (travel) distance to the radio tower and geographic surroundings of survey clusters (e.g., Armand et al. 2020; Olken 2009; Yanagizawa-Drott 2014). A key issue when applying this well-established approach is that, due to privacy concerns, the geographic coordinates of surveyed households are randomly displaced prior to being made available to the researcher. In rural areas, more than half of all households are displaced by more than 2.5km. This can introduce substantial (attenuation) bias but has largely been ignored in the previous literature (Michler et al. 2022). To overcome this challenge, I develop a novel econometric approach that accounts for random displacement. Based on the publicly known displacement algorithm and ancillary information, I compute the probability density function (PDF) of original survey locations of households conditional on the (displaced) location reported in the survey. I then match this PDF with the coverage area to compute the probability that households are covered by a community radio station. Figure 1 below illustrates the PDF of an example location (left) and its probability mass on the coverage area (right). I use a similar approach to obtain the expected distance of households from the radio towers (which is not equal to the distance of the reported location from the radio tower). I show that my approach yields consistent estimates of the true treatment effects at the household level.
Empowering Women Through Community Radio
The findings show strong effects of exposure to community radio on measures of women’s empowerment. Women exposed to community radio gain an additional 0.3 years of education on average and are less likely to drop out of education. Overall, they are 3–4 percentage points more likely to obtain a primary, secondary, and higher education degree. The increase in educational attainment is not driven by improvements in school infrastructure or accessibility but stems from heightened aspirations among parents and girls themselves as evidenced by changes in reasons for school dropout.
In addition, parents are less likely to cite marriage as a reason for dropout. This is also reflected in a 1.4 percentage point (22%) decrease in child marriage among girls. Overall, girls exposed to community radio are less likely to get married up to the age of around 25. Effects for men are similar but lagged by around 5 years, which corresponds to the age-gap between men and women in India.
I also document decreases in fertility. Women in exposed areas have 8–12% fewer children between the ages of 19 and 35. These changes suggest not only delayed childbearing but a reduction in lifetime fertility, which can have profound implications for women’s health and economic opportunities.
Enhancing Autonomy and Challenging Norms
The impact of community radio stations extends beyond education, fertility, and marriage. While the data is only available on a third of observations, I find that young women in areas with community radio are 11 percentage points more likely to participate in household decisions and have greater autonomy over their mobility. There is also suggestive evidence of decreased approval of domestic violence among women and a reduction in domestic violence. Interestingly, men also show signs of shifting attitudes. They increase the share of household decisions in which they believe women should participate. This indicates that community radio is not only empowering women but also facilitating a change in gender norms among men.
Policy Implications: The Power of Local Voices
The results highlight the potential of community media as a scalable and cost-effective policy instrument to promote women’s empowerment. By allowing local content creation within a policy framework, community radio stations can address specific issues relevant to their communities. Local institutions’ knowledge of local issues is likely to be particularly valuable in culturally and linguistically diverse countries, a characteristic India shares with much of the developing world. The success of India’s policy suggests that governments can leverage civil society’s resources and local knowledge to address persistent gender inequalities.
Outlook and Limitations
While radio remains an integral part of most countries’ media spheres, an important question for future research and policy making is how the concept of community radio can be translated into other types of media. In addition, research on other themes of community radio in India would be a valuable addition. While I show that radios focus on women’s empowerment and education, radio stations also discuss other issues, such as agriculture, health, or government schemes. Another important question for future research is whether the policy translates into other settings. A starting point may be Bangladesh, which has passed a similar community radio policy. Finally, while my paper documents media-induced changes in gender norms, it cannot fully decompose whether the results are driven by changes in knowledge, attitudes, or information about peers’ attitudes. An experimental study may be required to more closely understand through which channels community radio is most effective (e.g. Banerjee et al., 2019).
Feature image created by Felix Rusche using DALLE.
