# **3.3 Treatment Effect Heterogeneity: Soft Skills, Gender, and Economic Outcomes**

This section assesses the extent to which several stylized facts related to soft skills, gender, and labor market outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa hold within our sample of highly-educated Rwandan youth before testing for heterogeneous treatment effects from the soft skills training. Specifically, Ajayi et al. (2022) identify: (1) a significant gender gap of around 0.15 standard deviation across a wide range of soft skills with the interpersonal skills gap increasing in education; (2) socioemotional skills are associated with higher earnings for men and women; and (3) interpersonal skills are more strongly correlated with earnings for women than for men.<sup>31</sup> Consistent with the stylized fact, Appendix Table A16 finds significant gender gaps across three measures of soft skills—an aggregate index of all soft-skills measures, an aggregate of intrapersonal soft-skill measures, and an aggregate of interpersonal soft-skills measures—though our gaps are slightly smaller than those estimated for the region as a whole using more heterogeneous samples.<sup>32</sup> Appendix Table A17 demonstrates that equivalent results hold when controlling for degree type and work status while also showing that point estimates support gender gaps favoring men across all sub-measures of intrapersonal and interpersonal skills: results for interpersonal skills are particularly striking where women report significantly lower levels for each of the skills.

Building on these gender gaps in soft skills, we next examine the relationship between gender, socio-emotional skills, and economic outcomes. We find a persistent gender gap in whether the respondent had worked in the 30 days before the baseline: women were about 8 percentage points less likely to be working than men.<sup>33</sup> We find limited evidence that either aggregate socioemotional skills, intrapersonal skills, or interpersonal skills close the gap for women (Appendix Table A18). A similar pattern holds for pre-program income: women earn about 40% less than men and socio-emotional skills do not close the gap. Indeed, the results suggest limited returns to socio-emotional skills for tertiary educated women in the Rwandan labor market.<sup>34</sup> Appendix 2 explores whether the effects of the training were different for women and men.

> 31The authors identify a fourth set of stylized facts detailing how the skills gap varies with education. We are unable to speak to this point as all applicants to the soft-skills program had completed some form of tertiary education. 32Intrapersonal skills include emotional awareness, self-awareness, emotional regulation, self-control, perseverance, personal initiative, and problem solving. Interpersonal skills include listening, empathy, expressiveness, relatedness, influence, negotiation, and collaboration. We follow Ajayi et al. (2022) in the definition and construction of each index.

> 33The administrative records recovered 17 months after training show a significant gender gap in formal jobs: while around 70% of men in both treatment and control groups had had a formal job at some point in their lives, this was true for only 54% of women in the control group (the share in the treatment group was 58%, though the treatment effect is not statistically significant).

> 34We should take these results with caution since these are not causal estimates, and there is a literature pointing out the difficulty of measuring soft skills with self-reported questions (e.g., Laajaj and Macours (2021)).

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