DISCUSSION PAPER

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER
AND DEVELOPMENT:A Review of Research and PracticeNo. 42, September 2023

TARA PATRICIA COOKSON, AND LORENA FUENTES,MARIA KLARA KUSS, AND JENNIFER BITTERLY OF LADYSMITH

The research and drafting of this discussion paper was led by Tara Patricia Cookson, founder ofLadysmith and Canada Research Chair in Gender, Development and Global Public Policy at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Members of the research teamincluded Jennifer Bitterly, Lorena Fuentes and Maria Klara Kuss of Ladysmith.
The invaluable inputs of the three peer reviewers are gratefully acknowledged.
The completion of this discussion paper would not have been possible without the sustained
support and insightful comments from Elisa Acevedo Hernández, Paro Chaujar, Jennifer Cooper,
Papa Seck, Constanza Tabbush and Laura Turquet.

Suggested citation: Cookson, T.P., L. Fuentes, M.K. Kuss, and J. Bitterly. 2023. “Social Norms, Genderand Development: A Review of Research and Practice”. UN-Women Discussion Paper Series No. 42.
New York: UN-Women.
ISSN: 25216112© UN-Women, 2023. All rights reserved.
The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent
the views of UN-Women, the United Nations or any of its affiliated organizations.
Produced by the Research and Data Section
Editor: Tina Johnson

DISCUSSION PAPER

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER
AND DEVELOPMENT:A Review of Research and PracticeNo. 42, November 2023

TARA PATRICIA COOKSON, AND LORENA FUENTES,MARIA KLARA KUSS, AND JENNIFER BITTERLY OF LADYSMITH

TABLE OF CONTENTSACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONSSUMMARY

RÉSUMÉRESUMENINTRODUCTION

3

4

5

7

3. HOW ARE SOCIAL NORMS MEASURED?

40

3.1 Contextual discovery

40

3.2 Establish baseline indicators

41

3.3 Iterative measurement of ongoing changes

44

3.5 Final data collection

44

3.4 Dissemination of results

46

3.6 Towards improved programmatic researchand evaluations

47

3.7 Should we worry about ‘getting
measurement right’?

48

51

10

1. WHAT ARE SOCIAL NORMS?

12

4. CONCLUSION: WHAT ROLE (IF ANY)SHOULD DEVELOPMENT AGENCIESPLAY IN SHIFTING SOCIAL NORMS?

1.1 From psychology to sociology:
What are social norms?

13

4.1 ‘Targeting’ social norms work

52

1.2 Gender norms: A subset of social norms

17

4.2 Making social norms work make sense53

4.3 Supporting women’s and feminist organizations
as key agents of change

54

REFERENCES

55

ANNEX. METHODOLOGY OF THE
EVIDENCE REVIEW

62

2. HOW DO SOCIAL NORMS CHANGE?

21

2.1 Evidence on programmatic interventions:Media, group communication and incentives

22

2.2 Shifting social norms in wider society27

2.3 Discussion: Changing hearts and minds,changing society

37

ACRONYMS ANDABBREVIATIONSALIGNAdvancing Learning and Innovation on Gender Norms

CEDAW

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against WomenCR

consciousness raising

CSE

comprehensive sexuality education

CSO

civil society organization

CPA

community participatory analysis

FGC

female genital cutting

FGM

female genital mutilation

GAL

Gender Action Learning

GBV

gender-based violence

IPV

intimate partner violence

MHM

menstrual hygiene managementNGO

non-governmental organization

OECD

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

RCT

randomized control trial

SIGI

Social Institutions and Gender Index

UN-Women United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment
UNICEF

United Nations Children’s Fund

VAW

violence against women

WASH

water, sanitation and health

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

3

SUMMARY
Global development organizations are increasingly
turning to social norms, including gender norms, as a
new area of investment in contexts where progress ongender equality is slow, has stalled or is backsliding.
Yet, for many actors new to this area of work, questions about where and how to intervene remain open.
Meanwhile, feminist scholars and practitioners haveexpressed concern about how some development
organizations are defining social norms and establishing theories of change around them. This tension
points to a problem of approach. The social norms
approaches rising in prominence tend to reflect aparticular understanding of social change, one that
did not originate in feminist thought or action. The
grounded work undertaken for decades by feminist
and women’s movements to shift discriminatorysocial norms in communities around the world – often
as part of broader initiatives to improve women’smaterial conditions – is rarely reflected in these neworganizational efforts and the theories of change
undergirding them.
This paper provides a ‘state of the evidence’ on social
norms change. It draws on findings from a scoping
review of studies and evaluations of programmaticinterventions to shift social norms, as well as insightsfrom a broader and more heterogeneous body ofevidence tracing how social change happens. In
doing so, it aims to answer four questions: What aresocial norms?, How do social norms change?, How
are social norms measured? and What role (if any)
should global development organizations play inshifting social norms?
The answer to the question What are social norms?
largely depends on who is being asked. Social norms
theory and research provide multiple, conflicting andconfusing definitions. Some of these are anchored inbehaviour economics and social psychology perspectives that view social norms as existing in individual
hearts and minds. Others view social norms as diffusedthroughout society, embedded in all its components
from the law to the economy and from religions tocorporations, a view grounded in political, anthropological and sociological theory. In recent years, theproliferation of attempts to achieve ever more precise
definitions and typographies is increasingly removed
from fields of practice and the ways in which feminist
and women’s movements and civil society organizations (CSOs) have been talking about social norms for
decades.
In exploring the question How do social norms change?,
the paper traverses a divided scientific evidence basethat, on the one hand, does not adequately reflect thevaried social, political and economic drivers behindhistorical changes in social norms, including the roleof women’s and feminist movements and, on theother, grasps the complexity of social norms but does
not lend itself to clearly defined theories of action.
There are, however, some overarching lessons to be
drawn. The first is that gender norms are one of thesignificant factors shaping progress, stasis and backsliding on gender equality, meaning that they are one
lever among many others that also require attention.
The second is that social norms change is bi-directional: Shifts in gender norms can lead to changes
in the tangible matter of society, and changes in thetangible matter of society can lead to shifts in gendernorms. The third is that different levers are required
to change different social norms: No single ‘magicbullet’ approach exists. The fourth is that women’sand feminist movements and CSOs are historically
proven agents of change. The fifth is that shifts insocial norms – and work to catalyse those shifts – canprovoke backlash. Finally, the sixth is that social norms(usually) change slowly.
Within a data-driven development paradigm, a great
deal of interest exists in the question How are social
norms measured? The answer to this question isshaped by methodological and philosophical tensions. In terms of a methodological approach, there iscurrently no global standard for identifying and measuring social norms change, despite the significant
investments in getting this right among academics

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

4

and development and global health practitioners.
Many evaluations use attitudes, beliefs, perceptions
or behaviours (or some combination of these), thoughthese are widely recognized as poor proxies. Experimental and quasi-experimental approaches, while
attractive for their orientation to rigour, do not appear
to be well suited for the subject matter, which involves
high levels of complexity and requires considerationof multiple, confounding factors. The second tension
concerns whether ‘getting measurement right’ is aworthwhile goal in and of itself – and, if so, to what
extent. There are legitimate concerns about the
involved, complicated nature of some approaches tomeasuring social norms, particularly with regard totheir reliance on ‘outside’ technical expertise, spotty
track record of effectiveness, and cost. Simpler, mixed
methods and participatory approaches to measuringsocial norms change may be more appropriate.
These insights inform our answer to the final question: What role (if any) should global development

organizations play in shifting social norms? Many
global development organizations already do workthat shifts social norms by supporting feminist
and women’s movements and CSOs with funding,research and data, technical expertise and capacityand network building. Work that shifts social norms
in these cases is implicit and often secondary to
broader agendas to change the material conditionsof women’s lives. Further support to these groups
could deepen their impact, but changes are required
to the social norms, practices and processes withindevelopment itself if the slow and non-linear work ofshifting social norms is to be adequately supported. A
cumulative and significant lesson that emerges fromthe various bodies of thought and action on how
feminist change happens is that social norms change
is not the next ‘silver bullet’. Targeted and thoughtful
engagement with this area of intervention is required,
as is a bigger picture that includes the myriad of otherlevers in the political, economic and social arenas thatneed to be pulled.

RÉSUMÉ
Les organisations internationales de développement
investissent de plus en plus dans le domaine desnormes sociales, notamment les normes de genre,dans les contextes où les progrès en matière d’égalitédes genres sont lents, stagnent, voire reculent. Cependant, de nombreux acteurs novices dans ce domaine
ont encore du mal à déterminer où et comment il
convient d’intervenir. Parallèlement, plusieurs universitaires et spécialistes travaillant sur les questions
féministes ont exprimé leur inquiétude quant aux
définitions que donnent certaines organisations dedéveloppement des normes sociales et aux théories
du changement qu’elles élaborent autour de cesnormes. Cette situation met en évidence un problèmed’approche. En effet, les approches fondées sur lesnormes sociales les plus courantes tendent à refléter
une compréhension singulière du changement social— une compréhension qui ne tire pas son origine dela pensée ou de l’action féministe. Par conséquent,le travail de fond entrepris depuis plusieurs dizaines
d’années par les mouvements féministes et lesmouvements de femmes pour faire évoluer les normessociales discriminatoires en vigueur dans les communautés du monde entier (souvent dans le cadred’initiatives plus larges visant à améliorer les conditions matérielles des femmes) n’est que rarement prisen compte dans les récents efforts des organisationscomme dans les théories du changement qui lessous-tendent.
Le présent document dresse un « état des lieux »de l’évolution des normes sociales. Pour ce faire, ils’appuie sur les résultats d’un examen approfondi desétudes et des évaluations portant sur les interventions
programmatiques visant à faire évoluer les normessociales, ainsi que sur les conclusions tirées d’unensemble plus large et plus hétérogène de donnéespermettant de décrire l’évolution du changementsocial. Il entend ainsi répondre aux quatre questions
ci-après : À quoi correspondent les normes sociales ?
Comment les normes sociales évoluent-elles ? Comment
les normes sociales sont-elles évaluées ? Et enfin,

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

5quel rôle (le cas échéant) les organisations internationales de développement doivent-elles jouer dansl’évolution des normes sociales ?
La réponse à la question « À quoi correspondent lesnormes sociales ? » dépend dans une large mesure dela personne interrogée. De fait, les normes sociales
font l’objet de multiples définitions, contradictoires
et parfois déroutantes, tant dans la théorie que dansla pratique. Certaines se fondent sur des notionsd’économie comportementale et de psychologiesociale et considèrent que les normes sociales
résident dans le c’ur et l’esprit des individus. D’autres
soutiennent que les normes sociales sont diffusées
dans l’ensemble de la société à travers toutes ses
composantes, du droit à l’économie en passantpar la religion et les entreprises — un concept
inspiré des théories politiques, anthropologiques etsociologiques. Or, les efforts déployés ces dernières
années en vue d’établir des définitions et desnomenclatures toujours plus précises s’éloignent deplus en plus de la pratique et du discours que tiennent
les mouvements féministes, les mouvements defemmes et les organisations de la société civile sur lesnormes sociales depuis des décennies.
Pour répondre à la question « Comment les normessociales évoluent-elles? », le présent document analyse
une base de données scientifiques hétérogène qui,d’une part, ne reflète pas suffisamment les divers
facteurs sociaux, politiques et économiques à l’origine
des évolutions qui ont marqué les normes sociales
au cours de l’histoire, notamment le rôle desmouvements féministes et des mouvements defemmes, et qui d’autre part, tient compte de lacomplexité que présentent ces normes, sans toutefois
parvenir à élaborer des théories d’action clairement
définies. Il est toutefois possible d’en tirer quelquesenseignements généraux. Tout d’abord, les normesde genre constituent l’un des principaux facteursde progrès, de stagnation ou de recul en matièred’égalité des genres, ce qui signifie qu’elles comptent
parmi les nombreux moyens d’action auxquels
il convient de prêter attention. Deuxièmement,l’évolution des normes sociales se produit dans lesdeux sens : l’évolution des normes de genre peut
entraîner des changements tangibles dans la société,

tout comme les changements tangibles dans lasociété peuvent entraîner une évolution des normes degenre. Troisièmement, l’évolution des normes sociales
requiert plusieurs moyens d’action : aucune solution
miracle ne peut garantir cette évolution. Quatrièmement, les mouvements féministes, les mouvements
de femmes et les organisations de la société civile ont
démontré par le passé qu’ils étaient des agents dechangement. Cinquièmement, l’évolution des normessociales et les efforts déployés pour favoriser celle-ci
peuvent susciter des réactions négatives. Enfin,l’évolution des normes sociales se produit (le plus
souvent) avec lenteur.
Étant donné que le modèle actuel de développement
est axé sur les données, la question « Comment lesnormes sociales sont-elles évaluées ? » suscite un grandintérêt. La réponse à cette question comporte un
certain nombre de difficultés d’ordre méthodologiqueet philosophique. Sur le plan méthodologique, iln’existe actuellement aucune norme mondialepermettant de définir et d’évaluer l’évolution desnormes sociales, malgré les efforts considérables
déployés par les universitaires et les spécialistesdu développement et de la santé mondiale pour yparvenir. En outre, de nombreuses évaluations sebasent sur les attitudes, les croyances, les perceptions
ou les comportements (ou une combinaison de ceséléments), bien qu’il soit largement reconnu que
ces indicateurs fournissent de piètres résultats.
De même, les approches expérimentales et quasi
expérimentales, malgré l’intérêt qu’elles présentent
eu égard à leur souci de rigueur, ne semblent pas
bien adaptées au sujet, qui revêt un haut degré decomplexité et nécessite la prise en compte de facteurs
multiples et contradictoires. Une autre difficulté réside
dans la question de savoir si le fait de « bien évaluer »est un objectif valable en soi — et, si oui, dans quelle
mesure. En effet, on peut légitimement s’inquiéter
de la nature complexe de certaines approches visantà évaluer les normes sociales, notamment en ce qui
concerne leur dépendance à l’égard d’une expertisetechnique « extérieure », leurs résultats mitigés entermes d’efficacité et leur coût. Des méthodes plus
simples, hybrides et participatives pourraient s’avérer
plus appropriées pour évaluer l’évolution des normessociales.

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

6

Toutes ces informations éclairent la réponse quel’on peut apporter à la dernière question : « Quel rôle(le cas échéant) les organisations internationales dedéveloppement doivent-elles jouer dans l’évolution
des normes sociales ? ». De nombreuses organisations
internationales de développement œuvrent déjà
en faveur de l’évolution des normes sociales enapportant leur aide aux mouvements féministes,
aux mouvements de femmes et aux organisations
de la société civile par des financements, desrecherches et des données, une expertise technique,un renforcement des capacités et l’établissementde réseaux. Néanmoins, les efforts consentis parces organisations pour faire évoluer les normessociales se limitent à des activités implicites etsouvent secondaires au regard de programmes plus
vastes ayant pour objectif d’améliorer les conditions

matérielles de la vie des femmes. Apporter davantage
de soutien à ces organisations permettrait derenforcer leur impact. Pour autant, il est également
nécessaire de faire évoluer les normes sociales, lespratiques et les processus au sein même des activitésde développement si l’on veut soutenir comme il sedoit les efforts lents et non linéaires déployés en faveurde cette évolution. L’un des enseignements majeurs
qui se dégagent des différents groupes de réflexion
et d’action sur la manière dont le changement
féministe se produit consiste à dire que l’évolution
des normes sociales n’est pas la panacée. En revanche,
un engagement ciblé et réfléchi dans ce domained’intervention est nécessaire, de même qu’une vision
globale incluant l’ensemble des moyens d’action
disponibles dans les domaines politique, économiqueet social.

RESUMEN
Las organizaciones mundiales para el desarrollo se
están volcando de forma creciente en las normassociales, incluidas las de género, como una nueva
esfera de inversión en contextos en los que el progresohacia la igualdad de género es lento o se ha detenido
o deteriorado. Sin embargo, para numerosos actoresque se adentran en este campo de trabajo, las preguntas de dónde y cómo intervenir siguen sin respuesta.
Mientras tanto, el mundo académico y profesionales
feministas han expresado sus inquietudes acerca
de la definición que algunas organizaciones para eldesarrollo dan a las normas sociales y de cómo establecen las teorías del cambio en torno a ellas. Esta
tensión indica un problema de enfoque. Los enfoques
que están adquiriendo más preeminencia en materia
de normas sociales tienden a reflejar una noción
particular del cambio social, noción que no provienedel pensamiento ni de la acción feministas. El trabajo
fundamental que los movimientos feministas y demujeres han llevado a cabo durante decenios paratransformar las normas sociales discriminatorias en
comunidades de todo el mundo —a menudo comoparte de iniciativas más generales orientadas a
mejorar las condiciones materiales de las mujeres—casi nunca se ve reflejado en las actividades que

ponen en marcha esas organizaciones ni en las teoríasdel cambio que las sostienen.
En este documento se ofrece un “estado actual delconocimiento” sobre la transformación de las normassociales. Se basa en los resultados de una revisión dealcance de los estudios y las evaluaciones de intervenciones programáticas encaminadas a modificar las
normas sociales, así como en la información recabadaa partir de un conjunto de datos más amplio y heterogéneo que analiza cómo se produce el cambio social.
Así, su finalidad es la de responder cuatro preguntas:¿qué son las normas sociales?, ¿cómo cambian las
normas sociales?, ¿cómo se miden las normas sociales? y ¿qué función (de tenerla) deberían desempeñar
las organizaciones mundiales para el desarrollo en latransformación de las normas sociales?
La respuesta a la pregunta ¿qué son las normas sociales? depende en gran medida de a quién vaya dirigida.
En la teoría y la investigación sobre las normas sociales coexisten múltiples definiciones contradictorias
y confusas. Algunas se fundan en perspectivas de laeconomía del comportamiento y la psicología social
que consideran que las normas sociales existen en

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE7el corazón y la mente del individuo. Según otras
posturas, las normas sociales se extienden a toda lasociedad, permean todos sus componentes —desdeel derecho a la economía, pasando por la religión y lasempresas—, una visión asentada en la teoría política,
antropológica y sociológica. En los últimos años, laproliferación de intentos de elaborar definiciones yconceptos más precisos ha ido quedando cada vezmás de lado en los campos de práctica y la forma
en que los movimientos feministas y de mujeres ylas organizaciones de la sociedad civil (OSC) vienen
hablando sobre las normas sociales durante decenios.
Al analizar la pregunta ¿cómo cambian las normassociales?, en el documento se recorre una base dedatos científicos dividida que, por un lado, no refleja
adecuadamente la diversidad de factores sociales,políticos y económicos que subyacen a los cambios
históricos en las normas sociales —incluida la funciónde los movimientos feministas y de mujeres— y que,por el otro, si bien recoge la complejidad de las normassociales, no alcanza a elaborar teorías de acción
claramente definidas. No obstante, se pueden extraer
algunas conclusiones generales. La primera es que lasnormas de género son uno de los factores determinantesdel progreso, el estancamiento y el retroceso en materia
de igualdad de género; es decir, son un mecanismo más
entre muchos otros que también es necesario atender.
La segunda es el carácter bidireccional del cambio enlas normas sociales: la transformación de las normas degénero puede dar pie a cambios en la materia tangible
de la sociedad, y los cambios en la materia tangible de lasociedad pueden transformar las normas de género. La
tercera es que se requieren distintos mecanismos para
modificar diferentes normas sociales: ningún enfoquepuede considerarse la “fórmula mágica”. La cuarta es
que los movimientos feministas y de mujeres y las OSC
son agentes de cambio históricos ya probados. La quinta
es que los cambios en las normas sociales —y la laborpara acelerar su transformación— pueden provocar
reacciones adversas. La sexta y última conclusión
es que las normas sociales (por lo general) cambian
con lentitud.
En un paradigma de desarrollo que se rige por losdatos, hay gran interés en la pregunta ¿cómo se miden
las normas sociales? La respuesta viene dada por

tensiones metodológicas y filosóficas. En cuanto a un
enfoque metodológico, no existe en la actualidad una
norma global para determinar y medir los cambios enlas normas sociales, pese a la considerable inversión
al respecto en el mundo profesional académico, deldesarrollo y de la salud mundial. Numerosas evaluaciones se basan en actitudes, convicciones, percepciones
o conductas (o alguna combinación de estas), pese aque, en general, se consideran indicadores indirectosde escasa eficacia. Los enfoques experimentales ycuasiexperimentales, si bien resultan atractivos por
su apego al rigor, no son idóneos en este ámbito, que
involucra altos niveles de complejidad y exige tener encuenta una multiplicidad de variables de confusión.
La segunda tensión concierne a si “lograr una buena
medición” es un objetivo valioso en sí mismo y, de serasí, en qué medida. Existe una preocupación legítima
acerca de la complicada naturaleza de algunos
enfoques para medir las normas sociales y lo que ello
implica, sobre todo con respecto a su dependencia delconocimiento técnico experto “externo”, su historial
irregular de eficacia y sus costos. Los enfoques más
simples, participativos y con métodos combinadospara medir los cambios en las normas sociales pueden
resultar más apropiados.
De estas consideraciones se nutre la respuesta a laúltima pregunta: ¿qué función (de tenerla) deberían
desempeñar las organizaciones mundiales para el desarrollo en la transformación de las normas sociales? El
trabajo de numerosas organizaciones mundiales parael desarrollo genera de por sí cambios en las normassociales al facilitar a los movimientos feministas y demujeres y las OSC financiamiento, investigación ydatos, conocimiento técnico experto y desarrollo decapacidades y redes. La labor transformadora de lasnormas sociales en estos casos está implícita y es, amenudo, secundaria a los programas más generalespara cambiar las condiciones materiales de la vida delas mujeres. Si bien un mayor apoyo a estos grupos
podría aumentar su efecto, se hace necesario también
cambiar las normas sociales, las prácticas y los procesos en el propio seno del ámbito para el desarrollo
si lo que se intenta es apoyar de manera adecuada
el trabajo lento y no lineal de modificar las normassociales. Una importante enseñanza acumulativa ytrascendental que surge de los diversos campos de

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

8pensamiento y acción acerca de cómo se produce
el cambio feminista es que la transformación de lasnormas sociales no es la próxima “fórmula mágica”.
Se requiere un compromiso específico y reflexivo con
esta esfera de intervención, así como un panorama
más amplio que incluya el sinnúmero de mecanismos
políticos, económicos y sociales que deben activarse.

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

9INTRODUCTION
Major progress towards gender equality and the realization of women’s rights has occurredin the past century, from women’s participation in paid work and access to their own income,to the codification of violence against women as a human rights abuse in international andnational laws, to more women in political office and increased access to sexual and reproductive health care. These gains are the result of many factors, including women’s mobilization,
labour movements and changes in the economy, among others.1
Meanwhile, in the past decade, backlash against the
progress women have made has been on the rise incountries around the world, threatening to undo
hard-won gains.2 In these spheres of life and others,social norms are widely accepted as influencing­– andbeing influenced by – progress and pushback on
gender equality.3
Global development actors across a variety of fields
are increasingly turning to social norms as a new programmatic area of investment because they recognize
them as a lever for change in contexts where progresson gender equality is slow, has stalled or is backsliding.
Yet, for many actors new to this area of work, questions about where and how best to intervene remain
open. Moreover, this heightened interest, particularlyon the part of development donors and large multilateral organizations, has been subject to some criticism.
Feminist scholars and practitioners have expressed
concern with how some development organizations
are defining social norms and establishing theoriesof change around them. Charges levied include thatmany attempts “fail to adequately engage withpower and inequalities”, including politics and theeconomy, and represent “yet another instance ofideological colonization of the field of development
through the exercise of hegemonic institutional control over the process of knowledge creation”.4
These critiques are not only empirical; they also problematize a difference in ontological perspective – what
1
2
3
4

Htun and Weldon 2018.
OHCHR 2020.
Harper et al. 2020; Pearse and Connell 2016.
Piedalue et al. 2020, p. 91; Wazir 2022, p. 4.

we might consider a problem of approach.5 Many of
the approaches to social norms becoming prominent
in development financing and practice tend to reflecta particular understanding of social change, onethat did not originate in feminist thought or action.
At the same time, the grounded work undertaken
for decades by feminist and women’s movements
to shift discriminatory social norms in communities
around the world – often as part of broader initiatives
to improve women’s material conditions – is rarelyreflected in these new organizational efforts and thetheories of change undergirding them. The critiques,
however, are almost never accompanied by constructive and clear advice about what development actors
might do otherwise.
This discussion paper intervenes at this point oftension. Its aim is twofold. The first is to provide a“state of the evidence” on what works to change
discriminatory social norms, and specifically gendernorms. It draws on academic and grey publications
produced by independent researchers, development
organizations including United Nations entities andother multilateral organizations, and civil society
organizations (CSOs) working on social norms aroundthe world. We began with a scoping review of published evaluations of interventions explicitly seeking
to address gender-related social norms (see Annex),6
which revealed the predominance of a relatively
narrow conceptualization of social and gender norms.
5 Cislaghi and Heise 2020.
6 Scoping reviews are well-suited to mapping research whenthe evidence base is nascent or scattered across various
disciplines. The review was conducted following the method
laid out by Arksey and O’Malley 2005.

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10

We knew from our prior research and collaborations
with feminist organizations, however, that this bodyof research was an incomplete reflection of existing
efforts to theorize and shift social norms. In response,
we incorporated insights from the wider literature onsocial norms, social change and gender equality, ultimately presenting a more diverse and heterogeneous
set of perspectives regarding what social norms are
and how they change.
The “state of the evidence” identified four issues inparticular, all of which need to be addressed in orderfor global development organizations new to social
norms work to develop theories of change and actionthat are effective, appropriate and sustainable: (1) alack of consensus on what social norms are and how
to change them; (2) a divided scientific evidence basethat, on the one hand, does not adequately reflect thevaried social, political and economic drivers behindhistorical changes in social norms, including the roleof women’s and feminist movements and, on theother, grasps the complexity of social norms but stops
short of proposing ways forward; (3) funding mechanisms that preclude the long-term investments
required to do social norms change work; and (4) amis-fit between the imperative to measure progresswithin development practice and the fact that social
norms are diffuse, held in place and shifted by multiple factors and change slowly.

individuals operate. Development organizations that
understand that social norms shape all of these, andare shaped by them, are more likely to land on an
approach that brings about enduring change. The
paper also proposes that one of the clearest pathwaysfor development organizations to effect such enduring change is to support feminist movements andwomen’s CSOs. Implementing these proposals entails
norms change within development practice itself,
including around the duration of funding cycles andthe demand for easily measurable results.
The paper is organized into four sections, each ofwhich answers a question. The first section, What
are social norms?, summarizes the bodies of thought
and action that inform different approaches to social
norms work. The second section, How do social norms
change?, reviews various bodies of evidence that
attempt to explain why and how social norms change
and distills lessons from these. The third section,
How is social norms change measured?, provides an
overview of existing measurement approaches anddiscusses the opportunities and shortcomings inherent to these. And finally the concluding section, Whatrole (if any) should development organizations playin shifting discriminatory social norms?, reflects onwhether and how organizations such as donors, UN
entities and other multilateral institutions are bestplaced to contribute.

Bearing these tensions in mind, the second aim of
the paper is to identify pragmatic pathways forward
for development organizations committed to making
progress on the realization of women’s rights andgender equality. To be clear, this paper is not targetedto those grassroots women’s movements and feminist organizations that have been working to shift
discriminatory social norms as part of their advocacy
and service provision work over the course of many
decades; rather, it is aimed primarily at the global
development donors and implementation agencies
pursuing opportunities for new areas of work. Ultimately, it suggests that enduring social norms change
requires attention to the attitudes and beliefs ofindividuals, in concert with attention to the economic
markets, legal and political systems, workplaces, social
services and built environment within which those

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11

1.

WHAT ARE SOCIALNORMS?
Social norms are broadly understood as a set of shared beliefs or unwritten rules about what
is right and wrong, acceptable or “normal” within a social group. They differ across societies
and communities because they are rooted in culture, religion and tradition.7 While social
norms are somewhat imposed on individuals, they can also provide them with a sense of
belonging and social identity.
This broad understanding of social norms, however,masks a tension that has practical implications fordevelopment organizations seeking to address themthrough a defined area of work. Namely, that theanswer to the question What are social norms? largely
depends on who is being asked. In the grounded workof feminist activism and service delivery in communities around the world, understandings of what social
norms are and how they operate have been refined
through everyday work to improve women’s material
realities by means of education programming, accessto justice and economic empowerment, among otheravenues.8 Meanwhile, theorizations of, and experiments with, social norms have been proposed bysociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, social
psychologists, behavioural economists and scholars
of women”s and gender studies and public health– sometimes in conversation with activists and practitioners. These bodies of thought and practice provide
different and often contradictory definitions of social
norms as well as the subset of these known as gendernorms, also confusing the two. A recent review foundthat “initiatives at the intersection between these two
streams of work include mentions of ‘gender norms’,‘gendered social norms’ and ‘gender-related social
norms’”.9 Moreover, what may be termed ‘gendernorms’ in English may not translate precisely to other7 Shaheed 2013.
8 See, for example, Wazir 2022 on the MV Foundation (education); Crosby and Lykes 2011 on Mujeres Transformando elMundo (gender-based and sexual violence); Voinea 2019 on
SEWA (economic empowerment).
9 Cislaghi and Heise 2020.

languages.10 Our own work with a variety of development organizations in different regional contexts
confirms this dynamic among as well as within organizations. How this question is answered, moreover,has implications for how social norms are understoodto change – a topic pursued in section 2.
Understanding the origins of social norms thought isimportant for appreciating why conflicting approaches
to social norms exist today in development practice,often even within the same organization.The people who
make decisions about development efforts – including
whether and how they are funded, focused and implemented – draw on theory, evidence and lived experience
to make those decisions. Moreover, within a data-driven
development paradigm, theories and evidence fromsome disciplines have greater purchase over decisionmaking than others, for a variety of reasons. Clarity
about the theories of change underlying these decisions
better enables conversations to be had about whatworks and what does not, as well as about appropriate
roles and courses of action for different actors.
This current section of the paper attempts to sortout these various understandings of social norms
and gender norms. It is organized as follows: First,
it summarizes different disciplinary approaches tosocial norms within the social sciences, recognizingthat these approaches, to varying degrees, are informing the strategies and financing priorities of large
10 Cookson et al. 2021.

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

12development organizations. Second, it discusses atension between these disciplines, with some tending
to understand social norms as existing in people’s
minds while others view them as largely more diffusedthroughout society.11 Third, it introduces gender norms
as a subset of social norms. Finally, the section suggeststhat the tension in the literature (and subsequently
practice) does not adequately reflect what women’s
movements and feminist organizations have observed
and addressed over centuries: that social norms, including gender norms, exist in the hearts and minds ofindividuals as well as in the wider society. The section
concludes with a working definition of gender norms
that comes closer to reflecting this reality.

1.1

From psychology tosociology: What are social
norms?

The concept of social norms has a rich and longstanding history in the social sciences that dates backto the work of philosophers such as Aristotle, Lockeand Hume.12 Sociology, anthropology, political science,social psychology and economics have been particularly influential in shaping contemporary approaches
to understanding social norms.13 We will review eachof these in turn. As noted above, the understanding ofsocial norms emerging from these disciplines tends toalign (albeit imperfectly) with one of two views: thatsocial norms largely exist in the hearts and minds ofindividuals or that social norms are diffused throughout the systems and structures of society. Each of theseviews lends itself to different approaches to shiftingsocial norms in practice.

‘In the mind’: Social psychology andbehavioural economics
Two of the disciplines with increasing influence on
development efforts to shift social norms are social
psychology and economics. Social psychologists
11 Cislaghi and Heise 2020.
12 For more extensive reviews, see Chung and Rimal, 2016;
Mackie et al. 2015; Bicchieri et al. 2011.
13 For further analysis of disciplinary thought in regard to social
norms, see Harper and Marcus 2018.

have grappled with social norms since the early 19th
century.14 They tend to understand social norms as collective constructs that influence an individual’s beliefs
about how to behave and what others approve of. In
other words, they are “standard[s] from which people
do not want to deviate”.15 Contemporary work in thisfield distinguishes between descriptive norms, which
are shared ideas about typical behaviour (expectations about what is commonly done), and injunctive
norms, which are beliefs about desired behaviour(how a person should behave).16 Much of the debate
within social psychology has focused on understanding how social norms are internalized. The literature
has pointed to three main pathways: (1) deliberative
instruction and learning, (2) sanctioning of inappropriate behaviour (e.g., through ridicule, gossip andeven violence) and (3) observations of acceptablebehaviour and inferring associated norms. Perhaps
the most prominent contemporary social norms
theorist drawing on this tradition is Cristina Bicchieri, whose work to develop a precise theory of social
norms that disentangles them from other drivers ofcollective human behaviour has been hugely influential in social norms programming at the United
Nations Children”s Fund (UNICEF).17 We shall return toBicchieri’s work later.
Economists – and, in particular, behavioural economists – began to take a strong interest in social norms
much more recently, in the late 1980s.18 Behavioural
economists identify social norms as a key explanation
14 Allport 1935; Deutsch and Gerard 1955; Kahneman andMiller 1986; Cialdini et al. 1991.
15 Schultz et al. 2007, p. 430.
16 Hewstone et al. 2012.
17 Bicchieri 2017.
18 Behavioural science, broadly speaking, is the study of human actions or behaviour through systematic observationand experimentation. Behavioural economics is considered asubcategory of behavioural science and sits at the intersectionof economics and psychology. Behavioural economists focus
on exploring human decision-making. According to the UN
Behavioural Science Group, “Behaviourally informed interventions leverage what is known about human behaviour anddecision-making: They invest in better diagnosing what specific behavioural barriers prevent people from adopting a certain
behaviour, explore enablers that help people achieve theiraims, and design interventions on the basis of these diagnoses” (UN Innovation Network n.d.). A sub-group of behaviouralscience interventions focus on changing behaviour by shiftingsocial norms perceptions, especially in public health.

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13

for human economic behaviour.19 Influenced by rational choice theory and game theory, they define social
norms as mechanisms that affect the incentives andconstraints of self-interested individuals in attaining
their desired goals.20 This understanding strongly
emphasizes the decisions, choices and actions ofindividuals rather than their perceptions or beliefs.
Research and evaluations in this tradition often use
individual behaviours as proxies for social norms.21
This methodological choice has been criticized byscholars from other disciplines on the grounds thatwhile social norms enable or constrain certain behaviours, they are not the same thing.
These ways of thinking about social norms haveseveral features that make them attractive to development organizations. One is that social psychology andbehavioural economics tend to share a focus on individuals, specifically, on “the cognitive processes thatgive origin to social norms”.22 Crudely speaking, we
can say that these traditions understand social norms
as existing and operating in an individual’s mind. Ina practical sense, this individual-level focus lends
itself well to experimental interventions and evaluations, which align with a data-driven development
paradigm. Another attractive feature is the level of definitional clarity sought by scholars anchored in these
traditions, particularly social psychologists. Bicchieri,
for instance, proposes a meticulous definition of social
norms that was originally developed in a lab andthen refined through a practitioner partnership with
UNICEF.23 She distinguishes between various driversof collective behaviour that many other theorists(see below) gloss over simply as ‘norms.’ This includes
customs (i.e., independently motivated actions that
happen to be similar to each other, like people using
umbrellas in the rain), moral rules (e.g., resting on
the Sabbath, a collective behaviour driven by moral
conviction), descriptive norms including conventions
19 Akerlof 1976; Elster 1989; Eggertsson 1999.
20 Rational choice theory suggests that individuals use rational
calculations to make choices and achieve outcomes that arealigned with their own personal interests, given all the options available. Game theory seeks to predict the strategic
decision-making of rational actors in relation to one another.
21 kerlof 1976; Arrow 1971.
22 Cislaghi and Heise 2020.
23 Bicchieri 2017.

(people conform to a behaviour out of mutual expectation and rationality, e.g., driving on the correct sideof the road), and social (injunctive) norms. For Bicchieri, “a social norm is a rule of behaviour such that
individuals prefer to conform to it on condition thatthey believe that (a) most people in their reference
network conform to it (empirical expectation), and(b) that most people in their reference network believe
they ought to conform to it (normative expectation)”.
The work of Bicchieri and others who attempt tountangle vague and overlapping understandings ofsocial norms (notably proposing different categorizations), sits on one end of a spectrum of social norms
theory. Much other work informed by social psychology
and economics seeks considerably less precision inits conceptualization of social norms, conflating andexpanding the various categories that Bicchieri untangles. A reasonable critique of Bicchieri’s approach isthat the real world is much messier than the lab (acontention she agrees with). In reality, there are very
many more slippages between these various driversof collective behaviour, which prevents researchersand practitioners from categorizing them neatly inboxes. This contention notwithstanding, Bicchieri’s
recognition that not everything is a social norm is infact much more aligned with the appeals of feminist
scholars and activists for greater attention to power
relations and complex systems – as outlined below –than the critiques would suggest.

‘In wider society’: Sociology, anthropology
and political science
Another view of social norms recognizes individuals
but emphasizes the embeddedness of social norms inthe systems and structures of wider society. This view,which has been developed over an even longer periodof time, is rooted in sociology, anthropology and political science.
Within the field of sociology, social norms have been
a topic of vivid intellectual debate since the late
18th century.24 Sociologists tend to define them asrules or standards that individuals internalize as they
are socially integrated into society. This view holds that
24 Durkheim 1985 [1982], 1950 [1957]; Parsons 1937; Parsons
and Shils 1951.

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

14social norms are “considered desirable by individuals
as socialized actors”, which means that starting fromchildhood, individuals not only learn to behave in amanner that is approved by the group or groups they
belong to but also take on the beliefs of the group(s),such that they will conform to the norm even when
no one is around to sanction or reward them for doingso (a process often referred to as “socialization”).25
These processes also lead to social stratification – thecategorization of groups along lines such as class,ethnicity, caste and sexual identity, among others – bydefining the informal rules of different social groups
and classes as well as the ways that they interact (ordo not interact) with one another.26
In anthropology, social norm theory and research
emerged in the 19th century.27 Anthropologists
emphasize the relationship between social norms
and culture, conceptualizing social norms as “sociallynegotiated and contextually dependent”.28 This
understanding views social norms as enacted andreproduced through social practices, interactions,customs and rituals and, relatedly, explains why social
norms differ across contexts – regional, country, local
and otherwise. Because they are anchored in culture
and context, social norms can give individuals a senseof identity and belonging. Anthropologists have alsoemphasized the relationship between social norms
and power, viewing them “as ideological tools (ala Gramsci 1971), where conformance to a norm,
and beliefs associated with conformance, are social
control mechanisms that serve to impose and maintain cultural hegemony”.29 This conception of social
norms helps explain why they endure and can be hard
to change.
Political scientists have likewise been interested insocial norms since the 19th century. More recently, they
have conceptualized them as shared ideas or values
that shape actors’ preferences and actions, underscoring the “power of ideas” similarly to anthropologists.30
25 Edberg and Krieger, 2020, p. 2.
26 Durkheim 1985.
27 Geertz 1973; Goffman 1974; Cancian 1975; Boyd andRicherson 1994.
28 Rimal and Lapinski 2015, p. 394.
29 Edberg and Krieger 2020, p. 2.
30 Blyth 2016; Hay 2006.

In this view, social norms have hegemonic power inthat they “dominate expectations of what should
happen, as well as interpretations of what has
happened”.31 This perspective emphasizes the disciplinary power of social norms to train behaviour
through two mechanisms in particular: (1) processesof ‘normalization’ that create distinctions between
what is considered normal and abnormal, for example,
or respectful and disrespectful; and (2) rewarding
adherence and punishing deviation through symbolicand material incentives and disincentives. This is not
to say that individuals have no agency; some politicalscientists emphasize that “even if people are necessarily influenced by their [normative] contexts, they
may still be agents who can adopt beliefs and perform actions for reasons of their own and in ways thattransform the contexts that influence them”.32
Sociology, anthropology and political science tend
to take a much broader view of social norms thando social psychologists and behavioural economists,
understanding that while social norms may “residein the consciousness of an individual … they are more
fundamentally properties of a community, society ororganization”.33 In this perspective, social norms areforces existing in the wider society, shaping everything from legal, welfare and religious institutions
to education and health systems, economic systems
from capitalism to communism, labour and financial
markets, and the governance of cities, nations andglobal political bodies – as well as the individuals that
operate within these. At the heart of this approach is adialectical understanding of the relationship betweensocial norms and the everyday practices that takeplace everywhere from households to schools to hallsof government: Everyday practices reproduce social
norms and social norms shape everyday practices.
This conceptualization of social norms has at least
three defining features that distinguish it fromthe understanding advanced by social psychologists and behavioural economists. First, sociologists,
anthropologists and political scientists view social
norms as fundamentally social. This differentiation
31 Cox 2004, p. 206.
32 Bevir and Rhodes 2016, p. 15; Hay, 2002.
33 Pearse and Connell 2016, p. 34.

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE15

is significant, as it emphasizes that while an individual will internalize social norms, they are always
produced and reproduced through social interaction
and relationships.34 Second, social norms reproduce
power relations between individuals and between
groups by shaping what is and is not considered
acceptable.35 These power relations, while largely
invisible, are present in and reproduced by governanceand religious institutions, the media, education andhealth-care systems, community groups and intimate
partnerships, where they afford some individuals andgroups more agency, more voice and greater accessto material resources (money, credit, real estate, etc.)
than others. Javier Auyero provides an illustrative
example of this power in his ethnography of a welfare
office in Argentina.36 Here, poor people wait ‘patiently’
for the attention of state bureaucrats and for theirwelfare benefits, despite the significant discomforts of the room, the unreasonable wait times andthe lack of clarity around administrative processes.
Auyero suggests that in conditioning the poor to wait
without complaint, the state exercises power (control)
over them. The expectation that the poor should
wait patiently is ‘normalized’; through the mundane
act of waiting, poor people internalize strong social
messages about their subordinate position in society
relative to all the others around them, including thestate bureaucrats inside the building and the nonpoor outside. Such manifestations of invisible power
are important to many theorists of social norms.
The third feature of sociological, anthropological andpolitical science understandings of social norms is
attention to complexity. Patterns of collective humanbehaviour are shaped by many factors all at once: thebuilt and natural environment, the economy, politics,
labour markets, religious doctrine and shocks andcrises, among others. All these factors may have a
34 Piedalue et al. 2020.
35 The kind of power discussed here is what philosopher-historian Michel Foucault would theorize as disciplinary, invisible
power: power that shapes and constrains the behavioursof individuals and groups in all realms of society, as well as
the relations between them. This type of power may not be
at all obvious, even to those whose behaviour it trains. Thisis distinct from the type of overt power wielded by a state
when it wages war or mandates a lockdown to prevent a
public health emergency.
36 Auyero 2008.

bearing on the emergence, characteristics, consistency, strength and duration of a social norm. In otherwords, humans act within the context of multiple
systems that on their own are complex and together
even more so. The social expectation that the poor
should wait patiently may be embedded not only inthe physical space and administrative practices of thewelfare office but also in the health-care system thatoffers tiered attention, in the transit system that has
infrequent and slow service to the peripheral neighbourhoods and in the behaviour of politicians who
repeatedly make promises they do not keep all thewhile expecting poor people to vote for them. The
expectation that poor people should wait patiently
may be embedded in multiple systems all at once.
Complexity has implications for programmatic
endeavours to change norms, a matter that we willturn to in section 2.
It is worth noting here that while social psychology
and behavioural economics approaches to social
norms are subject to critiques of over-simplification,
the inverse is true of sociology, anthropology andpolitical science, from which emanate definitions ofsocial norms that are sweeping, complex and abstract.
Descriptions of social norms as underpinning, influencing and being influenced by systems, structuresand institutions is difficult to fully comprehend andappreciate, let alone operationalize in practical terms.
In sum, these bodies of thought can be distinguishedbetween those that view social norms as primarily
existing ‘in an individual’s mind’ and those that viewsocial norms as ‘forces in the wider society’.37 They
could alternatively be understood as psychologicalperspectives and social perspectives. To be sure, there
does exist overlap: “both approaches include theunderstanding that the mind and the world influenceeach other, but each tends to privilege one perspective over the other in their study of norms”.38 Even
acknowledging this, such a conceptual distinction is
not without its problems.39 Yet, given the convoluted
character of the aggregated social norms literatures,
37 We adapt this distinction from Cislaghe and Heise 2020,
who delineate between norms in the ‘mind’ and ‘world’.
38 Cislaghi and Heise 2020, p. 411.
39 Wazir 2022.

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE16we contend that the distinction is useful enough toaccept its shortcomings. Outside of the academy
where such theories influence development practice, the circulation of overlapping and conflictual
definitions feeds into what is widely acknowledged
as a mess of confusing terminology and inconsistent theories of change, both across development
organizations and within them. It is hard to have aconversation when those conversing cannot untangle
one thing from another.

1.2

Gender norms: A subset ofsocial norms
Gender norms are a subset of social norms. A simple
definition of gender norms is “the informal rules andshared social expectations that distinguish expectedbehaviour on the basis of gender”.40 Gender norms
vary across and within societies because they are
influenced by other factors of social differentiation,such as religion, culture, class, race, sexuality and age,among others. For example, the informal rules andshared expectations about what is acceptable behaviour for women or men in one caste may be different
from that in another caste; they may differ for wealthy
gay men and poor straight men; between women of
one religion and another; and by age group – what is
considered socially acceptable for young women may
not be acceptable for elderly women.
The ways that gender norms intersect with other axes ofsocial differentiation can have material consequences.
Research from Guatemala, for example, has shownthat what is considered “acceptable and appropriate”
behaviour for a white, middle- or upper-class woman
can differ sharply from that for an Indigenous domestic
worker living in the same household. For instance, it iscommon and expected that the domestic worker inthis scenario would take the bus or travel by foot acrossthe bustling urban streets of Guatemala City to run
errands for her employer, where she may be exposed
to various forms of structural violence (the buses arenotorious for armed robberies) as well as the ‘everyday’
40 Marcus and Harper 2015.

harassment and abuse faced by Indigenous women. In
contrast, the woman with the relative power afforded
to her because of her race and class position would
be veering far outside social expectations if she wereto occupy similar public spaces and could face violent
repercussions from her husband for so doing. Both
women’s lives are shaped and constrained by intersections of harmful gender and other social norms, but inqualitatively different ways.41
Gender norms, like other social norms, are not inherently good or bad. The rich body of practice-oriented
research carried out by Harper and Marcus, among
others, as part of the ALIGN (Advancing Learning andInnovation on Gender Norms) platform, shows thatgender norms can impede progress on gender equality or they can catalyse it.42 To this point, Harper andMarcus note that “many norms surrounding girls’ lives
exist for good reason and [development researchersand practitioners] would do well to acknowledge thisalongside seeking change where norms are harmful
to girls”, a point made of norms that shape adulthood too.43 On this basis a distinction is sometimes
made between harmful, discriminatory or inequitablegender (or social) norms and positive norms that
foster gender equality.
The ontological tension that exists within the social
norms literature also exists within the gender norms
literature – with similarly significant implications fordevelopment practice. A search for scientific evidence
on gender norms would suggest that it is a relatively
new area of research. Cislaghe and Heise note that it
was only “…by 2000, [that] the language of gendernorms was on the ascendancy in academia, with mentions on google scholar rising from 300 between 1985
and 1990 to 16,700 in the decade between 2000 and2010”. The recent swell in gender norms literature islargely indicative of a marked increase in research froma social psychology (and, to a lesser extent, behavioural
economics) perspective. As with social norms, thisapproach tends to focus narrowly on individuals, studying and measuring gender norms as attitudes, beliefs
41 Fuentes 2020; see also Menjívar 2011. For an analysis ofthese dynamics in Mexico, see Wright 2011.
42 Harper and Marcus 2018; see also Pearse and Connell 2016.
43 Harper and Marcus 2018 p. 36.

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17

and stereotypes regarding what is and is not acceptable for women and men and boys and girls.
This more recent rise of the term ‘gender norms’
in social scientific research, however, gives a false
impression of the extent to which they have historically been studied, theorized and acted upon. In reality,
feminist and other scholars have been writing about
the invisible forces shaping women’s and men’s lives
for as long as they have been permitted to publish,
often referring to gender roles, gender divisions,gendered power imbalances and the like.44 Outsideof the academy, moreover, women’s movements andfeminist organizations have been mobilizing to shift
the informal and formal rules that have subordinatedwomen to men (and some women to other women)
for centuries, as section 2 of this paper elaborates.
Indeed, decades of transnational dialogue between
activists, practitioners and academics on the natureand features of women’s oppression has refined abroader and significantly more nuanced understanding of gender norms than the one proposed by social
psychologists.
Key elements of this broader understanding arethat gender norms are socially constructed rather
than ‘god given’, they are integral to the reproduction of unequal power relations in all spheres of life
and they have tangible consequences. While gendernorms operate at the individual level, they are also“political and embedded”, existing “in all domains ofsocial life, shaped by and shaping the material andinstitutional”.45 This includes the built environment,household objects, money, machines, art, etc. (“thematerial”). It also includes formal institutions suchas the law, religions, the family, the state and theeconomy as well as the informal institutions thatexist within and alongside the formal ones – the often
unwritten “processes, practices, images and ideologies, and distributions of power in the various sectors

44 See, for example, Klein 1971; Beauvoir 1949; Mohanty 1984;
Butler 1993.
45 Piedalue et al. 2020.

of social life”.46 Diane Elson’s edited volume Male Biasin the Development Process was one of the first toshow how gender norms shape policy formulationand implementation in development contexts aroundthe world.47 Case studies illustrated how they function“as social relations, a set of interactions between more
powerful and less powerful social agents, buttressedby social institutions imbued with male bias”.48 In
Mexico’s maquiladora industry, for example, everything from the organization of the production process
to management decisions, wages and skills training
are “riddled with male bias, due to unthinking acceptance of female stereotypes or to ‘commonsense’
about the ways in which men and women behave”.49

Gender norms: Towards a working
definition
The circulation of these different understandings ofsocial and gender norms as operating primarily ‘in themind’ or ‘in wider society’, and the tensions inherent
to them, is a source of confusion and inconsistency
in research and in practice not only in development
but also in related fields such as global health.50
Lack of conceptual clarity has practical implications
that go beyond definitional confusion, impeding the“cross-disciplinary understanding and collaboration”
46 See Acker 1992. It is worth noting here that the tensions insocial norms research and practice – imprecise and competing
definitions within theoretical work, as well as between theory
and practice – also exist with regard to the term ‘institutions’.
Theorists are having their own conversations, parsing out formal, informal and social institutions (with slippage between
these, as in the case of schools/education and religion) as wellas organizations, which are broadly defined as groups of individuals. Meanwhile, practitioners, including those within CSOs,
women”s movements and development agencies, often use
the term “institution” as synonymous with organization (e.g.,a national military, a development agency), refer to policies
as policies and laws as laws (rather than formal institutions)and refer to customs as customs and traditional practices
as traditional practices (rather than informal institutions).
Pragmatically, work with policies, laws, militaries, corporations
and the like might be referred to as “higher level change”.
47 Elson 1991.
48 Elson 1994, p. vii.
49 Ibid.
50 Cislaghi and Heise 2020; Bell and Cox 2015. For a contemporary genealogy of the uptake of social norms/social
psychology/game theory approaches within global health and
GBV practitioner work, described through a series of programmatic interventions with UNICEF and national organizationsin Senegal and Uganda (SASA!), see Piedalue et al. 2020.

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18

that is required to tackle what research has shownis the cross-cutting nature of gender norms acrosseducation, sexual and reproductive health andrights, paid work, unpaid care work and political participation, among other areas.51 Within development
organizations specifically, this has implications forthe theories of change – and attendant theories ofaction – applied in the contexts of inequality within
which such organizations work: “if norms are embedded in the mind, changing beliefs will be sufficient fornorms to change too. If norms are embedded in laws,
policies and institutions, changing gender norms will
require a larger project.”52
Social psychology and behavioural economics areholding sway over the strategic approaches being
formulated by some of the world’s most influential
development organizations – donors and implementing agencies alike. Yet, the definitions of social andgender norms that locate them ‘in the mind’ largely
eclipse the insights of feminist scholars, practitioners
and activists refined through decades of grounded
work.53 Meanwhile, the definitions emanating frommuch of the sociological, anthropological and political science literature (including women”s and genderstudies) are often so sweeping and complex that theyrisk provoking paralysis when it comes to operationalization. Pragmatically, how does one begin to crafta theory of change and action around “structuralformations embedded in institutions, wrapped up
in the expansion of global capitalism and racialised
hegemonies and systematically shaping privilege,
access, opportunity and vulnerability”?54 In practice,
feminist movements and women’s organizations areoperationalizing understandings of social norms thatare indeed more nuanced than what is proposed by
the siloed bodies of literature reviewed here. As theexamples in section 2 will show, much grounded feminist work is anchored in an understanding of socialand gender norms as both in the wider society and inindividual minds.

51 Cislaghi and Heise 2020, p. 408.
52 Ibid., p. 412.
53 Wazir 2022.
54 Piedalue et al. 2020 p. 101.

The respective bodies of thought informing theseviews both have contributions to offer, as well as
shortcomings, as we have outlined here. Some efforts
have been taken to reconcile the two perspectives, ina move that “acknowledges the cognitive nature ofnorms as beliefs, while, at the same time, suggestingthat those beliefs are the result of (and shape) very
concrete and material realities in which people live andlearn”.55 For others, the tensions inherent to these perspectives are irreconcilable: “theories of gender norms
and of social norms are more opposed than complementary, particularly in their conceptualisation ofpolitical economy and wider structures of power thatgive rise to inequalities”.56 This position emphasizes
that positivist, technical approaches to development
are antithetical to feminist visions of progress and themuch bigger and more complex project of societal
transformation this entails.57 These risks are not small:
Adopting an individual-scale understanding of norms
could lead to the conflation of behaviour and norms
where, for example, individual men’s perpetration of
GBV is addressed in isolation from the more far-reaching social norms and political and economic factorsthat drive it as well as violence in other spheres.58
We agree that these concerns have merit. Yet we also
propose that working through this tension – andconsidering and assembling what is useful from thevarious perspectives – is a worthwhile endeavour.
Short of this, the ideological chasm that already exists
around what social and gender norms are, and what
to do about them, may well result in the mainstreaming of an approach that entirely obscures the broadersocial, political and economic transformations
required to achieve gender equality. Building on adefinition proposed by Cislaghe and Heise (with sometweaks to clarify meaning, bolded), we propose thefollowing definition as a reasonable starting place:
Gender norms are social norms defining acceptable and appropriate actions
for women and men as well as girls andboys in a given group or society. They
55 Cislaghi and Heise 2020, p. 416.
56 Piedalue 2020, p. 126.
57 Wazir 2022.
58 Piedalue 2020, p. 97.

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are embedded in formal and informal
institutions, including social, political andeconomic systems and the built environment, nested in the mind, and produced
and reproduced through social interaction in private and public life. They play arole in shaping women’s and men’s accessto resources and freedoms, thus affecting
their voice, power and sense of self.59
Thus far, we have suggested that definitions matterin the practice of development because theories ofchange and action are built on them. The next sectionof this paper asks the question How do social norms(including gender norms) change?

59 Adapted from Cislaghe and Heise, p. 416.

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2.

HOW DO SOCIAL NORMS
CHANGE?
History shows that social norms can and do change. Researchers, practitioners and activists
studying and participating in the struggle for gender equality are in agreement that social
norms, and gender norms specifically, are a key factor in the changes to women’s status thathave occurred in societies around the world over the past 200 years.60
Not all of this change has been straightforward,
however. Forexample, women’s entrance into the paid
workforce in many areas of the world reflects more
permissive gender norms regarding the acceptabilityof women in public spaces and women having moreaccess to and control over money and credit. Yet,shifts in gender norms that assign responsibility forcare work to women rather than men or the state or
private sector have been slower to change, with theresult that while more men than before assume some
responsibility for care, women still shoulder the majority of it – often on top of paid work.61 The COVID-19
pandemic illustrated the shaky ground on which progressive shifts rest: Public health policies were basedon the assumption that ‘someone’ would assume careof children and ill persons while countries were under
lockdown, and indeed women left the workforce at a
rate greater than men.62
A question relevant to development practice is how
to shift discriminatory social norms in service of realizing the rights of women and girls. As we shall see,
there are various approaches to this based on the
different understandings of social norms. For thosestrongly anchored in the view that social norms exist in
individual”s minds, the theories of change that underlie
many interventions focus on individual-level change,
while those influenced by the idea that social norms
60 Htun and Jensenius 2022; Harper et al. 2020; Pearse andConnell 2016.
61 UN-Women 2019.
62 Htun and Weldon 2018; Green 2016.

are diffused throughout wider society seek to change
institutions and the organizations within which individuals operate. Yet others bridge these views.
While the existing evidence base is dispersed acrossvarious disciplines and issue areas, there are someoverarching lessons to be drawn. The first is thatgender norms are one of the significant factors
shaping progress, stasis and backsliding on genderequality, meaning that they are one lever among manyothers that also require attention. The second is thatsocial norms change is bi-directional: Shifts in gendernorms can lead to changes in the tangible matter ofsociety, and changes in the tangible matter of society
can lead to shifts in gender norms.63 The third is thatdifferent levers are required to change different social
norms: No single ‘magic bullet’ approach exists. The
fourth is that women’s and feminist movements and
CSOs are historically proven agents of change. The
fifth is that shifts in social norms – and work to catalyse
those shifts – can provoke backlash. Finally, the sixth isthat social norms (usually) change slowly. 64
These points make for a muddled start to designing
programmatic interventions. The fact that progress
on women’s rights is never only a question of gendernorms themselves, and that social norms change isalmost always non-linear, has implications for theoriesof change and attendant theories of action (how doeschange happen? what steps are required to achieve it?),63 Harper et al. 2020.
64 Ogando et al. 2022; Seck et al. 2021.

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the design of methodologies to capture and track progress over time (is it working?) and, more broadly, the rolethat development organizations should take in this kindof work. We will attend to the question of how change
happens in this section, the issue of measurement in
the next section (3), and appropriate roles for development organizations in the conclusion (section 4).
This section on how social norms change is organized
as follows. It begins with a review of the publishedevidence on what we are calling the ‘programmatic
evidence base’ – recent published studies and evaluations of programmatic interventions to change social
norms within development contexts. The view thatsocial norms exist in individuals’ minds, and therefore
require interventions at the individual level, is influential in this literature. Next, it zooms out to a broader
and more dispersed set of evidence influenced by
the view that social norms are diffused throughout
society. We draw lessons from across global andhistorical contexts where social norms change has
occurred. The section concludes with takeaways fromacross these approaches.

2.1

Evidence on programmaticinterventions: Media,
group communicationand incentives
The rise in interest in social norms – and gender norms
in particular – in global development discussed in
section 1 is reflected in a growing body of publishedstudies and evaluations of programmatic interventions to change discriminatory social norms. In order
to identify existing evidence on ‘what works’ to change
discriminatory social norms, we began by conducting ascoping review of published studies and evaluations ofinterventions that explicitly sought to address genderrelated social norms.65 This included research carriedout by academics, as well as research and evaluationscommissioned or produced by development agencies
such as UN entities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as donor organizations.
65 See Annex for details on the study.

Most of the 83 academic and grey (policy) publications
that met our search criteria focused on individualand community level interventions. These largely
approached social norms as ‘in an individual’s mind’,even when study authors recognized the need for abroader view (i.e., social norms exist throughout wider
society). In practice, this meant a focus on changing
attitudes, beliefs, perceptions or behaviours, often
measured at the individual level and aggregated fora collective (community) perspective. Some genderequality issues receive more attention than others in
the programmatic evidence base, with the greatest
share focused on GBV, followed by health-focusedinterventions including HIV, hygiene, family planningand teenage pregnancy. A much smaller share relates
to women’s economic empowerment and very few towomen’s political participation, peace and security
or humanitarian action. The three most commonly
studied issues in the programmatic evidence base are
media-based interventions, group communication
and, to a lesser extent, economic incentives. Working
with men and boys is largely recognized as critical totransformational change.

Media and ‘edutainment’Some evidence suggests that the media can be
an effective lever for shifting discriminatory social
norms. Studies arrive at this conclusion by measuring changes in attitudes and (sometimes separately)collective behaviour. In India, for example, exposure tocable television seemed to favourably shift attitudes
on the acceptability of intimate partner violence(IPV).66 In the United States of America, the broadcasting of a popular reality show about teenage pregnancy
and motherhood coincided with a decline in both ofthese in the broader population, and fertility rates in
Brazil dropped as people were exposed to soap operas
depicting smaller households with fewer children.67
Research in Bangladesh, meanwhile, suggests thattelevision narratives are shifting young women’s
expectations regarding their own day-to-day lives.68

66 Jensen and Oster 200967 On the United States, see Kearney and Levine 2015; on Brazil,
see La Ferrara et al. 2012.
68 Priyadarshani and Rahim 2010.

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Such findings have catalysed the development of
television and radio “edutainment” interventions
in various contexts around the world. Edutainmentthat is impactful, at least in the short term, shares a
few features in common. This includes use of dramaand humour, cultural alignment with the target population such that viewers are able to identify withthe story’s characters, depiction of the problems ofeveryday life, and storylines and characters who
find happiness and success by doing things differently (‘trendsetters’).69 Some evidence suggests that
edutainment is most effective when it seeks indirectchange by, for instance, promoting a new social
norm rather than directly criticizing an old one.70
The evidence is thin, however, as to the durability of
edutainment”s impacts over time, as well as whether
these go beyond changing individuals’ attitudes toactually change social norms.71
In addition to television and radio, gender and othersocial norms are reproduced through social media (e.g.,
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok) and throughadvertising campaigns.72 In turn, media and advertising campaigns can also be harnessed to help shift
discriminatory social norms.73 For example, ALIGN’s
work on social media and social norms indicates how
activists shift gender norms through social media
by sharing knowledge and reframing perceptions,amplifying messages, building and expanding likeminded communities and mobilizing campaigns.74
However, while various organizations pursue thesestrategies, more research is needed to evaluate theireffectiveness, including among different audiences,
their impact on material conditions (e.g., reduction inviolence) and on policies and laws, and their use as along-term strategy.

Economic incentives
Economic incentives have also been studied as ameans to shift discriminatory social norms, reflecting the influence of behavioural economics and69 La Ferrara 2015; Bicchieri 2017.
70 Evans et al. 2019; Marcus and Harper 2015.
71 La Ferrera 2015; Arias 2019.
72 Diepeveen 2022.
73 Evans et al. 2019; Donati et al. 2022; Francis et al. 2021.
74 Washington and Marcus 2022.

specifically Thaler and Sunstein’s “nudge theory”.75
In reality, the majority of this programmatic evaluation literature measures changes in behaviour, rather
than shifts in social norms per se, though large-scalechanges in behaviour or practices can be an effective
lever of social norms change (and may well suffice toimprove lived realities). Overall, the evidence on theeffectiveness of economic incentives on shifting social
norms is mixed.
For example, where cash transfers have been effective at changing discriminatory patterns of collective
behaviour, it is not always clear what the pathway of
causation truly is: For example, did the messaging
that accompanied the cash (girls should be in schoolrather than married off) provoke the change, or wasit that the cash itself softened economic hardship?
Or did a combination of both lead to changes in thediscriminatory norms that had resulted in parents
making the decision to invest in boys’ rather than
girls’ education? Research on the link between cash
incentives and intimate partner violence (IPV) showsthat while the injection of cash into the household
may decrease IPV by softening economic hardshipand increasing women’s economic empowerment,
discriminatory gender norms permitting violenceagainst women do not change.76 The pragmatic
implication of this is that once the cash transfer programme ends, pre-intervention patterns of IPV may
return.77 These findings indicate that behaviour canchange even while a social norm prevails.78

Group communication and criticalreflection groups
Group communication, or ‘community deliberation’has been the subject of a fair share of studies andevaluations in the programmatic evidence base. These
interventions attempt to change collective perceptions – and ultimately behaviours – through dialogue
among members of a social group (sometimes calleda reference group). They typically involve creating space
75 Thaler and Sunstein 2008. See also Bicchieri 2017 on
economic incentives to change social norms.
76 Barrington et al. 2022er
77 Buller et al. 2018; Aitken et al. 2015; Spencer et al. 2022.
78 Lilleston et al. 2017.

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to collectively discuss ‘taboo’ issues and to (1) learn
new information about why a belief and related behaviour may be harmful, (2) come to the realization that
others may share similar attitudes and beliefs that go
against the social norm and (3) collectively decide
on a superior alternative.79 Some of these evaluations are grounded in critical reflection and are best
understood as critical reflection groups. This approachto shifting discriminatory social norms is not new:Powerful examples of social change achieved throughgroup discussions exist throughout the last century,
including feminist consciousness raising (CR) and
Freirean conscientização (see Box). Indeed, Freirian
notions of CR and human rights feature substantiallyin the theories that inform critical reflection groups
on gender equality and violence prevention.

BOX

Group communication through history
Feminist consciousness raising
Consciousness raising (CR) groups in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States (and elsewhere)
in the late 1960s to the early 1980s sought to promote non-judgmental group discussion among women
about their personal experiences with topics that had broad relevance, such as “sexism, anger, roles and rolemodels, body image, rape, sexuality, relationships with men, women and children, economic disadvantage,
career opportunities, and legislation”.80 These groups were discussing gender norms, even if this was not theterm used. The theory of change underlying the groups was that “By becoming more aware of the reasons
behind their behaviour, women are freer to explore alternatives in making decisions about their lifestyles”.81 CR
groups led by Black feminists brought race to bear on the discussions otherwise focused on gender or genderand class, thus building social awareness and solidarity around the specific issues Black women faced.82
CR groups understood that “psychology mattered” insofar as “overcoming psychological obstacles to liberation was a necessary precondition for social change”.83 In other words, change in individual hearts and minds
was not the end in itself but was a means to (or a precondition for) a broader end, which was radical changes
in the social, political and economic systems that upheld unequal power relations between women andmen. Studies of CR groups have found that while not all were successful, many were effective at bridging
the tension between “the personal and the political, between psychological liberation and social liberation… between theory and practice, and between the women’s movement and other spheres of women’s lives,
including their private and professional activities”.84 The changes that CR achieved occurred slowly but wereenduring. Key to their success is that the groups were always community led, their agendas and structures
were collectively decided (and contested) and women joined and left at will. CR groups were not tied todonor funding or externally imposed issue agendas.
Conscientização
In the 1970s, groups of ordinary citizens in Brazil drew on Paulo Freire’s work on conscientização, or criticalconsciousness, as a pathway for social transformation and liberation. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freireenvisioned that if men and women assumed roles as active ‘co-investigators’ in exploring their reality, theywould build a critical consciousness that would enable them to claim ownership of that reality.85 In this way,
he saw CR as a precondition for community mobilization.86 According to Freirian theory, liberation from oppression requires expressing “view[s] that resist societal norms”, and community participation builds ownership of

79 Bicchieri 2017.
80 Randolph and Ross-Valliere 1979, p. 922–923.
81 Ibid., p. 922.
82 The Combahee River Collective 2014.
83 Ruck 2015, p. 297.
84 Ibid., p. 299; Bruley 2013.
85 Freire 1970.
86 Freire 1973.

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both problems and proposed solutions.87 Freirian ideas about CR and human rights influenced the developmentof community deliberation groups, which focused on community-level solutions yet often also called for governmental accountability. Participatory methods included artistic approaches, such as photography and drawing,
to facilitate reflection. For example, Freire would ask community members to respond to questions such as “Whatis exploitation?” with photographs, which provoked deep discussion.88
Several organizations throughout Latin America and across the globe have incorporated these methods into theirsocial mobilization and critical reflection efforts. For example, the NGO Minga Perú, which promotes gender equality and reproductive health in the Peruvian Amazon through radio broadcasts and community-based interventions,asked participants to draw themselves now and five years earlier to assess how their views and identities had
evolved. The practice forged bonds between participants and helped shape “a collective voice in dialogue andinteractions” by building ownership and leadership among community participants.89 In Mozambique, acommunity dialogue programme called Tchova Tchova built on Freire’s conscientização to change harmfulsocial norms surrounding HIV prevention. The development of critical consciousness via face-to-face dialogue and questioning one’s beliefs was considered an important part of public health efforts, of which
new “knowledge, beliefs and values (attitudes), emotions, self-efficacy, self-concept, and interpersonal communication” could then evolve into new social norms.90
87 Rattine-Flaherty and Singhal 2009.
88 Glassman and Erdem 2014.
89 Rattine-Flaherty and Singhal 2009.
90 Figueroa et al. 2016.

Community-level critical reflection and deliberative
discussion has been facilitated through approaches
like community-based mentoring, community-based
engagement and action, locally facilitated classsessions and ‘community discussion centres’, a peer-topeer learning initiative.91 Programmes such as UNICEF’s
Communities Care, Oxfam’s Creating Spaces Project andTostan’s Community Empowerment Program leveragedeliberation as a key tactic to shift social norms overtime. These initiatives seek to prevent violence against
women and/or children, dismantle taboos about menstruation and change harmful practices such as female
genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage. For
example, the Creating Spaces Project in Nepal sought
to end violence against women and girls by focusing
on women-led collective action as the heart of socialchange and moving beyond community deliberation tobolster women’s leadership skills through community
discussion centres.
Critical reflection groups have been particularly influential in shifting social norms regarding FGM in West91 Adhikari 2019; Miller et al. 2020; Vaitla et al 2017.

and East Africa. For example, researchers studying the
NGO Tostan’s Community Empowerment Program in
Senegal found that this approach had lasting effects:
In 2008, nearly a decade after the programme’s completion, “the prevalence of [FGM] had fallen by morethan half”.92 Rather than correct misperceptions, theprogramme sought to change community members’
attitudes, behaviours and, eventually, social norms. It
also went beyond social norms change to “address avariety of intersecting institutional, material, individual and social factors that sustained” these norms.93
To ensure sustainability and maximize impact, theprogramme used the coordinated approach of ‘organized diffusion’ over a three-year period.94 Its activities
included the democratic selection of Community
Management Committees to lead further development projects related to their community’s needs
after the programme ended.
92 UNICEF 2008.
93 Cislaghi and Berkowitz 2021.
94 ‘Organized diffusion’ describes a participant-led method
through which knowledge to change social norms is sharedwith specific members of communities and then spreads acrosslevels into the larger social system. See Cislaghi et al. 2019.

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Engaging men and boys

With respect to shifting discriminatory gender norms,a growing body of evidence supports engaging withmen and boys as necessary for change to be sustainable.95 Many examples exist of efforts to reach men
and boys through media campaigns and edutainment initiatives (e.g., UN-Women’s HeforShe) andgroup communication efforts (e.g., Real Fathers).
Yet engaging them in these ways is not enough. Ina review of contemporary work to involve men andboys in shifting discriminatory gender norms, Greig
and Flood find that “most interventions are focused
only on micro- and meso-level change, their evidence
is uneven, and few evaluations examine wider shifts
in gender relations or structures of power”.96 In otherwords, such interventions align with a narrow ‘in themind’ approach to social norms that focuses on men’ssocial identities and eclipses the ways in which theirrealities are also shaped by laws, policies and theeconomy, among other factors. They suggest that whatis needed is a political economy approach that emphasizes “broader political struggles for redistribution
and social transformation” rather than “privileg[ing]concerns about masculine identities and cultures” via
a “politics of recognition”.97
Nijera Kori, a Bangladeshi NGO committed to social
mobilization, provides an illustrative example of themultifaceted nature of work of the type called for by
Greig and Flood. It works to strengthen the collective
capabilities of poor or landless women and men to
claim their rights and protest discrimination. Kabeer
and Sulaiman call this NGO’s strategy for change a“radical capability approach” that builds the critical consciousness of members and, in so doing, canstrengthen their ability to challenge discriminatorysocial norms.98 Changes with respect to social norms
around masculinities in particular were found toresult from processes of social mobilization thatstarted with consciousness raising, utilized an intersectional approach by situating patriarchal norms in
the context of other forms of power and inequality,
95 Abebe et al. 2018; Edström et al. 2015; Haylock et al. 2016;
Stewart et al. 2021.
96 Greig and Flood 2020, p. i.
97 Ibid., p. 24.
98 Kabeer and Sulaiman 2014.

and engaged both men and women.99 In other words,
building relationships between women and men andraising critical consciousness led to social mobilization in demand of a more equitable redistribution of
resources (e.g., tackling corruption in public service
provision, claiming land rights) and other women’s
rights issues (e.g., community collective agreementson dowry and early marriage). These processes
exemplify what future engagement with the ‘men
for gender equality’ field can look like: focusing on“gendered operations of power and injustice”, advocating for both political and policy change, increasing
attention toward “anti-patriarchal social action” andrecognizing the “extended timeline and complex processes of social change”.100

Key takeaways from the programmatic
evaluation literatureWithin the admittedly narrow scope of the programmatic evaluation literature, the evidence isstrongest with regard to interventions that involvegroup reflection and problem-solving on an issue
the group’s members have themselves identified.
There is little evidence supporting interventions
that rely on one-way messaging, such as social
marketing or social media blasts. It is also clear that
men and boys need to be involved in dialogue andthe construction of new norms, rather than simply
lectured to.Whether the intervention is media-related,or involves group communication, the involvementof influential actors, such as faith leaders and community leaders, can be important. The literature also
points to increased effectiveness when complementary interventions are deployed simultaneously andover a sustained period. This includes, for example,
well-designed edutainment programmes combinedwith group discussions that foster engagement anddebate over the course of several years.101
The approaches to social norms change that predominate in the programmatic evaluation literature also
have some significant limitations. First, there are slippages in the indicators used: Attitudes and behaviours
99 Greig et al. 2015.
100 Greig and Flood 2020.
101 WHO 2019.

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are imperfect proxies for social norms, and nearly allof the studies we reviewed identified a need to better
understand the long-term effects of the interventionsin question. These measurement issues are discussed
further in section 3. Second, the approaches reviewed
here also tend to focus on achieving change at theindividual, interpersonal and community levels. Thisfocus largely reflects a perspective anchored in social
psychology and behavioural economics that does
not require consideration of factors beyond the perceptions and observed behaviours of individuals orgroups.102 Because these approaches tend to eclipse
questions of political economy, they run the risk ofreinforcing the notion that gender inequality and discrimination are rooted in personal characteristics or‘culture’.103 Theories of change resting in this perspective tend to place the onus of change on individuals
rather than (also) tackling the variety of other factorsthat influence people’s lives and how they understandand interact with the world around them.
The predominance of a focus on individuals andcommunities does not necessarily mean the interventions lack a political or power analysis, however.
Many such interventions are anchored in a socioecological framework that recognizes the importanceof working across scale, from working with individuals
and communities to also targeting organizations andformal institutions such as law, policy and religion,to create an “enabling environment” for sustainablechange. Rather, the narrow focus may reflect the
programmatic constraints inherent to much development work, including constrained financial andhuman resources, externally imposed issue agendas(from donors, for example), results-based management requirements and short funding cycle timelines.
In practice, an arbitrary division between ‘grassroots
work’ and ‘policy work’ creates a situation in whichinterventions tend to address social norms either as‘in an individual’s mind’ or ‘in the wider society’.

102 Piedalue et al. 2020; Greig and Flood 2020.
103 Ibid.

2.2

Shifting social norms in wider
society
The question How do social norms change? is notcomprehensively answered by the existing programmatic evidence base, which generally reflects a theoryof change rooted in social psychology and behavioural
economics perspectives and focused on individuals.
The question has, however, also been answered by sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists – aswell as by feminist movements and women’s organizations mobilizing for change in households, inworkplaces, in government and in the streets – manyof whom approach social norms as diffused throughout society.
It is worth recognizing that an understanding ofsocial norms as “political and embedded”, existing“in all domains of social life, shaped by and shaping
the material and institutional”, does not lend itself
automatically to a straightforward theory of change
and a clear set of steps of the sort most development
donors and implementing agencies are searchingfor.104 This includes a vast body of critical social sciencethat documents the ways in which gender and othersocial norms constrain the agency and opportunities
of women and girls, and to a lesser extent men andboys, in a variety of different contexts and how thesenorms interact with other social, economic, politicaland environmental factors that themselves influence
access to and exercise of power.105 It also includes
research in which the treatment of gender norms
is more implicit, such as in Auyero’s ethnography of
waiting discussed above, or in work documenting how
mothers in conditional cash transfer programmes
race to comply with conditionalities even when they
are sick, or have competing responsibilities, because
gender norms about what it means to be a ‘good
mother’ interact with a rural economy unfavourable
to women.106

104 Quote from Piedalue et al 2020; commentary authors’ own.
105 Dancer 2018; Wright 2011.
106 Cookson 2018; Molyneux 2006.

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Such critical work is valuable in its own right: It
documents how power operates in society; it paints
accurate pictures of the messiness of the real world; itconnects the perceptions and behaviours of individuals to specific features of the broader social, politicaland economic environment in which they live; andit trains the attention of development professionals
away from “technocratic fixes” that too often only
provide a Band-Aid. Clear theories of change, though,can be harder to draw from this work.
Social science research asking the broader questionof ‘how does social change happen?’ is useful in thisregard. Rather than designing, implementing andevaluating an intervention to test for shifts in social
norms (the approach typically taken in the programmatic literature), much of this research investigates
the drivers of large-scale shifts in social norms overtime, often at the societal level. Research to answer
this question has deployed a mix of methods, fromquantitative analysis of large databases to ethnographic and participatory approaches. This section
presents insights from these wider bodies of literature
on social norms, social change and gender equality,
which offer a more heterogeneous set of perspectives
on how social norms change.
This literature points to political, social and economic
arenas of ‘wider society’ that are both shaped bysocial norms, including gender norms, and in turnshape them. In this view, making changes in these
arenas can lead to shifts in social norms. The academic literature might refer to these as changes informal and informal institutions, organizations and‘the material’ – the built and natural environment andresources.107 In practice – in the spaces where feminists are doing the work of advocacy, organizing andservice provision – such distinctions may be less rigid
and also less necessary; understanding that ‘higher
level change’ (e.g., in the law, social and economic
107 As noted earlier, while gender norms operate at the individual level, they are also embedded across all domains ofsocial life, shaped by and shaping the material and institutional. This includes the built environment, householdobjects, money, machines, art, etc. (“the material”). It also
includes formal institutions such as the law, religions, thefamily, the state and the economy as well as the informal
institutions that exist within and alongside the formal ones.

policy and regulations, the private sector and global
governance organizations) is important may suffice.
This section also considers the role of shocks – abrupt,
large-scale changes to political, social and economic
life – that can shift social norms. It provides examples
of how change happens in these arenas, and as aresult of shocks, and then discusses lessons derived
from them about social norms.

The constitution, rights, laws and policies
The written rules governing a society can communicate strong social messages about what is and is not
acceptable. Throughout history and across contexts,
women’s right activists have spearheaded the adoption of new laws and policies, and even the newformal recognition of rights, in an effort to change
discriminatory social norms around issues as diverse
as GBV and unpaid care.108 Household survey datafrom Mexico, for example, indicate that social norms
have shifted dramatically towards less acceptabilityof intimate partner violence (IPV) and that rates of
IPV declined following the adoption of anti-violence
legislation.109 There is also compelling evidence from
Brazil showing how, over time, domestic violence
and feminicide laws led to increases in reportingby women as well as substantive improvements instate and criminal justice responses to victims.110 The
continued existence of violence in these and othercontexts, however, indicates that laws alone are notenough – though they are an important tool in themix.111 In Nepal, for example, legislation that bans childmarriage and calls for sanctions, such not providing
birth certificates or registering households from earlymarriages, has dissuaded some parents from continuing the practice. Additional measures, includinginterventions from community discussion centres incoordination with local government, have complemented legislative efforts to reduce child marriage.112
Similar effects can be found with policy. For example,
a study using difference-in-difference models to108 On GBV, see Htun and Jensius 2022; on care, see Esquivel
2014.
109 Htun and Jensenius 2022.
110 Macaulay 2021.
111 Fuentes 2014.
112 Adhikari 2019.

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analyse data from Demographic Health Surveys andWorld Values Surveys in 31 low- and middle-income
countries found that “[a] longer paid maternity leave
policy was associated with women’s increased rolein economic decision making in the household andimproved attitudes toward women’s right to work”
among both women and men.113 Providing men withpaid paternity leave, in theory, can change norms
around care work by fostering more equitable parenting practices and shifting the care work dynamic
within households.114 For example, in Canada, more
fathers have begun to take paternity leaves in the past
two decades: Between 2001 and 2006, only 34 percent of fathers used a paternity or parental leave,
while between 2012 and 2017 that number increased
to 46 per cent.115 In practice, evidence of social norms
change via paternal leaves may take time to manifest
or require that additional factors and conditions are inplace. Researchers have suggested that creating nontransferable paternity leaves or implementing “daddy
quotas” can help ensure that more men use paternity
leaves.116
More recently, feminist efforts to make care more
equitable, including through shifting social norms thatdevalue it and assign it to women, have included action
to get care recognized as a right in the law and eventhe constitution.117 For example, the law establishing
the Uruguayan National System of Care, the first in
Latin America, was passed thanks to the advocacy offeminist movements as well as feminist academics
and NGOs. Care is asserted as a universal right in thesystem, defining “new rights for persons who are in
dependent situations broadly” and “identif[ying] all
caregivers, both paid and unpaid, as rights holders”.118
Similar efforts to spearhead the social reorganization of care exist elsewhere. Cabo Verde, for example,
passed a policy in 2017 to create its first National Care
Plan, which had three primary objectives: professional
training for caregivers, the creation of a nationalcare service network and the promotion of policies
113 Chai et al 2022.
114 Edström et al. 2015.
115 Statistics Canada 2021.
116 UN-Women 2019.
117 Esquivel 2014.
118 Ibid.

to encourage the redistribution of care tasks withinhouseholds and society. Some feminist movements,
such as in Chile and Mexico, have even advocated for‘feminist constitutions’.119 Evidence is yet to emerge
on the extent to which these efforts will change social
norms and create material improvements for careproviders and those who need care, as well as theextent to which these legal and policy changes havebeen backed by adequate fiscal resourcing. Yet, given
data on singular care policies like maternity andpaternity leave, there is at least some indication that
this ‘big bet’ on the part of feminist and women’s
movements and organizations will generate positivechange over time.

Rules and regulations governing thelabour market and economic activity
Changes in the economy and the labour market
can also shift social norms. A well-studied context
for this phenomenon is the garment industry in
Bangladesh, where the search for cheap labour bytransnational corporations opened the doors forthousands of women to enter the (often poorly)
paid workforce. In doing so, they transgressed social
norms that constrained women’s place in society to
the household. Qualitative research among women
workers shows that while women were motivated toseek employment in the factories by a combination oflabour market opportunity and economic necessity,
they justified their decisions to “break with convention” by redefining and renegotiating social norms
around purdah, morality and motherhood in theirfamilies and communities.120 The broader changes toeconomic and labour market conditions had otherspill-over effects on gender norms among young
women and girls: According to one study, girls living
in villages near garment factories were more likely to
be in school, less likely to get married and less likely
to give birth compared to girls living elsewhere. Thesejobs provided girls with some freedom from theirnatal home and sheltered them from child marriage,
even if the jobs were poor quality. In fact, younger
girls aged 12–14 saw the greatest benefit in termsof delaying marriage, which may be due in part to119 CEPAL 2021; Martinez and Maya 2016.
120 Kabeer 1991.

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continuing their education in order to obtain jobs inthe garment factories.121
It is worth emphasizing that “the factories did nothead for Dhaka intent on liberating Bangladesh”swomen. As is often the case in a complex systemsuch as the global garment trade, the evolutionof gender norms was an accidental by-product ofstructural changes in the economy.”122 Indeed, various
studies show that other discriminatory gender norms
were reproduced within the garment factories. For
example, unequal power dynamics between the maleunion leaders and the women workers were upheldby the organizational hierarchy and paternalisticsocial norms that women should not challenge men’s
authority.123 This example illustrates how social norms
change is complex and multi-directional and, for it
to lead to aggregate improvements in women’s lives,
requires multiple, complementary interventions.

Religious systems, practices and teaching
Religion has a significant influence in shaping andmaintaining cultural norms that impact on genderequality, such as gender norms pertaining to moral
purity, bodily autonomy and gender roles.124 At thesame time, engaging with religion has also been a key
strategy for women’s movements to mitigate backlash and ensure that change is sustainable. Engaging
with religion occurs through multiple means,though a couple stand out: (1) leveraging religious
texts in favour of gender equality, which may entail
the reinterpretation of religious documents; and(2) securing the support of prominent religious leaders
who act as gatekeepers to religious communities.125

example is the work of Musawah, a global movement
for equality and justice in the Muslim family made up
of NGOs, activists, scholars, legal practitioners, policymakers and women and men across the globe.126
Through capacity-building and partnerships withwomen’s organizations that are rooted in the local
context, Musawah works to (re)align feminist andIslamic discourses and practices – such as those related
to family law – in ways that help mitigate against
backlash and encourage shifts in social norms that
promote progress on gender equality. For example,
Musawah developed a course to build the knowledgeof women leaders working in Muslim contexts so thatthey “critically speak out on the impacts of laws, policies, and practices justified in the name of Islam” intheir specific environment.127 It also created a feminist
reader’s guide on rethinking authority in Muslim legal
tradition, which they have made publicly available
to build bonds between scholarship and activism on
the subject.128

Of note are women’s organizations and movementsthat are situated within traditional or conservativeenvironments and seek to challenge harmful gendernorms and to advocate for women’s rights by reinterpreting religious texts and customs. One significant

Women’s organizations within Catholicism have also
built connections with faith leaders, such as bishops
and priests, to advance gender-equitable practices
within both the church and their broader societies. In
Latin America, increased dialogues between Catholic
theologians and women’s movements over the pasthalf century have shaped a “Latin American community of liberation theologists” that puts forward an“inclusive” interpretation of religious texts.129 In the
1990s, Latin American Christian feminists advanced
international exchange and dialogue through the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians and
Theology in the Americas.130 More recently, in Ireland,
the landslide vote in the 2018 referendum to repeal theconstitutional ban on abortion occurred in part due tothe advocacy of NGOs such as Catholics for Choice and“helping people reconcile their religion with a desire forreproductive rights”.131 The Catholic church has recently
built new leadership positions for women, with express

121 Kabeer 2007, as cited in UN-Women 2019.
122 Green 2016, p. 51.
123 Dannecker 2000.
124 UN-Women 2019.
125 Working with actors who might themselves be viewed as“excluders” of women and resistant to gender equality is a
strategy referred to in the governance literature as “working
with the grain”. See Barnes et al. 2021.

126 See Musawah n.d.a.
127 See Musawah n.d.b.
128 Rehman 2022.
129 Aquino 1998.
130 Peña 1995.
131 UN-Women 2019.

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calls for more women leaders from the Pope and recent
modifications to their canon law.132

Organizational change
In some cases, changes to the ways in which organizations – from businesses to political parties,
government ministries, labour unions, sports teams
and CSOs, among others – are structured and run (i.e.,their leadership, processes, practices and rules) can
also lead to shifts in social norms and thus change theimpact those organizations have on gender equality
internally as well as externally. There are a variety of
approaches to organizational change, although thesevary in effectiveness.
One theory of change is that increasing women’s
representation in organizations, particularly at thehighest levels of decision-making, can provoke positive shifts in gender norms. The evidence supporting
this theory of change is mixed, however, and comeswith several caveats. On the one hand, studies showthat having a greater number of women in government is positively associated with factors such as
the availability of maternity and paternity leave andgender equality in work. On the other hand, greater
representation of women does not seem to have abearing on poverty, unemployment and poor health.
These findings lead researchers to conclude that for“some dimensions of gender equality, the driving
forces of change have more to do with general transformations of society than the equal distribution of
women and men in elected assemblies”.133 One explanation points to the interaction of gender norms
with other social norms around class, caste, ethnicity
and race, among other factors. Women who are able
to enter elite organizations may not share the same“class concerns” as other women and thus may not
represent and take action on the interests of poor
women.134 The recognition of this dynamic underlies
calls for feminist leadership of important nationaland global organizations, beyond just female leadership – in other words, support for leaders who arealigned with transformative policy platforms.135
132 Daniels 2021.
133 Wängnerud and Sundell 2011, p. 99. See also Franceschet
and Piscopo 2008.
134 Htun and Weldon 2018; Goetz 1998.
135 Sandler and Goetz 2020; Cornwall and Goetz 2005.

Another explanation for why women’s representationin organizations is not always sufficient relates to thegendered ways in which organizations are structured.
This view emphasizes that, from the outset, gendernorms inform decisions about the roles, requirements,
processes and practices of an organization – leading
to organizations ‘built by men, for men’ (and their
biological characteristics and socially-prescribed
responsibilities). This is the sort of ‘male bias’ that
Diane Elson and others talked about in Male Bias in
the Development Process, as discussed in section 1.
Organizational structure can impact on women’sability to meaningfully participate in and thus
shape the outcomes of organizations. Research on
Panchayati Raj institutions in India, for example, showsthat even when gender and caste quotas are in place,
women’s participation is stymied by barriers including lack of childcare and social norms restricting theirmobility such that they rely on the willingness andavailability of husbands to drive them to meetings.136
Changing gender norms within organizations may
also require more significant transformations thatcreate the conditions for women and men to sharecare responsibilities and for organizations to recognize that people have caring lives and require timeand adequate compensation.
Part of changing institutions is working with influential actors within those institutions – for example,
those who shape how the organization is governed.
Gender at Work is an example of an organizationthat provides “peer support” to organizations such as
unions, university science labs, CSOs and development
institutions to help strengthen their contributions
to gender equality and the advancement of feminist leadership. Their Gender Action Learning (GAL)
framework, in particular, leverages adult learning principles and long-term engagement to transform social
norms from within organizations. The GAL approachis grounded in a theory of change and action thatsocial norms change requires working with a diversity of individuals across an organizational hierarchy.
More specifically, it recommends that key institutional actors who enjoy a sphere of influence and/or
decision-making power be involved in the “change”
projects (e.g., the director of the university science lab,136 Domingo et al 2015.

SOCIAL NORMS, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:A REVIEW OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

31rather than “just” a junior technician working in it).
UN-Women and other partners (e.g., the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – UNODC) take asimilar approach in their work with police to catalysemore gender-responsive police services for victimsof violence against women (VAW).137 In this case, theapproach centres on working with “police middle
managers” who can inspire change from subordinatesthat improves the services on offer.138

Infrastructure and resources
Changes to the physical environment, including
infrastructure such as buildings, transportation andcommunication networks, power and water and sanitation systems can also contribute to shifting social
norms.139 A well-evaluated example of this is water,
sanitation and health (WASH) and menstrual hygiene
management (MHM) programming that has sought
to change discriminatory social norms impeding girls’
education by changing school buildings to include
appropriate washrooms.140 While ensuring that girls
have access to facilities does not entirely resolve
the problem, it is an important part of the solution.
Similarly, organizations working to increase accessto MHM products and infrastructure in humanitarian contexts have found that lack of adequate MHM
infrastructure is both driven by discriminatory social
norms and drives them.141 On this basis the provision of MHM supplies in humanitarian crises is a key
component of how frontline organizations respondto gender inequality and its material effects in crisis
situations.142
Studies on transportation infrastructure further
illustrate the relationship between infrastructure andsocial norms. In Tehran, for example, the constructionof a subway line and the inclusion of women-onlycars created opportunities for women to access education, employment and recreation in parts of thecity that otherwise would have been inaccessible.
The subway also offered them a space to be anonymous and, through acts like changing their hijab
137 Fernandez and Townsley 2021
138 Ibid.
139 Khanna and Das 2016; Ames and Yon 2022
140 See for example Sahin 2015.
141 Fuentes. and Cookson 2019
142 Patel et al. 2022.

styles and makeup, challenge restrictive social norms
about “proper” Muslim women upheld by the state.
In doing so, the visibility of women in public spaces
increased, as did opportunities for women to “explore
new gendered roles and identities”.143 Similar findings
have emerged in Mexico City, where the combinationof public investment in women-only transportation
options and political action have shifted social norms
around women’s mobility.144 A mixed-methods study
drawing on national statistics, informal interviews
and media coverage found that “women-only buses,
subway cars, and taxis have not only been used asplaces to publicize a historically ignored problem of
GBV in transportation, but also to legitimize women’s
claims to equal rights to mobility”.145
What made the initiative in Mexico City successful was a multi-pronged approach: In addition to
public investment in fleets of women-only vehicles,
the National Institute for Women (INMUJERES) ran
a campaign that included “converting women-onlytransportation into a symbolic place for a women’s
movement” by painting the vehicles pink, naming thebuses ‘Athena’ (goddess of war, courage and independence) and adorning them with pictures of historical
women, reframing violence on public transit as an
issue of gender discrimination and connecting a newlaw against GBV with the establishment of new safe
spaces for women to report violence in transit.146 The
pink buses and women-operated taxis prompted apublic discussion about men’s role in women’s experiences of violence and, like in Iran, broke down restrictive
stereotypes about the appropriateness of women’s
mobility. Moreover, the evident success of the initiative prompted transit companies to hire more women
drivers, shifting gender norms that previously excluded
women from that industry.
Social norms can enable or constrain access toresources, such as land, money, tools and technology.
For example, discriminatory gender norms can posea barrier to women’s ownership of land and other143 Bagheri 2017, p. 313.
144 Dunckel-Graglia 2016.
145 Ibid., p. 628.
146 Ibid., p. 62.

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resources in many parts of the world.147 Some customary systems in Africa only grant women indirectaccess to land and produce through male relatives.148
Researchers have pointed to unfavourable court
rulings that uphold customary systems as influenced
by social norms on land ownership.149 Access to theseresources, in turn, can shift discriminatory social
norms regarding ownership and decision-making
capacities and has been positioned as a key strategy
by some women’s rights organizations. In Uganda,
for example, local women’s rights organizations haveadvanced a rights-based discourse to build solidarity
with rural women, promote legislative change andincrease women’s land ownership. Women have leveraged strategies including “purchase of land, obtaining
titles to land, taking claims to courts, and organizedcollective protest around legislation, together withdaily acts of resistance” to advance their aims.150
Research among resettled Syrian refugees in Turkey
and the United States found that access to resources
such as cars and training opened up new possibilities
for young women and broadened the remit of what
was possible in the eyes not only of the young women
but of their mothers and fathers as well.151
There are other arenas, such as health and education
systems, in which action has been taken to shift discriminatory social norms and improve gender outcomes.
One such example is the development of comprehensive
sexuality education (CSE) in school curricula. Longterm work at the level of crafting new curricula, newmanuals, new institutional tools and new teams ofactivists to train educators exemplifies how education systems, and gender advocates within them, canbe leveraged to slowly reduce discriminatory norms
and practices. For example, a systematic review of
evidence from three decades found that outcomes of
CSE include “appreciation of sexual diversity, dating
and intimate partner violence prevention, development of healthy relationships, prevention of child

147 Van den Bold et al. 2015.
148 Gray and Kevane 1999, as cited in van del Bold et al. 2015.
149 Tripp 2004.
150 Ibid.
151 Yalim and Critelli 2023.

sex abuse, improved social/emotional learning, andincreased media literacy”.152

Shocks and crises
Scholars of social change have long observed that
“international economic and political crises destabilize entrenched institutions, including institutionsof gender, thus opening up opportunities for emancipatory politics”.153 “Critical junctures” – major
events such as large scale economic and politicalshocks as well as natural disasters and crises – canquickly reorder what people do, which can inturn lead to shifts in gender and other social
norms.154 An example of a critical juncture inWestern history is the shift in social norms aroundfemale labour during and after World War II.155
Because women’s labour was needed to sustain
national economies as well as to support the military operations, conventional expectations about
women’s role in social life changed. Women were
elevated out of domesticity into the public, economic
realm of society, and policies and campaigns for theformation of alternative arrangements of domestic
work were launched in order to increase women’s
employment.156 Similar shifts have been observed
during other wars and conflict contexts, with womentaking up new jobs, joining armies, acting as peacemakers and contributing to the reconstruction ofcommunities.157 Once the war ends, however, societalpressures and post-conflict processes tend to limit
the capacity of women to participate fully and takeadvantage of new opportunities.158 Indeed, a few
years after World War II, women were encouraged togo back into the home and make space for men who
were seeking employment.159
Humanitarian crises can also provoke the renegotiation of gender norms.160 During the Ebola crisis in West
Africa, for example, men assumed new caregiving
152 Goldfarb and Lieberman 2021.
153 Meyer and Prugel 1999, cited in Naples and Desai 2002, p. 4.
154 Green 2016.
155 Hancock 1994; Summerfield 2013.
156 Ibid.
157 Justino et al. 2012.
158 Ibid, p. 6.
159 Colman 1995.
160 Dietrich Ortega et al. 2020.

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roles to contribute to the welfare of their families.161
Humanitarian response programming and resettlement policies commonly create opportunities to shift
gender norms by positioning women as income-earners in social protection and employment schemes.162
Yet attention also needs to be paid to changes inmen’s roles and the intersection of gender norms withother social norms related to class, ethnicity and race.
Indigenous women affected by protracted crisis in
Colombia, for example, emphasize that gender norms
shifted alongside other social norms: “The armed
conflict has affected everything in our way of living.
Ancestrally, we used to live in harmony with nature,in equilibrium with nature and with our spirits. Thena series of displacements came about with a seriesof human rights violations that led to a total disequilibrium. Obviously, the impact is both for men as
well as for women and total chaos came about in our
territory.”163
The previously mentioned research among Syrian
refugees in Turkey and the United States describes thatwhile gender norms at home in Syria positioned men
as breadwinners and protectors of their families, someresettlement policies and humanitarian programming
constructed Syrian men as dangerous to women andas security threats, offering them fewer opportunities
to thrive.164 Research on refugee resettlement contexts
also illustrates that gender norms are “revisited andrevised” depending on challenges encountered as wellas the larger policy context and support on offer inthe host country.165 For example, women’s integration
into the paid workforce may be prompted by necessity
rather than by an underlying change in views regarding
social acceptability. If the work is considered indecent
or undignified, or women are discriminated againston the basis of class or ethnicity, it is not accurate toequate the shift in roles to empowerment.
Shocks and crises can also reinforce unequal gendernorms. This was illustrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw a reversion to social norms assigning
161 McLean and Paxton 2019.
162 Blackwell et al. 2019.
163 Dietrich Ortega et al. 2020, p. 31.
164 Yalim and Critelli 2023.
165 Ibid., p. 7.

women majority responsibility for unpaid caregiving,with significant negative implications for their labour
force participation and access to income.166 This shift
was catalysed at least in part by lockdown measuresand public policies grounded in the assumptionthat ‘someone’ would pick up the slack. The “shadow
pandemic” of violence against women also points
to the heightening of discriminatory gender norms
that condone male violence, a dynamic evidenced
in the increase of sexual and gender-based violence
that often occurs in crisis contexts.167 Research on economic shocks showed that as the 2008 financial crisis
worsened in Europe, “more people came to agree withthe sentiment that men had more rights to jobs than
women”, a view that was more pervasive in countries
with welfare systems based on conventional malebreadwinner models.168 This is perhaps not surprising
if we accept that unequal gender norms are baked
into economic systems that assign greater value topaid “productive” work, and lesser or no value to the“reproductive” work that sustains society – and economic production.169
Even where positive changes follow critical junctures,
little evidence exists about whether shifts in gendernorms and roles during crises endure after the crisis
is resolved.

Key takeaways from the ‘how change
happens’ literature
The varied bodies of research examining how socialchange happens provide several lessons that are relevant for understanding what causes social norms,
including gender norms, to shift and the characteristics of these shifts. The first is that the relationshipbetween social norms change and change in women’s
lived realities is messy and multi-directional.170 It ischallenging to measure the effect of any one action or
event as shifts in social norms often occur as a resultof multiple, unrelated factors.171 Reflecting on Oxfam’s
work in women’s rights, for example, Green writes:
166 UN-Women 2021a.
167 Stark et al. 2021; Raftery et al. 2022; Stark et al. 2020.
168 Kushi and McManus 2018.
169 Fraser 2022.
170 Inglehart and Norris 2003.
171 Green 2016.

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Women’s expected roles [and thus
norms about women’s roles] haveundergone extraordinary change overthe last century. Was the main factor
behind this shift the right to vote,
employment outside the home, theinvention of the washing machine, girls’
education, new forms of contraception,access to information, or the women”smovement? The answer of course is allof the above and more. In a complex
system full of feedback loops and surprises, each of these factors has bothshaped and been shaped by evolving
norms on women”s roles.172
The research generated from four years of investigation through ODI’s ALIGN platform confirms these
dynamics. For example, changes to policies, laws andmaterial conditions have been observed to shift social
norms; in other cases, changes in social norms havebeen observed to shift material conditions, policies
and laws. This ‘problem of attribution’ poses some
pragmatic hurdles for results-based development
practice that requires clear theories of change.
The second lesson is that shifts in social norms (usually)occur slowly. If we accept that rules about appropriate
and inappropriate roles for women and men are deeply
embedded in the social, political and economic institutions of society, as well as in the built environment,
then it stands to reason that changing them will not
happen quickly. Most of the literature on how socialchange happens confirms that norms change is slow.
Indeed, the principal researcher of the ALIGN platform noted that “gender norm change is an enigma
in a world that applauds quick wins … Gender norms
change, but the pace is often slow and not always
progressive.”173 When an apparent shift does occur
quickly – for example, in the context of a crisis – itmay not be the case that what is observed is really achange in the prevailing social norm. It may just be
behaviours changing as a result of necessity. As discussed earlier, however, shifts in collective behaviour
172 Ibid., p. 50.
173 Harper et al. 2020, p. 6.

can eventually lead to shifts in social norms. In any
case, the material effects of a collective behaviourchange – e.g., women earning their own income or
men engaging in more care work – may actually be
the thing that matters most.
A third lesson is that gender equality issues are shapedby a diverse range of discriminatory social and gendernorms, and the extent to which these vary acrossissues implies that different levers for change will
be required. What has worked to shift social norms –and practices – around FGM, for instance, is different
from what has worked to shift social norms – andpractices – around women’s mobility in public spaces.
This lesson aligns with the broader research on thedrivers of progress on realizing women’s rights, whichindicates that “the logic of gender justice on one issue
is not the same as the logic on another issue”.174
In a landmark statistical study of the drivers of state
action on women’s rights, Htun and Weldon finddistinct differences in the nature of gender equality
issues, which in turn demands the use of different
tactics to address them.175 ‘Status issues’ such as VAW
and equality at work are anchored in the privileging ofmasculinity over femininity and the casting of men as
dominant and women as subordinate. Behind the legal
and policy wins that have changed women’s material
realities in these areas were local women’s and feminist movements that hooked into similar movements
elsewhere in the world and leveraged international
tools such as the Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)
to pressure for needed changes. ‘Class issues’, such as
family leave policies and childcare, arise from unjust
economic arrangements between state, market andfamily that manifest in inequality among women.
Levers of policy change included strong political coalitions and the support of Leftist parties in the caseof leave policies and autonomous women’s movements in the case of childcare. ‘Doctrinal issues’ are
174 Htun and Weldon 2018, p. 4.
175 Htun and Weldon compiled and analysed a dataset of laws
and policies across seven domains of women’s rights issues in
70 countries (representing 85 per cent of the world’s population), pooling single-year cross-sections at four points in time
between 1975 and 2005.

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those influenced by religious and codified cultural
traditions. Progress on reproductive freedom, which
is a doctrinal, status and class issue, requires multiple
levers to be pulled, including working with Leftist
parties and drawing on international tools such as
CEDAW, especially in more religious societies and incountries where religious institutions have a strong
relationship with state governance. In order to groundsocial norms work in the legal and policy changes that
lay the foundation for large-scale material improvements, this research suggests that women’s rights
advocates will need to assume different approaches
depending on the issue at hand.
The fourth, and perhaps most important lesson, isthat autonomous women’s and feminist movements
and CSOs are fundamental actors in achieving enduring shifts in social norms and the material conditionsof women’s lives.176 It is often groups of women andfeminists who have collectively identified discriminatory gender norms, practices, policies and laws andcatalysed the action to address them through collective organizing and advocacy in their communities,
workplaces and halls of government. On issues such as
GBV, which is deeply rooted in harmful gender norms,
a study on what works in Latin America found that“strategies put in place by feminist and women’s organizations in the region are the main drivers for change,
through mobilization, political advocacy and networking that is sustainable in the long term”.177 Indeed,
women’s mobilizations are behind many of the key
legislative changes that enshrine women’s rights andcommunicate what is and is not acceptable. Women’smachineries, lobbyists and CSOs have propelled policy
issues such as affordable childcare into the public
view. By reinterpreting millennia-old religious texts,
women’s and gender equality CSOs are forging newroles for women and men in religious institutions.
Part of the power of women”s and feminist organizations is that they function to bridge legal and policychanges with changes in the attitudes, beliefs andbehaviours in organizations and communities. Writing
176 
Htun and Weldon 2018; Ruiz et al. 2018; Green 2016;
Molyneux and Razavi 2002.
177 Ruíz et al. 2018, p. 20.

in the context of legal reform to address GBV and theharmful gender norms that give rise to it, Htun andJensenius write:
Feminist activists and other civic groups
help to close this law-practice gap, often
in alliance with progressive state actors.
Activist networks bring the law to bearon society through education, provisionof resources and other supports, training of police, judges, and health carepractitioners, and by calling attention
to enforcement failures, among otherwork. In these ways, societal mobilization often helps to “vernacularize” legal
rights, or convert formal law into meanings and practices that are salient andappropriate in local communities.178
Women’s organizing has catalysed shifts in discriminatory social norms in a variety of contexts and by
operating at a variety of scales, from the consciousnessraising groups in communities discussed above, to the#NiUnaMenos and #MeToo movements that occupied
both online and public physical spaces, to the transnational feminist movements organizing against thedevaluation of women’s paid and unpaid work throughwomen’s strikes. Feminist movements use a variety oftactics, including spreading awareness and fosteringsocial learning, creating social networks, demanding
institutional reforms and engaging in lobbying aswell as protesting, social disruption and disobedience
actions.179 In the words of Htun and Weldon: “they[feminist movements] articulate social group perspectives, disseminate new ideas and frames to thebroader public, and demand institutional changes thatrecognize these meanings”.180 It is worth noting thatsometimes what feminist movements and organizations are trying to change are social norms – but evenmore often they are struggling for material changes
178 Htun and Jensenius 2022, p. 9.
179 
On spreading awareness and fostering social learning,see Rochon 1998; on creating social networks, see Weldon
2004; on demanding institutional reforms, see Rochon and
Mazmanian 1993; on engaging in lobbying, see Gelb andPalley 1996; on protesting, social disruption and disobedience actions, see McAdam and Su 2002.
180 Htun and Weldon 2012, p. 552.

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(e.g., women living free from violence or enjoying
decent work), and shifting social norms is a means tothat end or a by-product of it.
A fifth lesson on how gender norms can change
is worth emphasizing: that changes can provoke
backlash. This is because “norms … act like a complex
system: the way they evolve is seldom linear or
imposed. They are fiercely debated, compromises are
struck, modifications are made” and even “the prospect of norm shifts can provoke a violent backlash”.181
The risk of backlash may be highest when the socialand gender norms in question are those related
to women and “status issues”.182 The evidence on
women’s economic empowerment in contexts ofstrong social norms sanctioning women’s visibility
in public spaces bears this out: Evaluations of somepublic works programmes and humanitarian cashtransfers targeting women have found an increase in
intimate partner violence, for example, and the workof Islamic feminists has encountered backlash when
their propositions have been perceived as ‘outside’
Western or donor-led impositions.183
This is where the analysis of power is inseparable fromconceptualizations of social norms and appropriate
theories of change and action that evolve from them.
Writing about the horrific violence against womenin the context of global trade and export processing
zones in northern Mexico, Staudt writes:
In Juárez, since the birth of maquiladoras, hundreds of thousands of women
have worked formally for wages.
Although wages are meager and many
women work out of need rather thanchoice, they do earn and control money.
Women’s work outside the home has
no doubt changed women workers andperceptions of workers. Evidence showsthat women in Juárez overwhelmingly
denounce violence rather than accept
it in self-resignation. Men’s relationships with women have changed as
181 Green 2016, p. 61.
182 Htun and Weldon 2018; Cislaghe and Heise 2020.
183 Blackwell et al. 2019; Merry 2006.

well, evoking a wide range of responses:
threat, support, hostility. Men exhibit
diversity as a group, just as do women,with at least a quarter physically violent
and far more, verbally abusive. For somemen, perhaps male rage against cheapened wages under the global economic
regime produces backlash and revenge,
but they exercise that rage against an
easier target than the global politicaleconomic octopus: their partners. Work,
money, and new relationships makewomen less likely to accept the naturalized ideology of female subservience.184
Staudt contends that “some men, for whom power
and authority have slipped in absolute terms and in
relation to women and their growing power, adopt
violence against women as a control strategy”.185 In
addition to underscoring how perceived shifts ingender norms can provoke backlash, this example also
illustrates the range of contributing factors: global
trade rules, changes in labour market opportunities
and cheapened labour. It underscores the importanceof accounting for and engaging men and boys, whose
lives – like those of women and girls – are shaped by
the political economy.186
The risk of backlash has important implications forinternational development organizations seeking to
do social norms change work. A great deal of evidence
supports the contention that intentional work to shiftsocial norms needs to be community-driven and thus
community-owned.187 Should international organizations wish to undertake work to shift social norms,
they need to understand their responsibility towards
the women they work with and be prepared to stick it
out with them if backlash should occur. This point is
expanded in the conclusion to this paper.

184 Staudt 2008 p. 46.
185 Ibid., p. 44.
186 Greig and Flood 2020.
187 OECD 2019; Cookson et al. 2021; Institute for Reproductive
Health, n.d.

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2.3

Discussion: Changing hearts
and minds, changing society
In practice, there exist many ways to shift discriminatory norms. Some of these are intentional and direct,
such as group communication or edutainment interventions; others, such as passing laws or adopting
policies, seek to alter the formal and material conditions of society and, in so doing, indirectly shape social
norms in the right direction. While the programmatic
evidence base focuses on the more direct approaches,
this is not because they are the only options or themost effective or sustainable ones in every case. The
shifts in social norms wrought through the sustained
efforts of women’s and feminist movements and CSOs,
and their allies in government, the public and private
sectors and religious organizations, illustrate thatsometimes the shifts that endure are not the result of‘quick wins”. In many cases, the most enduring shifts
are those accompanying significant material improvements in people’s lives – women’s as well as men’s.
The evidence across the bodies of literature we review
here also suggests the salience of participation whenit comes to shifting discriminatory social norms.188
Consciousness-raising activities throughout contemporary history have involved the participation ofordinary people in the critical examination of why
things are the way they are and collective visioning
about how things might be different. At its heart,engaging men and boys is about recognizing their
participation in maintaining the status quo and fostering their participation in the construction of new,more gender egalitarian social norms.189 Women’s andfeminist movements, CSOs, unions and caucuses areoften anchored in the participation of people who
realized that the prevailing social norms were problematic, and who come together to resist those norms
and mobilize others to join their resistance.
Effective efforts to shift discriminatory social norms,
and thus improve the material conditions of people’s
188 For more on participatory approaches to social norms change,see: Chambers 1994; Gaventa and Martorano 2016.
189 Greig and Flood 2020.

lives, exist at individual and community levels aswell as within the broader arenas of “wider society”.
Theories of change that are more likely to have enduring effects are going to be those that recognize thecomplexity of social life and connect what happens
in households and neighbourhoods, for example,
to decisions taken in government offices, corporate
headquarters and multilateral economic institutions.
Indeed, many of the “higher level” approaches to shifting social norms are at least implicitly grounded in theview that social norms are dialectically (re)constituted
in both individual hearts and minds as well as in thesystems and structures of wider society. Approaches
that recognize this dynamic include, for example,
those that work through strategically situated actors
in powerful organizations, from police units to religious bodies, to help address gaps between de jureframeworks for gender equality and de facto realities
that fall short of this or indeed that are rampant withinequalities.190
Thinking about social norms change in terms ofsystems – and, moreover, complex systems – also
drives home the point that social norms change does
not occur in a vacuum: As one social norm shifts, weshould expect that many other things of a normativeand material nature do too. A case in point are thechanges in social norms around women’s economicroles that occurred as a result of World War II or theestablishment of garment industries and export
processing zones. New economic opportunities
prompted changes in collective behaviour that, overtime, became normalized. The story does not end
there, however: Modern “crises of care” are a resultof shifts in gender norms that permitted women towork for pay but were not accompanied by normativechanges that (sufficiently) permitted men to takeon more care work or assigned greater responsibility
for socialized care to the public and private sectors.
The result is the normalization of women’s double
burden and the reorganization of care work among
190 
There is also an important literature coming from theinternational development perspective that, in reflecting
critically on the possibilities and limitations of gender mainstreaming, considers how organizational change in favourof gender equality might be catalysed by feminists within,
but also at the margins of, mainstream organizations (seeEyben and Turquet 2013).

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women – from elite women to poorly-paid, working
class and often migrant women.
Socio-ecological models are one practical tool that canhelp development organizations consider how individual hearts and minds are shaped by very real forcesin the wider world, and vice-versa. Initially developedby psychologist Bronfenbrenner to conceptualize
how individuals are influenced by multi-level factors,
the model was later adapted by Heise to understandthe complex nature of violence against women.191
It presents a shift away from single-factor theories,
offering a framework for a ‘systems approach’ thatemphasizes that social norms change programmes
need to work across different levels in a coordinatedway in order to develop a “critical mass” for change.192
Various iterations of the model exist. Ultimately,
their purpose is “not to determine precisely in which
domain a particular factor should fall” but to prompt
thoughtful consideration of the variety of factors
at play that work to sustain harmful practices andto identify how a shift in norms in one sphere may
impact on life in another.193
This section of the paper has sought to answer thequestion How do social norms change? A related question, and one that is also the subject of a fair shareof debate, is How are social norms measured? We willanswer this question in the next section.

191 Bronfenbrenner 1977; Heise 1998.
192 Eaton 2021; Cislaghi et al. 2019.
193 Cislaghi and Heise 2018, p. 620.

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3.

HOW ARE SOCIAL NORMS
MEASURED?
When it comes to the topic of measurement, at least two tensions are relevant to this paper.
One of these is methodological and the other is philosophical, both of which have ethicaldynamics. The methodological tension is about how best to measure social norms. Thereis currently no global standard for identifying and measuring social norms change, despite
the great deal of effort invested in getting this right among development and global healthpractitioners (and academic researchers, for that matter). The second tension concerns
whether ‘getting measurement right’ is a worthwhile goal in and of itself – and, if so, to what
extent. There are legitimate concerns about the intentions behind, and efforts towards, sucha project. This section will address both these issues.
The section is organized by data collection steps thatwould typically accompany a development project
within a results-based framework: (1) contextual
discovery to identify relevant factors contributing toa problem; (2) establishment of a priori indicators,
which will enable measurement of change; (3) iterative measurement of ongoing changes during project
implementation; (4) final data collection and (5) dissemination of results. In working through each ofthese data collection steps, we discuss the approaches
that are currently used to measure social norms andtheir strengths and limitations. In light of thesestrengths and limitations, as well as the broader
context within which gender equality work in development is currently taking place, we conclude withreflections on ‘getting measurement right’.

3.1

Contextual discovery

This initial phase of a project involves data collection
about the context in which the problem is occurring aswell as features of the problem. Quantitative methods
and sources of data, for example, might include household surveys and demographic data sourced fromnational statistical offices that help paint a pictureof the social and economic features of a community,e.g., age, household composition, religious and ethnic
makeup, employment rates and income levels, among
other characteristics. Qualitative methods such as
interviewing, focus groups and observation might beused to describe in detail local customs and practices
and, importantly, local perspectives on the issue athand. This is the phase of a project within which qualitative methods – deployed rigorously, and by thosewith deep understanding of social dynamics and local
context – are useful to identify social norms as well as
the various other social, political, economic and environmental factors shaped by and shaping social norms
and influencing material outcomes.
For example, the first phase of CARE’s Tipping Point
Initiative to address child marriage in Bangladesh and
Nepal included a “community participatory analysis”(CPA) designed “to deepen understanding of the contextual factors and root causes driving the prevalenceof child marriage” in specific regions of the countries.194
Focus groups with women and girls, and men andboys, were used to identify factors that shape gendernorms, such as the strength of religious institutions, as
194 CARE USA 2017.

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well as practices informed by gender and other social
norms, such as purdah. Importantly, focus groups werealso used to map the services, built environment andmaterial resources of the community, such as thepresence of NGOs, the location of households, schools
and other organizations and services of significanceto the community, distribution of agricultural land
and access to productive infrastructure and markets.
Focus groups also identified environmental factors,
such as rainfall, and political economy factors, such as
food security, labour market and migration patterns, aswell as relationships between these. Interviews wereused to document and understand the life stories
of women, men, girls and boys, the major events
within them (e.g., puberty, education, marriage) andtheir own interpretations of these, as well as theirpersonal aspirations.
This participatory discovery phase of the project
identified the five strongest social norms aroundacceptable behaviour for girls. In Nepal, for example,
these included social norms around girls’ mobility, their participation in decision-making aroundmarriage and education, their sexuality and their
voice and participation in their communities. The
exploratory nature of this measurement phase, andthe view beyond individual attitudes, beliefs and perceptions, facilitated a recognition of complexity andthe influence of economic factors on human behaviour: “[K]ey findings from the CPA study around thedrivers of child marriage show that it is embedded
in a complex dynamic of economic insecurity andprevailing social norms around family honor, controlof girl’s sexuality, and the low social status of girls.”195

3.2

Establish baseline indicators

Many different approaches exist for establishingthe indicators that will be monitored throughout aprogrammatic intervention to measure social norms
change. Variation in approaches is attributable tolack of consensus on the definition of social norms,
as discussed in section 1. It is also a reflection of
methodological challenges, particularly regarding
understandings of social norms that seek ever more
precision. Indicators that capture individuals’ attitudes, beliefs and sometimes behaviours are common
in scholarly and practitioner social norms research aswell as programmatic evaluations. This approach istypically informed by social psychology and behavioural economics perspectives and methods. Attitudes
and beliefs, and sometimes behaviours, are used as
proxies for social norms because these data are relatively straightforward to collect.

If we accept the view that social norms shape and areshaped by social, political and economic arenas that
extend well beyond communities (e.g., laws, religious
doctrine, trade and labour regulations), it is worthemphasizing here that a contextual discovery phaseshould include consideration of how these impact on
the social norms, practices and material realities (e.g.,
environment, access to resources) of the communities
where the social norms in question are evidenced.
Socio-ecological models can be helpful in this regard.

A common critique of this approach, however, is that
individual attitudes and beliefs are poor proxies forsocial norms because they can actually be at odds
with the prevailing social norms.196 Moreover, changes
in individual attitudes and beliefs are not a sufficientcondition for social norms change. They may ‘indicate’
deeper-rooted social norms change, but they canalso be driven by other factors (e.g., policy changes),leaving the prevailing social norms intact. Recent
experiences in some countries around childcare are acase in point. Introducing access to quality, affordable
childcare may change the attitudes, beliefs and practices of mothers and fathers with regard to women’ssocially assigned responsibility for children’s care. Yet,when public officials remove access to childcare, as
they did during the COVID-19 pandemic, it may fallback onto women (not men), illustrating that thesocial norm assigning responsibility for children’scare is still around. This suggests a dynamic we might
think of as different levels of social norms: A newsocial norm in one context (where quality childcare ispublicly provided) rests on top of an old social normin another context (where access to quality childcare
does not exist or is taken away). This also, of course,

195 CARE 2017 p. 2.

196 Bicchieri 2017.

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indicates the influence of the political economy onsocial norms. We will return to this point of alternative explanations and inadequate assumptions of
causation further below.
There is some consensus that “the emphasis on
measuring not only individual attitudes but also
individuals’ perceptions of others’ expectations is asignificant move towards locating social norms in
the interactions between individuals and their socialworld”.197 On this basis, many scholarly studies ofsocial norms draw on the World Values Survey, whichconventionally asked questions about attitudes
and beliefs until its most recent version (Wave 7),
which incorporated questions about community
perceptions.198 These and other studies attempt tocapture what individuals think or believe is acceptable/unacceptable behaviour, as well as individuals’
perceptions of social dynamics in their communities,e.g., what they think their neighbours think is or is not
acceptable behaviour. Programmatic interventions
are also moving beyond attitudes and beliefs andadopting increasingly sophisticated methods to incorporate perceptions.199 Such approaches seek tocapture an individual’s expectation of how others
would react if a certain thing happened (empirical expectations) and what an individual believes
others would expect them to do in a certain scenario(normative expectation). Attempts at capturingcommunity perceptions often involve the use of
hypothetical vignettes and incentives to induce participants to answer questions sincerely.200 In somecases, incentives are justified as a technique for (atleast partly) overcoming the subjective nature of
the answers elicited and their susceptibility to bias.
Yet, these attempts to establish baseline indicators
typically remain anchored in the individual level:
The “aggregation of individual perceptions to create
197 Piedalue et al. 2020, p. 98.
198 The World Values Survey is the largest non-commercial,
cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs
and values ever executed, currently including interviews
with almost 400,000 respondents. It is conducted by aglobal network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life, led by aninternational team of scholars, with the WVS associationand secretariat headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. See:
https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org.
199 Bicchieri 2017; CARE 2017; Perrin et al. 2019.
200 Bicchieri 2017.

a collective category continues to rely upon behavioural sciences’ understanding of norms as locatedwithin individuals’ minds”.201
Some approaches to measuring social norms change
incorporate collective patterns of behaviour in theirbaseline indicators. Harper et al., for instance, lookat attitudes, beliefs and behaviours together, thus
attempting to get a closer approximation of norms inpractice.202 An example of baseline indicators worthhighlighting is the Social Institutions and Gender
Index (SIGI), a cross-country measure developed by
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment (OECD) Development Centre of genderbased discrimination in formal and informal laws,social norms and practices. The index draws together
outcome indicators (e.g., prevalence of early marriage, polygamy), attitudes (e.g., towards domestic
violence) and the existence of certain laws (e.g., on
workplace rights).203 For example, SIGI triangulates
data on women’s representation in politics, the presence of gender quotas and country-level attitudes onwhether men make better leaders than women to
explore whether quotas can “change the status quo
where rigid gender norms restrict women’s ability to
become political leaders”.204 While it does not measuresocial norms directly, or capture community perceptions, it seeks to leverage “sex-disaggregated data onsocial attitudes and behaviours, as well as existing
formal and informal laws” to help measure gender
discrimination in social norms.205 SIGI is a research
and advocacy tool rather than a programmatic intervention per se, but it is useful in highlighting an effort
that seeks to draw connections between what exists‘in hearts and minds’ (attitudes), ‘within wider society’(e.g., laws) and in practices (e.g., early marriage).

Randomized control trials
The establishment of baseline indicators is an important step in randomized control trials (RCTs), which are
201 Piedalue et al. 2020, p. 98, original emphasis.
202 Harper et al. 2020.
203 The SIGI predominantly relies on quantitative methods anddraws on qualitative data in the form of a standardized questionnaire in order to gather supplementary data on the legal
landscape.
204 OECD 2023a.
205 Ibid.

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increasingly used to measure social norms change indevelopment and global health interventions.206 Yet,their faithful reliance on a set of baseline indicators,
and their inability to adapt interventions to changing circumstances, is also a significant weakness withregard to social norms. Where they are used, RCTs use
individual attitudes, beliefs and behaviours as baseline
indicators for social norms, all of which are imperfectproxies. To be clear, RCTs are a useful tool in manymeasurement scenarios. They were designed for biological interventions (i.e., those in medical research)with little complexity and few confounding factors,
most of which are amenable to control. This ‘control’
is key to the claims of rigour that led to RCTs being
crowned the “gold standard” for establishing causal
relationships between interventions and outcomes.
They are, however, a significantly less feasible approachin scenarios of high complexity and low control ofconfounding factors. For development programmesthat take place outside of a lab and “in the wild” (touse Bicchieri’s term), it is impossible to control for themultitude of factors that may influence outcomes.
More noteworthy, however, is that the rigidity of the
RCT model does not allow for consideration of thecommunities in which people exist, the institutions
with which they interact and the actual experiences
they have with these in their everyday lives – it does
not locate them in the social, political, economic andenvironmental ecosystems in which they live.207 The
result is that RCT methods render programmes ofintervention less capable of adapting to unintended
consequences, some of which may involve grave
harm. An RCT carried out in Somalia by researchers at
Harvard University provides an example.208 It involved
an experiment that used social messaging to shiftsocial norms perceived to be driving widespread practices of a severe form of female genital cutting (FGC;
type III); the aim of the project was to ‘downgrade’
the type of FGC practiced to other types (I and II) that
the World Health Organization considers less severeon the grounds that it involves removing less of the
206 
Randomized control trials were the most commonly
deployed measurement approach in the programmatic
evaluation literature captured by our scoping review. See
Markel et al. 2016; Clark et al. 2017; Glass et al. 2018.
207 Piedalue 2020, p. 98.
208 La Ferrara 2023.

genitalia. Yet, while the RCT did indeed provoke a shift
in this practice, it also had the effect of increasing
the practice of types I and II FGC among households
that never would have otherwise practiced FGC atall. Shockingly, the researchers interpreted the harmcaused as little more than a deviation.
This case emphasizes an important and oft-overlooked
point: While some contexts related to social norms
may present circumstances that are relatively safe for
RCTs, in other cases the RCT method may not only beunsuitable but entirely unethical. Whether an RCT isan ethical method needs to be seriously consideredat the contextual discovery phase of a project – and,to be clear, a handful of consultations conducted by‘parachuted in’ researchers will not suffice. The significance of this shortcoming will be further expanded
on below (section 3.7).

Big data
Recent years have seen a rise in attempts to measuregender norms using ‘big data’: the “digital informationpassively generated by human social and economic
behaviour, and often available at high resolution inboth time and space”.209 The attempts use data fromsources such as Twitter, Facebook and cell-phone
towers to extract insights about attitudes, beliefs
and behaviour on a large scale and often in real-time.
Such initiatives to “​​unlock the potential of digital data
to inform real-world interventions” are interesting inpart because of the unprecedented scale at which
they can operate.210 Some may also provide important
insights into online culture that could – in theory –inform interventions to improve the toxic culture ofmany online spaces, though in practice this would
require productive coalitions between technology
companies and human rights groups.
Data that are generated passively in the course ofpeople’s social and economic activity can speak totheir actual behaviour in a substantively different
manner than subjective responses to interviews or
surveys. For example, a smartphone’s GPS log does notreport where individuals say they spend their time
– the data trace where they actually were. However,
209 Vaitla n.d.
210 Ibid.

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a significant limitation of such research has to dowith the difficulty in using trace data to make inferences about complex social dynamics related to such
issues as power differences, access to resources andchanges in the environment. For example, GPS logs
might show that female smartphone users spend
more time outside the home than male smartphoneusers, but it could be difficult to ascertain whether
this reflects a gendered social norm about presence athome rather than gender and class-based differencesin smartphone ownership, or differences in use ofprivacy and battery-saving settings that limit logging
of GPS data. Such limitations have been recognizedby big data researchers themselves.211 Furthermore, inthe context of no gold standard regarding digital data
rights, some researchers have suggested that “using
big data poses a minefield of conceptual, practical,
ethical, epistemological and political issues, leadingto ‘bigger dilemmas’ than it solves”.212

3.3

Iterative measurement ofongoing changes
Ongoing evaluation throughout the life course of adevelopment programme is critical not only for tracking the effectiveness of an intervention but also for
identifying unintended consequences early on. Qualitative methods such as interviews, focus groups andobservation are useful for this type of data collection, as
are the complaint and grievance mechanisms used insome interventions. If properly designed and deployed,
they can shed light on the anticipated and unanticipated experiences of those involved in or impacted by
the programme or intervention and empower practitioners to redesign a programme (or stop a harmfulintervention). Approaches should thus have the flexibility to enable researchers and evaluators to discoverand explain unexpected phenomena.213

antagonistic reactions early on.214 The importance ofopportunities for iteration are illustrated in researchon UPWARD, a programme implemented in the
United Republic of Tanzania, which sought to increase
women’s participation and role in decisions aroundwater and sanitation.215 By providing iterative monitoring accompanied by ongoing mentoring, the initiative
pivoted mid-way to address backlash from men andadjust the pace to approach shifting social norms
more gradually instead of pushing for rapid changethat isolated community members. In the case of RCTs
and other similarly structured scientific approaches,the practice of establishing rigid indicators a priori
comes with the weakness of not being able to adapt
them to ongoing learning about how people areresponding to an intervention. In the context of social
norms, which are produced and reproduced in relation to a complex set of factors, methods that enable
practitioners, programme evaluators and researchers
to account for complexity are critical.
Of course, opportunities to identify and understandhow an intervention is interplaying with the variety ofsocial norms that exist in any given society, as well aswith the other economic, political and environmental
factors, also enables practitioners, programme evaluators and researchers to identify and explain the ‘brightspots’ – what is working, and why.216 Measurementof ongoing changes can also open opportunities torefine the baseline indicators themselves and improve
the quality and usefulness of data generated.

3.4

Final data collection

This is particularly important when we consider therisk of backlash to social norms programming andthe usefulness of being able to diagnose potentially

The data collected at the end of a project provide
an overall picture of the successes, challenges andfailures in meeting its stated aims and objectives.
In most cases, data will be collected against thebaseline indicators established at the start of the
project, analysed, and conclusions will be drawn
about any changes that occurred. A critique worth
taking seriously is that many efforts to measureand understand social norms change are plagued by

211 Vaitla et al. 2020.
212 Wazir 2022, p. 17, citing Ekbia et al. 2015.
213 Holeman and Kane 2020.

214 Pittman and Haylock 2016.
215 Institute for Reproductive Health, n.d.
216 Pearse and Connell 2016.

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issues of “conflation of correlation with causation”.217
This issue is widespread within research on social
norms: “Norms researchers have proposed many different social mechanisms by which norms are said toaffect action… Unfortunately, despite the large numberof proposed explanations and the large number ofstudies collecting data on norms and action, very few ofthese explanations have actually been tested.”218 It alsocomes up in the experimental and quasi-experimental
methods deployed to measure the effectiveness ofdevelopment interventions to shift social norms, adynamic that by all accounts would seem to undercut the point of collecting action-oriented data in thefirst place.
Those development interventions that intervene at
the individual or community level at least recognizethat social norms are shaped by a variety of political,
economic and environmental factors originating inthe ‘wider society’ and that collective human behaviour is also driven by contextual factors that are notsocial norms.219 Nevertheless, in practice, most studies
tend to overlook these other possible factors, focusing
narrowly on the baseline social norm (or proxy) indicators.220 Even when other contextual factors are taken
into account – for example, as control variables in
RCTs – the complex interactions between thosefactors are inadequately reduced to fairly linear
processes. Piedalue et al. summarize this dynamic
as follows:
Without testing causation, the simple
regularity of a behaviour may be falsely
assumed to result from social norms – I
do x because everyone else does x – whenother factors (possibly material andinstitutional) in fact drive the regularityof the behaviour – I and everyone else dox because of y. For example, in the case of
GBV, an individual man’s use of violence
may not be caused by his belief that such
behaviour is common and sanctioned
in his community (i.e. a social norm).
217 Piedalue et al. 2020, p. 98.
218 Bell and Cox 2015, p. 29.
219 Bicchieri 2017; Cislaghi and Heise 2020; Harper et al. 2020.
220  Piedalue et al. 2020. This contention was also confirmed byour scoping review.

Rather, both the action and social norm
result from institutional reinforcementof men’s power (for example, in government institutions). In order to measurecausation, social norms proponents needto document social mechanisms that
affect individual action, which cannot be
achieved when a study only measuresindividual perceptions and actions.221
Whereas one part of the problem is that the dominant
experimental approaches to measuring social norms
change focus rigidly on a narrow set of individuallevel indicators, the other part of the problem is in
the aggregation of those indicators to approximate
community dynamics. This practice continues despite
the fact that:…interdisciplinary research demonstrates
quite clearly that a community cannot
be understood simply as the aggregatedformation of its individual members.
Through their interactions, processes ofintersubjective meaning-making, sharedexperiences, power struggles and situational contexts, collective groups become
something more than the sum of theirindividual parts... Institutional settingsand practices also influence these collective social relations.222
Getting closer to understanding causation incomplex systems will require some of the tools thathave enabled interdisciplinary research to makesuch observations.223 This includes mixed-methods
approaches incorporating both quantitative andqualitative methods that together can capture
perceptions and reality, intensity and scope, andcomplexity and nuance. Plenty of evidence existsthat combining quantitative and qualitative methods
gets us much closer to rigour, and to action-oriented
information, in the evaluation of global health and

221 Piedalue et al. 2020, pp. 98-99, original emphasis by authors.
222 Ibid., p. 98, citing Delanty 2018.
223 Piedalue et al. 2020.

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development programming.224 Indeed, “amplifying
the knowledge of local actors from their own pointsof view can provide a rich and nuanced picture of thedevelopment context” in which social norms changetakes place.225
Yet, qualitative approaches are under-used in theapproaches to social norms work recently rising inprominence. Even experts in social psychology, behavioural economics and game theory contend that
qualitative methods are required to understand thenature of a collective behaviour and its drivers (e.g.,whether it is a true social norm or motivated by somematerial constraint).226 Such social norms researchers,
who moreover adopt a view of norms that accounts
for power relations, note that “adopting such a
definition also requires accepting that quantitative measures might only partially grasp changes ingender norms … while a part of gender norms might
be uncovered by measuring people’s expectations ofappropriate behaviour for men and women, the institutional aspects or the related power relations might
not be captured by these same measures”.227 Qualitative, exploratory and descriptive methods are useful
to explain changes, or lack thereof, against a baseline
because they allow for in-depth investigation of how
people perceive and experience social norms (andother factors) in specific contexts.228
Another shortcoming of the dominant approaches
to measuring social norms is temporal, particularly
224 E.g. Jones et al. 2012. See, for example, the set of studies
emanating from an evaluation of an mHealth intervention
in a malaria endemic region of Kenya. The 2011 RCT showedpromising results: Text-message reminders sent to healthworkers’ personal mobile phones improved the quality ofmalaria treatment in both the short and long term. The RCT
established a casual link between the intervention (textmessages) and its outputs (improved malaria treatment).
A follow-up qualitative study in 2012 provided important
evidence as to why the text-messaging intervention was
successful. Through in-depth interviewing, the researchers
learned that the health-care workers appreciated receiving
timely information ‘on the job’, having ready access to old/
stored text messages and feeling ‘up to date’. The former
study showed that an intervention worked and the latter
showed why. For more information, see Zurovac et al. 2011or Jones et al. 2012.
225 MacArthur et al. 2022, p. 9.
226 Bicchieri 2017; Dempsey et al. 2018.
227 Cislaghi and Heise 2020, p. 416.
228 Singh and Mukherjee 2018.

with regard to evaluations of programmatic interventions. The examples of large-scale societal
change in section 2 illustrated that social norms
shift slowly, except sometimes in cases of large-scale
shocks. Within development practice, however, thetime period between the establishment of baseline
indicators and final data collection is often relatively
short. Short timeframes preclude opportunities tomeasure the sustainability of observed changes overtime. Timeframes are not a feature of development
programming over which practitioners typicallyhave much control, however, as they are embedded
in funding cycles set by development donors. Thisis a dynamic of social norms work that donors willneed to be willing to adapt if the sustainability of anintervention is a priority.

3.5

Dissemination of results

Dissemination of results is a critical component ofdevelopment programming from an accountability
and transparency perspective – not only to development funders but also to the public and those
directly involved in the intervention. It is also criticalfor mutual learning and for iteration on approaches.
Unfortunately, there exists a “glaring lack of systematic and long-term evaluations of field interventions”
in much high-profile social norms work.229 In a detailed
accounting of evidence on the Social Norms Approachand the refined Social Norms Approach 2, Rekha Wazir,
whose extensive research and practitioner expertise
includes work on discriminatory social norms, lists
examples of evaluations conducted in egregiously
short time frames and accompanied by boastfulclaims of success.230 In one such example, a WorldBank project in India conducted an evaluation justone week after the project closed.231 Other examplesof high-profile projects that were widely publicized as
successful, despite the fact that no final evaluations
are publicly available, include those carried out by
229 Wazir 2022, p.12. See also the critique from within the fieldof social psychology: Dempsey et al. 2018.
230 Wazir 2022. Wazir refers to the Social Norms Approach as“the new entrant from the behavioural sciences into thefield of development practice”, p. 2.
231 Wazir 2022, p. 8.

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UNICEF, CARE, the United Nations Population Fund
(UNFPA) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and funded by the UK Department
for International Development (DFID), the Bill andMelinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank.232

3.6

Issues with dissemination of results seems to plagueother fields with more longstanding, explicit programmes of evaluated work on social norms, suchas public health. In a review of published evidenceof social norms change interventions, including
systematic reviews, health psychologists Dempsey,
McAlaney and Bewik point to serious flaws in theinterpretation and presentation of findings.233 Theyfind that the systematic reviews, for example, make
implicit assumptions about the homogenous natureof the interventions reviewed and the mechanisms
driving change, which in reality included a wideranging and complex set of public policy, health risk
and economic factors. Even those that acknowledged
the heterogeneity among interventions “stopped
short of exploring the implications of this heterogeneity and implications for quality assurance andintervention fidelity”.234

For all the critiques of dominant social norms
approaches – and there are many – little guidanceis given in the way of pragmatic alternatives. It isutterly reasonable to suggest that “measurement ofsocial norms should also attend to the spaces andrelationships that constitute ‘community,’ and to
the social, political and economic institutions thatstructure community life”.236 It is also reasonable tosuggest that approaches are needed that “examine
the larger gender order and the relations of power
between women and men”.237 But what does it look
like, in practical terms, to take action on these contentions? We’ve provided some suggestions above,
including the incorporation of qualitative methods,
the accounting for factors that are not social norms
and the imperative of iterative measurement
throughout a project.

Towards improved
programmatic researchand evaluations

To be sure, the lack of publicly available final evaluations does not necessarily indicate that the projects
were not successful. Given the public claims of success,however, transparency in this regard would illuminate what data are being interpreted as evidence of
successful outcomes. The withholding of such data
impedes cross-organization and cross-sectoral learning and opportunities to build on past successes (orfailures). As it stands, the lack of published programmeevaluations in general, and the dearth of those thatmonitor changes over time in particular, fuels the reasonable perspective that it is “impossible to constructa reasoned argument or provide a comprehensive
assessment about the effectiveness of [the Social
Norms Approach] in bringing about large-scale andenduring shifts in social norms”.235

That said, this is an area of work where further
development may be merited, including in termsof understanding how social norms shape and areshaped by “higher level” arenas of society that are
relevant to development concerns. The notion inmuch critical social science research that ‘power iseverywhere’ can be paralyzing, but it need not be.
Institutional ethnography, developed by sociologist
Dorothy Smith, is one practical approach to documenting how power operates through the practices,
processes and social interactions of school systems,
development programmes and corporate social
responsibility efforts, among others.238 This and othersimilar approaches are informed by the bottom-up
approaches that emerged in the late 1970s and early
1980s that were largely concerned with understanding the perspectives and power of actors at various

232 Ibid.
233 Dempsey et al. 2018.
234 Ibid.
235 Wazir 2022, p. 12.

236 Piedalue et al. 2020, p. 98.
237 Cislaghi et al. 2018, cited in Piedalue et al. 2020.
238 On school systems, see Nichols and Griffith 2009; on development programmes, see Cookson 2018; on corporatesocial responsibility efforts, see Billo 2015.

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levels of policy and programme implementationand governance.239
In accounting for the beliefs and interpretations ofmultiple actors, as well as their goals, agency, strategies
and actions, these approaches can help to disentangle
power relations and identify competing beliefs andinterests as well as relevant practices and material
constraints, thus providing a comprehensive pictureof what is needed to provoke and sustain shifts indiscriminatory social norms. Importantly, they also
give voice and value to a plurality of perspectives andunderstandings.240 The adaptation of such approaches
may be a worthwhile endeavour towards understanding social norms and their material effects (e.g., how
they influence the adoption of a law or the implementation of a policy, etc.) in arenas beyond households
and communities.
Another avenue for improved programme evaluations
and monitoring entails partnerships with women’sorganizations, particularly at the grassroots level. The
baseline context of social norms – as well as women’s
and men’s material realities, the institutions theyinteract with and potential high risk or high opportunity moments, e.g., ‘critical junctures’ – should not
be approached as something that requires ‘discovery’by outside actors. Such partnerships can establish
grounded understandings of context and complexity
and also foster community ownership of the project.

3.7

Should we worry about‘getting measurement right’?
There is, however, a related and important questionthat is both pragmatic and ethical in nature: to what
extent should we worry about getting measurement
right? It is clear that many of the contemporary
attempts to measure social norms fall short of their
239 Lipsky 1980; Hjern and Porter 1981.
240 Such approaches have much in common with more recent
debates around “decolonizing approaches” to research that
aim at “bringing to the centre and privileging indigenous
values, attitudes and practices”. See Smith 2012, p. 41, citedin MacArthur et al. 2022, p. 9.

intended aims, not least because of a narrow, rather
than systemic, focus. There currently exists a great
deal of interest in perfecting approaches to social
norms measurement, and even in establishing a“gold standard”, among donors and global development agencies. However, the extent to which this is aworthwhile goal, what ‘right’ needs to consist of andat which point the returns are diminishing or evencounterproductive merits consideration. Principally, it
is worth reflecting on the extent to which the imperative to measure social norms is serving, or will serve,
the feminist and women’s movements, CSOs andimplementing agencies doing grassroots and policy
advocacy and delivering services.
One consideration is whether there should be a gold
standard approach that perhaps even fosters comparability across contexts. Over the past few years, agreat deal of attention, effort and funding has been
allocated towards developing ever more precise
approaches to identify and measure the intensityof social norms, including gender norms specifically(e.g., CUSP – the Community for Understanding Scale
Up, ALIGN, etc.). These attempts, which aim to makethe broad field of gender and development more
effective, have been subject to reasonable questions
and critiques from within the field, including fromindividuals and groups doing work that is shifting
discriminatory social norms.241 For example, there is atendency among dominant measurement approaches
to utilize global paradigms about what problematicsocial norms are, what the correct model of change
is, what the relevant control variables should be andhow to collect, analyse and report the data. These
paradigms come with an array of assumptions,motivations and conceptualizations that are often
uncritically accepted or simply not reflected upon.242
Such approaches tend to disregard the plurality ofvalues, local insights and knowledge at the grassroots
level and prevent a deeper understanding of social
norms change and adjunct power dynamics as theyplay out in reality. The premise of a global paradigm
is probably faulty if we accept that social norms areissue- and context-specific.
241 Wazir 2022.
242 Smith 2012; Fischer 2018.

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Critics also draw attention to the involved, complicated nature of dominant approaches to measuring social
norms and the incompatibility of these approacheswith the nature of social change work. In particular, theattempts at achieving ever more precise definitions
and categorizations of social (and other) norms, as wellas drivers of behaviour that appear to be social norms
but are not, results in “an over-mystification and overclassification of norms which is both confusing andunnecessary from the point of view of development
practitioners”.243 The recourse to “overcomplicatedmethods and technical jargon … disempowers both
local expertise and the subjects of the intervention, whilst rendering the presence and explanatory
power of the expert or consultant indispensable andimperative”.244 This is a well-founded concern: Even theauthors of this discussion paper had repeated, lengthy
and circular conversations attempting to sort out thecontradictory and confusing attempts to make social
norms readable in a technical and replicable way. The
relationship between methods and empowerment oflocal expertise is worth underscoring also in relation
to increasingly prominent debates around the politics
of representation in evidence or knowledge production for global development and gender equality.245
A reasonable provocation, therefore, is whether theend goal is perfecting a measurement technique or
diagnosing a problem with sufficient precision toaddress it in a way that changes people’s material
realities. Reflecting on the proliferation of categories
of norms within social norms research, the social
norms theorists Bell and Cox underscore an obsessive tendency within social norms research – one that
may also be eclipsing the very many other importantdrivers of human behaviour:
We seem to love the idea of social norms
too much. The plethora of normative
theoretical orientations is symptomaticof our love of norms. Love makes us creative in finding ways to talk about norms(“How do I love thee? Let me count the
243 Wazir 2022, p. 12. See also Bell and Cox 2015.
244 Wazir 2022, p 12.
245 Kabeer 1999; Fischer 2018; Roche et al. 2015; Fuentes andCookson 2018.

ways…”). Yet we do not seem to bewilling to subject these loved ideas tothe potential embarrassment of detailed
test, perhaps because it would suggest
that, for all our love, we are not satisfied with our beloved. This paragraph isintended to be metaphorical, and yet it
appears to describe an uncomfortable
pattern in research on norms.246
While Bell and Cox were speaking about academic
research, these tendencies seem to have bled intodevelopment practice. This slippage has material consequences that are more serious within development
than in the academy, however. Gender equality work
is grossly underfunded relative to the scope of theissues and share of the population it encompasses,with post-pandemic funding projections plateauing after a decade of incremental increase.247 Within
this context, the current direction of social norms
measurement efforts within development practice– towards RCTs, and a dependency on highly specialized technical consultants – should give pause. RCTs
are incredibly costly. Given their low utility in contextsof high complexity and confounding factors, theyshould not be pursued as a standard measurement
approach for policy and practitioner organizations
implementing social norms-related work. They may
well be an appropriate tool for fundamental learningin certain contexts, e.g., in plentifully resourced academic lab research, but evidence does not currently
support their use in underfunded gender equality
work where domestic violence shelters are closed
due to funding shortfalls and women toil for meagre
wages in garment factories.248
This is not to say, of course, that all measurement
is superfluous. It may be crucial, for instance, tounderstand whether the driver of a discriminatoryor harmful behaviour is the threat of social sanction(e.g., ridicule) or whether it is of a material nature
246 Bell and Cox 2015, p. 40.
247 OECD 2023b.
248 Both these issues, incidentally, are informed by discriminatory social and gender norms and, perhaps just as or more
importantly, by discriminatory policy and regulatory choicesthat have material consequences.

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(e.g., poverty) and may be addressed through othermeans (e.g., policy or regulatory change). But deciphering this information does not necessarily requirea detailed and arbitrarily complex methodology;
the drivers may already be known to organizations
embedded in those communities (e.g., local women’sorganizations, as suggested above) or swiftly ascertainable through qualitative research.

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4.

CONCLUSION: WHATROLE (IF ANY) SHOULD
DEVELOPMENT AGENCIESPLAY IN SHIFTING SOCIALNORMS?
Social norms, including gender norms, are one of the many factors that shape gender equality
outcomes. This discussion paper has intervened in debates about what social and gendernorms are, how they change and how that change can be measured. It has done so from therecognition that development donors and global development organizations are expressing agreat deal of interest in carving out new areas of work to shift discriminatory social norms asa pathway to catalysing progress on gender equality. Given this orientation of the paper, there
is a final question that merits consideration: What role (if any) should global development
organizations take in shifting social norms?
This question has recently surfaced in the academic
literature on social norms, where researchers andpractitioners have both weighed in. At the heart of it
is an ethical concern just as much as a practical one:Who should decide what a good norm is – and a bad
one?249 Even more specifically:norms change intervention] knowingthat there exists a risk of participants
perceiving change as externally driven,
moving too fast or too soon, resulting in change agents or early adopterssuffering?250

Whose voices and values, and at whichlevels, should programmers take into
account when designing interventions? Who should decide which norms
to promote and which strategies to
employ? Who should be accountable formanaging resistance and backlash that
often arise? As implementation occurs,should an organization implement [aSuch questions are underwritten by concerns that“outsider” interventions to shift social norms too
often impose Western values, with a significant riskof “social engineering” and producing unintended
harm, and thus may not be aligned with social
justice approaches. On the basis of such concerns,
some research-practitioners have proposed a set of
guidelines to introduce ‘ethical thinking’ into social
norms change interventions. Most of these involve

249 Piedalue et al. 2020.

250 Igras et al. 2021, p. 883.

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adding new technical elements to a project, such as
integrating qualitative methods to adequately map
community-level power relations; there are also calls
for the development of new technical tools to elucidate how power operates.251
Yet, others suggest that these ethical concerns andtheir proposed solutions are misguided. Using thepractice of child marriage as an example, Wazir argues
against a reversion to tired debates that falsely pit
human rights against ‘culture’ and largely overlook the“initiatives and interventions driven by local actors”:
Characterizing efforts to protect girls
from early marriage as ‘social engineering’
misses the point by a rather wide margin,
in its understanding both of social engineering as well as of emancipatory social
movements which also claim to use an
ethical, rights-based lens. While there
should always be room for additional
research and conceptual frameworks,
this should not become a means forreinventing the wheel and strengthening a particular policy and intervention
agenda which is backed by powerfulglobal donors and governments in the
North while ignoring the long history,
experience and analysis of researchers
and activists who are united by othersocial imaginaries and understandingsof social realities.252
This debate in the academic literature reflects thetension that we referred to as a ‘problem of approach’at the outset of this paper: namely, that the perspectives on social norms and their associated theoriesof change that are rising in prominence in global
development financing and practice tend to reflect anunderstanding of social change that did not originate
in feminist thought or action.
On the other hand, many global development organizations already do work that shifts social norms by
supporting feminist and women’s CSOs, government
251 Ibid.; Cislaghi and Berkowitz 2021.
252 Wazir 2022, p. 20.

ministries for women and gender equality andnational statistical offices with funding, research anddata, technical expertise and capacity and networkbuilding. Work that shifts social norms in these cases
is implicit and often secondary to broader agendas
to change the material conditions of women’s lives.
Global development actors considering new, explicit
areas of work around social norms need to engage inserious reflection on the pathway they will choose topursue – particularly those organizations mandated
to achieve gender equality. The research and practicereviewed for this paper point to a few ways forward,
each of which are outlined below.

4.1‘Targeting’ social norms work

Not every gender inequality issue is an issue of discriminatory gender norms – or, at the very least,
discriminatory gender norms are not always the mostinsidious factor. At the root of many of the world’s
most intractable problems – poverty, violence, poor
health – are legal, policy, regulatory and fiscal decisions that prioritize profit and power over people andtheir human rights and daily needs.
For the women (and men) who work for low wages
in indecent conditions in garment factories, thechange that would have the biggest impact on theirenjoyment of human rights would occur in the global
agreements and regulatory mechanisms that enablecorporations to search for the cheapest labour possible. For time-poor women stretched thin by the double
burden of a paid workday in the factory, office or fieldplus unpaid care at home, a sharing of home-basedcare with a more compliant male (or female) partneris insufficient to resolve a ‘crisis of care’; the biggest
levers are policy and regulatory mechanisms thatwould increase the availability of quality, affordable
child and elder care and force wealthy private sector
companies to pay their share for the social reproductive labour that feeds them with a steady stream ofproductive workers.253 For the women experiencing
GBV in humanitarian crises, changing the patriarchal
attitudes of their male partners may be part of the
253 See Fraser 2022.

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solution, but the most impactful lever would almost
certainly be the achievement of agreements that put
an end to protracted conflict and state and non-state
violence and that foster conditions of social, economic
and political equality in the aftermath of conflict(e.g., through equitable redistributions of land).
There are, of course, issues for which explicit interventions to shift discriminatory social norms may be a
primary (though likely not exclusive) line of action. Evidence shows that issues such as FGM and child and earlymarriage can improve when local organizations engage
in intentional efforts to raise critical consciousness,engage women and men and boys and girls and achieve
the buy-in of key religious and other community leaders.
On this basis, global development organizations,
including donors, should consider targeting theirsocial norms work. By this we mean that the full rangeof drivers and levers for a given problem should always
be considered – and should be considered first. There
should not be an imperative to ‘do social norms work’
for the sake of it. Rather, social norms interventions
should be targeted to problems that first and foremost require changes in ‘informal rules and sharedexpectations’ and where there is thus a compellingcase for (first) channelling energy and resources intosocial norms work. Conversely, they should not be theprimary line of action to address issues of inequality
for which interventions to improve the material conditions of people’s lives (e.g., consistent and adequate
incomes, healthy working conditions, safe neighbourhoods) are more urgently needed and better
suited. ‘Targeting social norms work’ suggests that if
discriminatory social norms are identified as part ofthe problem, they might form part of the associatedtheories of change and action – but not the only part.
Development donors and global organizations should
resist becoming distracted by the latest promise ofa ‘silver bullet’. The straightforward appeal of workto ‘change individual hearts and minds’ should not
eclipse the imperative to do the more difficult, patientor politically charged work of changing how legal, economic and political systems are set-up, governed andallocate resources. This is not to say that social norms
will not change in the course of these other efforts– but ‘invisible rules’ having shifted will not be themost important change achieved.

4.2

Making social norms work
make sense
To make informed, participatory decisions about how totarget social norms work, development organizations
will need to establish a way of talking about socialand gender norms that is grounded in reality andaccessible to everyone in the organization as well as
the communities they serve. The contradictory andobfuscatory character of the scientific and technicalattempts to define social norms, not to mention themushrooming levels of jargon, are out of control andtotally at odds with how social norms are discussed
and acted on by feminist and women’s movements
and CSOs in communities around the world. This is not
to say that the development and refinement of theory
is separate from how local organizations mobilize andaffect change (indeed, local organizations themselves
use and refine theory!); rather, it is to say that there
is a point at which theoretical and scientific efforts
have diminishing returns. Social norms work needs
to be anchored in how practitioner communities areunderstanding and grappling with social change. Not
only will this avoid the costly use of highly specialized
technical experts, but it is also a precondition for participation and community-ownership of change.
Relatedly, reflection is required regarding the appropriateness of pursuing a universal gold standard ofsocial norms measurement. There exist many waysof doing relatively low-cost research, monitoring andevaluation of social change. Provided that a mix ofmethods are used that enable an understanding ofcontext and relevant perspectives, and sufficient timeis allotted to monitor change and the sustainability of
the intervention, these existing approaches will likely
suffice. Pursuing costly experimental approaches withlimited feasibility given the subject matter does notseem to make sense – particularly in a global context
in which funding for women’s rights is urgently
needed on issues that are far more pressing than‘getting measurement right’.

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4.3

Supporting women’s andfeminist organizations as key
agents of change

Supporting women’s and feminist movements and
CSOs is one of the most important ways that global
development organizations can consider doingtargeted social norms work in an effective and sustainable manner.254 There is no need to reinvent thewheel on this; many examples exist of productive
partnerships between development organizations,researchers and feminist and women’s CSOs.255
Given the slow and non-linear nature of social norms
change, however, and its propensity for backlash, providing such support requires shifts in the social norms,
practices and processes within development financing
and practice itself. As it stands, women’s organizations are frequently expected to meet timelines thatare unrealistic given typical human resources and thenature of most gender equality work. Adoption of flexible funding models is needed, including those withtimelines long enough to accommodate change that
happens slowly.256 Under current models, grantees areoften expected to modify their agendas to respond tocurrent donor trends, and they end up living ‘project
to project’ rather than being enabled to work towards
a long-term goal in a sustained manner. These dynamics increase risk of “waste, missed opportunities, and

254 Girard 2019.
255 The UN Trust Fund to End VAWG, managed by UN-Womenon behalf of the UN system, is one such example of a productive collaboration between international development
organizations and grassroots actors, in which sustained
funding to CSOs and women’s rights organizations has supported their efforts to provide vital services for survivors of
GBV as well as identify current and future barriers and solutions to end VAWG (see UN-Women 2021b). The Prevention
Collaborative curates a knowledge hub of hundreds of local
CSO’s and researchers’ insights, making these accessible tofrontline implementers (see Prevention Collaborative n.d.).
Relatedly, the What Works to Prevent Violence Consortiumpromotes evidence and innovation on solutions to preventand respond to GBV, including through partnering withand funding women’s rights organizations that are familiar
with the local context (see What Works to Prevent Violence2019).
256 León-Himmelstine et al. 2022.

unintended harm”.257 To do effective social norms
work, and to reduce the risk of backlash and harm,
donors may need to relinquish some control over theagenda, recognize women’s movements and CSOs
as experts in the problems they have identified andgrant them greater autonomy over their theories ofchange and action.258
This paper has traversed a great deal of different
bodies of thought and action on addressing discriminatory social norms, including gender norms. It has
been guided by the prompt that global development
organizations are increasingly interested in social
norms as a lever for change but are unclear where or
how to start. Meanwhile, the quite narrow and technocratic form that some of this interest has taken todate is the subject of criticism within research andpractitioner communities. A cumulative lesson thatemerges from the various bodies of thought andaction on how gender norms change happens is thatchange is complex and that acknowledging complexity does not preclude taking action. It should, however,train the attention of development actors away from
simple solutions. Social norms change is not the next
‘silver bullet’. Targeted and thoughtful engagementwith this area of intervention is required, as is a bigger
picture that includes the myriad of other levers in
the political, economic and social arenas that need tobe pulled.

257 Prevention Collaborative n.d.
258 
Purposeful’s With and For Girls and the Prevention
Collaborative’s Investing Wisely are two examples of organizations and global funds working towards funding
models that are more supportive of feminist work.

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ANNEX.
METHODOLOGY OF
THE EVIDENCE REVIEW
We conducted a literature review that included a phased scoping review258 of the academic
and grey literature on interventions to change gender discriminatory social norms and efforts
to measure these processes of change, as well as a broader literature review on social change.
The scoping methodology is useful for mapping key concepts underpinning a research area
and the main sources and types of evidence available. It can also help identify relevant literature on topics studied using different analytical lenses and research approaches. This annex
provides a detailed description of the methodological steps of the literature review process,which included the initial search, data charting and analysis.
The initial search proceeded following three steps: theidentification of research questions, the developmentof a search strategy and the definition of inclusion andexclusion criteria. The overall research questions of
this study were: What is the state of the evidence on
work to change gender discriminatory social norms?
What works? How do you measure it? We operationalized these research questions by breaking them down
into the following sub-questions:
1. What are academics and policy organizations
saying about how to do effective social norms
change work for gender equality?
2. What works in terms of social norms change in
UN-Women’s focus areas?
3. What are promising ways to measure social norms
change?
After defining the research questions, we developed
a strategy for systematically searching articles.
This was to consider articles published in English
during the period 2012–2022 via Google Scholar and
Google search engines, reviewing the first 10 pagesof results. Searches included combinations of thefollowing terms: (1) “Social norms change” + genderequality; (2) “Social norms change” + gender relations;(3) “Social norms change” + measurement; (4) “Gendernorms change” + measurement; (5) “Gender norms” +measurement.
We set the following inclusion / exclusion criteria for
Google Scholar:
1. The abstract for the article includes both the exact
search phrases or a component of social norms(include)
2. The abstract for the article includes only one of
the exact phrases (exclude)
3. The abstract is not available (exclude)
The inclusion / exclusion criteria for Google searches
included the following:
1. The article studies or evaluates a specific social
norms change programme or intervention(include)
2. The article is a review of the evidence of a social
norms change programme or intervention (include)

259 Arksey and O’Malley 2005.

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3. The article does not include any empirical study ofa social norms change programme or intervention(exclude)
4. The article is focused on describing social norms
problems but not a programmatic solution orintervention (exclude)
5. The article puts forward a theoretical, conceptual
or methodological approach for understandingsocial norms change for gender equality (theoretical framework) (include)
We also identified relevant articles through snowballing. The aim of snowballing was to include relevant
articles on approaches that have featured relatively
little in the systematic literature review. This includes
particular areas of intervention that are relevant toUN-Women as well as approaches to measure social
norms. In order to identify additional literature inthese fields, we conducted internal consultations
and reviewed the reference lists of the most relevant
studies.
Overall, our search yielded 106 results. Of these,
21 articles were subsequently cut: 12 because they
were duplicates, 2 because they were outside thedefined time period and 7 that were found to be lessrelevant to the parameters of the study/research questions. This resulted in a final database of 85 articles.
Beyond the scoping review of programmatic literature, we conducted a broader literature review toincorporate further insights on social norms, socialchange and gender equality. This wider body of literature presented a more diverse and heterogeneous
set of perspectives on what social norms are and how
they change, providing helpful guidance on innovative
ways forward.

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UN-WOMEN IS THE UNITED NATIONSORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO
GENDER EQUALITY AND THE
EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN. A GLOBAL
CHAMPION FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS,
UN-WOMEN WAS ESTABLISHEDTO ACCELERATE PROGRESS ON
MEETING THEIR NEEDS WORLDWIDE.
UN-Women supports United Nations Member States as they set
global standards for achieving gender equality, and works withgovernments and civil society to design laws, policies, programmes
and services needed to ensure that the standards are effectively
implemented and truly benefit women and girls worldwide. It
works globally to make the vision of the Sustainable Development
Goals a reality for women and girls and stands behind women’sequal participation in all aspects of life, focusing on four strategic
priorities: Women lead, participate in and benefit equally fromgovernance systems; Women have income security, decent workand economic autonomy; All women and girls live a life free from all
forms of violence; Women and girls contribute to and have greater
influence in building sustainable peace and resilience, and benefit
equally from the prevention of natural disasters and conflicts andhumanitarian action. UN-Women also coordinates and promotes theUnited Nations system’s work in advancing gender equality.

This discussion paper provides a ‘state of the evidence’ on social
norms change within the field of gender and development. The paper
presents findings from a scoping review of studies and evaluations ofprogrammatic interventions to shift social norms, as well as insightsfrom a broader body of evidence tracing how social change happens.
It answers four questions: What are social norms?, How do social norms
change?, How are social norms measured? and What role (if any) should
global development organizations play in shifting social norms? In doing
so, the paper traverses a divided scientific evidence base that, on the
one hand, does not adequately reflect the varied social, political andeconomic drivers behind historical changes in social norms, including
the role of women’s and feminist movements, and on the other, grasps
the complexity of social norms but does not lend itself to clearly
defined theories of action. Key lessons include that social norms should
be approached as one lever in a broader toolbox of programmatic
options; that feminist and women’s rights movements are key agentsof social norms change, and that sustainable investments in social
norms programming requires shifts within development practice itself,
including how change is measured.

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