One way of bolstering the impact of legislative reform, and triggering normative shifts is through advocacy and awareness raising campaigns. Advocacy and awareness raising campaigns can include:

- assigned days to celebrate women and female children;

- documentary and infotainment films, infotainment television and radio series;

- hiring celebrities as brand ambassadors for gender equity;

- posters in hospitals and other key public spaces,

- dissemination of technical reports, policy briefs, and editorials

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- local counseling efforts, focus group discussions, and awareness building sessions

The stakeholders involved in these efforts include households, key community members, NGOs, medical personnel, different sections of the media, government organizations, and international organizations (Rahm 2012).

Mass-media campaigns are one of the most useful methods through which people’s awareness of a social issue, and their values and behaviors with regards to that issue, can be altered. The popularity and geographic reach of mediums such as the radio, television, and the internet, make media campaigns particularly cost-effective in bringing about normative change.

There are numerous examples of how access to media, particularly television and film, has led to a shift in attitudes and behavior. Jacobsen (2011) exploits variation in spatial proximity to theaters showing Al Gore’s _The Inconvenient Truth_ and finds that zip codes closer to where the film was shown experienced a 50 percent relative increase in voluntary carbon offset purchases. Similarly, for Brazil, La Ferrara et al. (2012) uses differences in the timing of soap-opera coverage in different areas to show that women living areas that had network access to soap-operas showing small, happy families, were more likely to lower fertility. In Tanzania, Rogers et al. (1999) draw on quasi-random variation in access to an entertainment-education radio show on family planning across different areas to estimate the impact of the show on family planning adoption. They find that access to the soap-opera increased the listeners’ belief that they could determine their family size by using contraception, and it also increased the probability that listeners would discuss family planning with their partners and peers.

Studies also illustrate how access to the television, films, and radio media platforms shift genderspecific attitudes and behavior. For example, Jensen and Oster (2009) use a three-year individual panel data set for India to see if gender norms and behavior changed between surveys and across villages depending on if and when they got cable TV. The key assumptions to identify a causal impact hold in their study: there were no pre-existing differences in women’s status across villages that had and did not have cable TV, the timing of changes in the outcomes of interest was closely tied to the introduction of cable TV, and the outcomes of interest were not associated with future cable TV access. They find that with the introduction of cable TV, women were more likely to make autonomous decisions, report domestic violence as unacceptable, and report son preference as unacceptable.

In a complementary study, Ting et al. (2014) use NFHS-3 data to find that TV exposure in India is linked with a range of measures of women empowerment, and more specifically, a lower 37